SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

oneniltothearsenal said:
This is what some of the anti-lockdown people are saying. Does anyone here have counters to this research? Besides the obvious, letting the virus run rampant even with a less than 1% fatality rate would lead to tens of millions of deaths and untold economic damage?



@Pogue Mahone
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This is one of the most comprehensive studies of the effects in the UK. It was subject to a lot of media spin too but one of the key points that featured in the summary here was this:
While these negative health impacts of lockdown exceed the impacts of COVID-19 directly, they are much smaller than the negative impacts estimated for a scenario in which these measures are not in place; without these mitigations, the impact of direct COVID-19 deaths alone on both mortality and morbidity would be much higher – an estimated 439,000 excess deaths resulting from COVID-19, and 3,000,000 QALYs lost.
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The anti-lockdown people are focusing on the first part of the sentence (and the evidence supporting it) while ignoring the rest, and it relies on a counter-factual that has no basis in reality.

If lockdowns could be avoided while countries were able to keep the spread of the virus under control through test and trace, social distancing and mask use, then every government in the world would do that. Every government in the world did try to do that. Lockdowns were the "nuclear option". But they were taken because it was demonstrably proven that the virus could not be kept under control, and the consequences of losing control was worse on almost every dimension.

It's not that SAGE are unaware of the consequences of lockdowns; they're the ones commissioning the 200-page reports on it. Nor is it that governments are particularly trigger happy on lockdowns; in most cases they've waited until the last minute in the second wave once more, long after scientific advisers asked them to just accept the reality, in turn making the lockdowns even longer. It's just the case that the alternative is demonstrably much worse.

Most of the negative effects that come with lockdowns also come without lockdowns. It just takes a different form, and so anti-lockdown people recognise that symptom a won't appear therefore consequence a will be prevented, without realising that instead symptom b will appear, unfortunately causing consequence a once more, and sometimes in greater numbers.

If the virus spreads more freely in schools then more children miss out on free school meals because they have to isolate, irrespective of any lockdown. Education will be set back because teachers are not only isolating but permanently removed from the workforce, while schools struggle to recruit new teachers in the midst of a pandemic. Suicide rates go up as anxiety, depression and stress increase. That happens with social isolation but it also happens as those around you are thrust into life-threatening situations. Greatly reducing the former while increasing the latter doesn't lead to fewer unhappy people. Or at least it's a very grim assumption, supported by no data, to take. There are very few areas where just letting covid run wild produces better non-covid health or economic outcomes, short-term or long-term.
 
Classical Mechanic said:
I know plenty of people don’t have common sense. My brother‘s wife seems to think if the government say it’s OK then somehow she’ll be safe. Their family is having a big Christmas. I think most posters in here are able to see things as they though. You can have 12 in a house and you’d be absolutely fine more likely than not . A minority won’t be, however. I guess it’s how much risk you want to take given your personal circumstances and geographical location. I won’t be looking to the government for advice anyway.

My close family don't want to get together in door at all which makes me happy. We’re planning on going on some family walks over the period instead.
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My brother is getting married next week.
He's having a house party tonight as a stag. About 30 people. I'm not going and I'm being judged.

My mother normally does a thing on Christmas eve with all of us there. Thats about 25 people. I told her myself and my family wont be there. Getting judged again.
Its infuriating that my own family are a set of stupid feckers but I'm the one being judged.
 
Brwned said:
If lockdowns could be avoided while countries were able to keep the spread of the virus under control through test and trace, social distancing and mask use, then every government in the world would do that. Every government in the world did try to do that. Lockdowns were the "nuclear option".
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Given that they seem immune to evidence then them having to explain why even right-wing governments like those in the UK and Australia acted as they did? Can't be a lefty plot to remove freedoms (oh the irony).

At the very least it will make them show their true nature be it Qanon, Sortos, Bill Gates conspiracy theories or just giddy excitement at supposedly knowing something the sheeple don't.
 
McGrathsipan said:
My brother is getting married next week.
He's having a house party tonight as a stag. About 30 people. I'm not going and I'm being judged.

My mother normally does a thing on Christmas eve with all of us there. Thats about 25 people. I told her myself and my family wont be there. Getting judged again.
Its infuriating that my own family are a set of stupid feckers but I'm the one being judged.
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I'm judging you as a highly responsible adult who doesn't want an aged relative's death on his conscience. Plus your kids will remember this and it will help them be responsible adults in the future.
 
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Wibble said:
Given that they seem immune to evidence then them having to explain why even right-wing governments like those in the UK and Australia acted as they did? Can't be a lefty plot to remove freedoms (oh the irony).

At the very least it will make them show their true nature be it Qanon, Sortos, Bill Gates conspiracy theories or just giddy excitement at supposedly knowing something the sheeple don't.
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Yeah that's an idea I can't quite wrap my head around, yet it continually goes unanswered. I suppose the only argument is "all governments want to take away our freedoms, it's just right wing governments want to do it less". I'm sure that doesn't fit with how they described these governments before, though. Then again, maybe it's just libertarians who have a larger share of voice at the moment, because it seems the silent minority on both sides of the political spectrum are comfortable that these sacrifices are in the best interest of the country, and not a sinister overreach by big government.

The other idea that puzzles me is that there's this other route that governments are not taking, which is founded on the belief that hospitals being overwhelmed was just a scare tactic. Yet in the US we get reports about it every week, and it's been reported across numerous European countries even with strict policies in place. This is the latest report in the US:
New York Times said:
In excruciating pain with lesions on her face and scalp, Tracey Fine lay for 13 hours on a gurney in an emergency room hallway.

All around her, Covid-19 patients filled the beds of the hospital in Madison, Wis. Her nurse was so harried that she could not remember Ms. Fine’s condition, and the staff was slow to bring her pain medicine or food.

In a small rural hospital in Missouri, Shain Zundel’s severe headache turned out to be a brain abscess. His condition would typically have required an operation within a few hours, but he was forced to wait a day while doctors struggled to find a neurosurgeon and a bed — finally at a hospital 375 miles away in Iowa.

From New Mexico to Minnesota to Florida, hospitals are teeming with record numbers of Covid patients. Staff members at smaller hospitals have had to beg larger medical centers repeatedly to take one more, just one more patient, but many of the bigger hospitals have sharply limited the transfers they will accept, their own halls and wards overflowing.

In the spring, the pandemic was concentrated mainly in hard-hit regions like New York, which offered lessons to hospitals in other states anticipating the spread of the coronavirus. Despite months of planning, though, many of the nation’s hospital systems are now slammed with a staggering swell of patients, no available beds and widening shortages of nurses and doctors. On any single day, some hospitals have had to turn away transfer requests for patients needing urgent care or incoming emergencies.

And rising infection rates among nurses and other frontline workers have doubled the patient load on those left standing.

There is no end in sight for the nation’s hospitals as the pandemic continues to hammer cities and rural areas across the country, totaling 13 million cases so far this year. And public health experts warn that the holidays may speed the already fast-moving pace of infection, driving the demand for hospital beds and medical care ever higher.

A record number of Americans — 90,000 — are now hospitalized with Covid, and new cases of infection had been climbing to nearly 200,000 daily.

Health care systems “are verging on the edge of breaking,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 advisory council, said in a podcast this month.

The public does not realize how dire the situation is, Dr. Osterholm said, and may respond only “when people are dying, sitting in chairs in waiting rooms in emergency rooms for 10 hours to get a bed, and they can’t find one, and then they die.”

When Ms. Fine went to UW Health’s University Hospital in Madison, she found doctors there overwhelmed and distracted. “They just parked me in a hallway because there was no place for me to go,” said Ms. Fine, 61, who was eventually found to have a severe bout of shingles that threatened her eyes.

She had missed her annual checkup or a shingles vaccination because of the pandemic.

Admitted to a makeshift room with curtains separating the beds, Ms. Fine watched the chaos around her. A nurse did not know who she was, asking if she had trouble walking or heard whooshing in her ears. She “was just completely frazzled,” Ms. Fine recalled, though she added that staff members were “kind and caring and did their best under horrifying conditions.”

Workers at the hospital issued a plea last Sunday, published as a two-page ad in The Wisconsin State Journal, asking state residents to help prevent further spread of the virus.
“Without immediate change, our hospitals will be too full to treat all of those with the virus and those with other illnesses or injuries,” they warned. “Soon you or someone you love may need us, but we won’t be able to provide the lifesaving care you need, whether for Covid-19, cancer, heart disease or other urgent conditions. As health care providers, we are terrified of that becoming reality.”

UW Health declined to comment directly on Ms. Fine’s experience, but acknowledged the strains the pandemic has imposed. While patients were sometimes boarded in the emergency room even before the new coronavirus surge, occupancy is now “super high,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, the group’s chief quality officer.

UW Health is “starting to do things it hasn’t done before,” he said, including enlisting primary care and family doctors to work in the hospital treating seriously ill patients. “It works, but it’s not great,” he said.

Hospitals in St. Louis have been particularly hard-hit in recent weeks, said Dr. Alexander Garza, the chief community health officer for SSM Health, a Catholic hospital group, who also serves as the head of the area task force on the virus. Over the last month, SSM Health turned away about 50 patients that it could not immediately care for.

And nurses — already one of the groups most vulnerable to infection — are adding more and more hours to their shifts.

Hospitals are reassigning nurses to adult intensive care units from pediatric ones, doubling up patients in a single room, and asking nurses, who typically care for two critically ill patients at a time, to cover three or more, he said.

“If you’re not able to dedicate as much time and resources to them, obviously they’re not getting optimal care,” Dr. Garza said.

Consuelo Vargas, an emergency room nurse in Chicago, says patients linger for days in emergency rooms because I.C.U.s are full. The nursing shortage has a cascading effect. It “leads to an increase in patient falls, this leads to bedsores, this leads to delays in patient care,” she said.

Personnel, available beds and protective equipment are fundamentally scarce. At a news conference held by National Nurses United, a union, Ms. Vargas said there was still not enough protective equipment like N95 masks, forcing her to buy her own.

Some hospitals have joined in sounding the alarm: Supplies of testing kits, masks and gloves are running low.

The country never quite caught up from the earlier shortages, Dr. Osterholm said. “We’re just going to run into a wall in terms of P.P.E.,” he said.

Even if hospitals in some cities appear to have enough physical space, or can quickly build new units or set up field hospitals, staff shortages offset any benefit of expansion.
“Beds don’t take care of people; people take care of people,” said Dr. Marc Harrison, the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, a sprawling system of hospitals and clinics based in Salt Lake City.

At any given time in recent weeks, a quarter of Intermountain’s nurses were out — sick, quarantining or taking care of a family member felled by the virus. Nursing students have been granted temporary licenses by the state to fill gaps, and the hospital system is scrambling to latch onto travel nurses who are in high demand across many states and expensive to hire.

To relieve pressure on its big hospitals, Intermountain is keeping more patients at its smaller centers, monitored virtually by specialists at the larger hospitals who consult with the local doctors via remote links.

Smaller hospitals are under significant stress. “We don’t have intensive care units,” said Tony Keene, the chief executive of Sullivan County Memorial Hospital, a rural hospital licensed for 25 beds in Milan, Mo. “We don’t perform surgeries or anything like that here. When we have Covid cases, it very much taxes our ability.”

His tiny hospital usually has no more than a half-dozen patients on a busy day, but may now treat twice that number. About a fourth of the hospital’s 100 employees, including Mr. Keene, have come down with the virus since March.

“It is sometimes a daily and hourly struggle to make sure we have adequate staff in the hospital,” he said. The hospital’s nurses, who typically work three 12-hour shifts a week, are taking as many as five or six shifts each week.

“We’re out here by ourselves,” Mr. Keene said. “We don’t have a larger system pumping money into us or something like that.” The hospital used federal Covid aid to invest in medical gas lines so patients could be given oxygen.

The sickest patients still must be transferred, but the larger hospital 35 miles away is awash in its own heavy volume of Covid patients and is reducing staff levels.
Even when hospitals in a community are talking weekly, if not daily, to discuss how to handle the overall spikes in admissions, few have room to spare in areas where numbers keep climbing. Many have reduced or even stopped providing elective surgeries and procedures.

“We’re all concerned about the surges we’re seeing now,” said Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety policy for the American Hospital Association. Patients who need special medical attention normally can be sent to a nearby urban area, but “many times those referral centers are full or nearly full,” she said.

Mr. Zundel’s case was a matter of life or death. He had a debilitating headache and “was not able to function at all,” he said. A larger hospital nearby was inundated with patients, so his wife, Tessa, took him to a small hospital in rural Missouri to be seen quickly. The doctors there recognized that he had a brain abscess, but could not immediately find a medical center to treat him.

“He was dying,” his wife said. Some hospitals had beds, but no available neurosurgeon. Staff members spent a full day trying to find somewhere he could get an operation.
“They just worked the phone until they found a solution,” she said. “They didn’t give up.”

Mr. Zundel, 48, was finally flown to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where Dr. Matthew Howard, a neurosurgeon, performed an operation.
But Iowa is also turning away patients, Dr. Howard said. “Early in the crisis, we were being hammered by limitations in P.P.E. Now, the problem is the beds are full,” he said.

Dr. Dixie Harris, a critical care specialist at Intermountain, had volunteered in New York City during the height of the pandemic last spring. Doctors are now better able to treat the virus and predict the course of the disease, she said.

But they are also stretched very thin, caring for Covid patients in addition to their regular patients. “Almost nobody has had a real vacation,” she said. “People are really tired.”
And readmissions or the lingering health problems of Covid “long haulers” have compounded the intensified regimen for medical care. “Not only are we seeing the tsunami coming, we have that back wave coming,” Dr. Harris said.

Some health care workers say they feel abandoned. “Nurses have been crying out for months and months that this has been a problem, and we really have not gotten rescued,” said Leslie McKamey, a nurse in Bismarck, N.D., and a member of National Nurses United.

“We’re working overtime. We’re working several different jobs,” she said. “We’re really feeling the strain of it.”
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We're already living in the dystopian reality where we let the virus comeback too strongly and it's having demonstrable effects on the healthcare system, harming patient outcomes for covid and non-covid patients. Yet they're just wandering through the streets painting that as a utopia that we should step further into, as if the chaos taking place in hospitals is simply a mirage and the medical experts crying out for "common sense" are treated as jokers and conspiracy theorists. Baffling.
 
McGrathsipan said:
My brother is getting married next week.
He's having a house party tonight as a stag. About 30 people. I'm not going and I'm being judged.

My mother normally does a thing on Christmas eve with all of us there. Thats about 25 people. I told her myself and my family wont be there. Getting judged again.
Its infuriating that my own family are a set of stupid feckers but I'm the one being judged.
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You are doing the right thing. Your brother on the other hand..
 
GloryHunter07 said:
You are doing the right thing. Your brother on the other hand..
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Dont even get me started .... this has the potential to be a super spreader event. His fiancee is doing the hen the night before -- in the house!!

Wibble said:
I'm judging you as a highly responsible adult who doesn't want an aged relative's death on his conscience. Plus your kids will remember this and it will help them be responsible adults in the future.
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Thanks
 
McGrathsipan said:
Dont even get me started .... this has the potential to be a super spreader event. His fiancee is doing the hen the night before -- in the house!!



Thanks
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All you can do is look after yourself and your own family. I’d say that’s priority than getting boozy with Covid. Good on ya, wish everyone saw things the same way around here
 
Apparently Primark are staying open for 24hrs when we move from the “lockdown” to tiers.

That will go well.
 
The only thing I'd say about xmas day is it's the one day of a normal year where it's like the first lockdown, no public transport or in city centres, very few people on roads, shops shut and hardly anyone about until 3-4pm when families will be out walking off the meal.

Surely that could balance out the expected infected rise a little bit given the situation currently where it's not really a proper lockdown and many ares are busy.

Of course you also should be stopping New years eve and anything much on Boxing day given the ridiculous queues for sales. Oh and the mad rush back on xmas eve as there's always a story in London of something going wrong with the trains at one of the London stations.

It's going to be a tough period but I'm not convinced it will be the apocolypse it's predicted to be.
 
My Mums friend had to travel to the Isle of Sheppey (Swale) in Kent yesterday to pick something up.

While there with her husband they decided to have a walk around.

She said it was like walking into a different world. Zero mask wearing and no social distancing at all.

They were berated and laughed at for wearing masks when entering a shop.

No wonder things are so bad in that area.

Thanks to idiots like that all of us in Kent will be in Tier 3.
 
Garethw said:
My Mums friend had to travel to the Isle of Sheppey (Swale) in Kent yesterday to pick something up.

While there with her husband they decided to have a walk around.

She said it was like walking into a different world. Zero mask wearing and no social distancing at all.

They were berated and laughed at for wearing masks when entering a shop.

No wonder things are so bad in that area.

Thanks to idiots like that all of us in Kent will be in Tier 3.
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Wake up Shepple!
 
Garethw said:
My Mums friend had to travel to the Isle of Sheppey (Swale) in Kent yesterday to pick something up.

While there with her husband they decided to have a walk around.

She said it was like walking into a different world. Zero mask wearing and no social distancing at all.

They were berated and laughed at for wearing masks when entering a shop.

No wonder things are so bad in that area.

Thanks to idiots like that all of us in Kent will be in Tier 3.
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My father in law says they are inbred on isle of sheppey
 
FootballHQ said:
The only thing I'd say about xmas day is it's the one day of a normal year where it's like the first lockdown, no public transport or in city centres, very few people on roads, shops shut and hardly anyone about until 3-4pm when families will be out walking off the meal.

Surely that could balance out the expected infected rise a little bit given the situation currently where it's not really a proper lockdown and many ares are busy.

Of course you also should be stopping New years eve and anything much on Boxing day given the ridiculous queues for sales. Oh and the mad rush back on xmas eve as there's always a story in London of something going wrong with the trains at one of the London stations.

It's going to be a tough period but I'm not convinced it will be the apocolypse it's predicted to be.
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You’re missing the main point, families visiting each other’s houses, gathering in big numbers for family dinners and visiting granny and grandad. Every medical professional I’ve read is dreading January when hospitals are already stretched.
 
golden_blunder said:
You’re missing the main point, families visiting each other’s houses, gathering in big numbers for family dinners and visiting granny and grandad. Every medical professional I’ve read is dreading January when hospitals are already stretched.
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Let's be honest, that's been happening for many months on the quiet, remember VE day? Mass gatherings of neighbours and families and that was full lockdown (well it was near where I lived).

All we can do is hope people are sensible. Majority will, minority won't.
 
Brwned said:
This is one of the most comprehensive studies of the effects in the UK. It was subject to a lot of media spin too but one of the key points that featured in the summary here was this:


The anti-lockdown people are focusing on the first part of the sentence (and the evidence supporting it) while ignoring the rest, and it relies on a counter-factual that has no basis in reality.

If lockdowns could be avoided while countries were able to keep the spread of the virus under control through test and trace, social distancing and mask use, then every government in the world would do that. Every government in the world did try to do that. Lockdowns were the "nuclear option". But they were taken because it was demonstrably proven that the virus could not be kept under control, and the consequences of losing control was worse on almost every dimension.

It's not that SAGE are unaware of the consequences of lockdowns; they're the ones commissioning the 200-page reports on it. Nor is it that governments are particularly trigger happy on lockdowns; in most cases they've waited until the last minute in the second wave once more, long after scientific advisers asked them to just accept the reality, in turn making the lockdowns even longer. It's just the case that the alternative is demonstrably much worse.

Most of the negative effects that come with lockdowns also come without lockdowns. It just takes a different form, and so anti-lockdown people recognise that symptom a won't appear therefore consequence a will be prevented, without realising that instead symptom b will appear, unfortunately causing consequence a once more, and sometimes in greater numbers.

If the virus spreads more freely in schools then more children miss out on free school meals because they have to isolate, irrespective of any lockdown. Education will be set back because teachers are not only isolating but permanently removed from the workforce, while schools struggle to recruit new teachers in the midst of a pandemic. Suicide rates go up as anxiety, depression and stress increase. That happens with social isolation but it also happens as those around you are thrust into life-threatening situations. Greatly reducing the former while increasing the latter doesn't lead to fewer unhappy people. Or at least it's a very grim assumption, supported by no data, to take. There are very few areas where just letting covid run wild produces better non-covid health or economic outcomes, short-term or long-term.
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Cheers Brwned, that report was exactly what I was hoping for. And the rationale of course makes more sense than cherry-picking the data like the anti-lockdown fanatics.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s an absolute shit-hole. One of the worst places I’ve ever visited in the UK. Not run-down or dangerous. Just unbelievably bland and ugly.
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100%.
They have massive holiday parks there too. Imagine going to the isle of fecking Shitty for your summer holiday :lol:
 
Thanksgiving travel has only dropped 10% this year v. last year when looking at transit through airports.

This is fecking appalling. The selfishness of the vast majority of these travelers will only start being felt in a few weeks. I hope it was worth it. Unbelievable.
 
calodo2003 said:
Thanksgiving travel has only dropped 10% this year v. last year when looking at transit through airports.

This is fecking appalling. The selfishness of the vast majority of these travelers will only start being felt in a few weeks. I hope it was worth it. Unbelievable.
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Is it selfishness or the fact leadership at the top hasnt educated them enough to fully understand the complete picture?
 
Judas said:
I couldn't believe just how busy it was when I went out this morning, I've not ventured too far at all in this supposed lockdown and it felt just like a normal monday out and about, truly bizarre. Can't see how this lockdown will have done much at all, and now it's all opening up again? Lovely stuff.
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Brwned said:
At the end of the day, regardless of whether this lockdown-lite played a pivotal role in things, the covid cases trend is much, much better than it was a month ago. On the 1st October there was 7-day average of ~12k cases, on the 15th it was 17.5k cases, on the 29th it was 22k cases. So it was at a doubling rate nearly every 4 weeks. We're almost 4 weeks on from then and things have basically held steady rather than doubled again, while things have fallen a lot in some of the previous hotspots. Imagine if it kept that doubling rate and we were on 40k+ cases per day, bringing us close to the previous peak of 1,000 deaths per day.
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Just to follow on from this, the US is an unfortunate test case that shows how the doubling rate could have continued in November; it's not some mythical idea. In October they had 1.9m cases. In November they had 4m cases. They are now getting close to that April peak of 2,572 deaths in a single day; this Wednesday they had 2,300. To get to those numbers they're hospitalising 50% more people with covid than they were back in April.

It is entirely possible that the UK would have experienced exactly the same problem without the "lockdown" and the strict regional tiers beforehand. Instead of continuing that rapid growth they've fallen back to where they were at the beginning of October. While it doesn't feel like much of a success that "only" 500 people are dying, the objective of the lockdown was to stop that from reaching 1,000. It has unequivocally done that so it's dangerous to dismiss the impact of it. It wasn't as severe as it was in April, which is both good and bad, but without it there's every reason to expect we'd be in a much worse place.
 
I've heard from friends in London they are now using DIY kits even in testing centres? I suppose that's one way to bring the case numbers down. There's no way most people will push the swab far enough up their nose on their own.
 
11101 said:
I've heard from friends in London they are now using DIY kits even in testing centres? I suppose that's one way to bring the case numbers down. There's no way most people will push the swab far enough up their nose on their own.
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The nose is easy - it’s the throat I found harder. Touching tonsils or where tonsils have been isn’t easy!
 
Nice to see public health policy being driven by Tory party politics rather than the science.

Boris Johnson in retreat as Tory revolt over Covid lockdown tiers rocks No 10

Boris Johnson capitulated to Tory MPs last night, announcing that he would reform his new coronavirus crackdown before Christmas after threats by backbenchers to vote down the government’s plans.

In a sign of disarray in Downing Street, the prime minister wrote to MPs, signalling that millions of people who will be hit with the toughest restrictions this week will see them eased on December 19.

He announced that the new rules would be scrapped altogether in February unless MPs want them to continue — putting an end to claims that tough restrictions will continue until Easter.
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...er-covid-lockdown-tiers-rocks-no-10-0xd329jrv
 
Stack said:
Is it selfishness or the fact leadership at the top hasnt educated them enough to fully understand the complete picture?
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I would say it is 30% government / 70% selfishness. Once we usher the current admin out the door in January, the warnings will increase exponentially in decibels & frequency, but one cannot marginalize how much to blame the populace itself of this country will be for the inevitable spike on the spike of cases / hospitalizations / deaths.
 
Garethw said:
My Mums friend had to travel to the Isle of Sheppey (Swale) in Kent yesterday to pick something up.

While there with her husband they decided to have a walk around.

She said it was like walking into a different world. Zero mask wearing and no social distancing at all.

They were berated and laughed at for wearing masks when entering a shop.

No wonder things are so bad in that area.

Thanks to idiots like that all of us in Kent will be in Tier 3.
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Spent a couple of months down there when we opened a distribution centre there, by far one of the weirdest places I have visited. The fact that they have more prisons than hospitals says it all.
 
Jippy said:
Nice to see public health policy being driven by Tory party politics rather than the science.

Boris Johnson in retreat as Tory revolt over Covid lockdown tiers rocks No 10


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...er-covid-lockdown-tiers-rocks-no-10-0xd329jrv
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Tories will tory. And why not when they would get returned with an increased majority even if Boris accidentally set the Queen on fire because Labor would get the blame in the press because Corbyn owns a fire extinguisher that he didn't use to put the fire out.
 
Brwned said:
Just to follow on from this, the US is an unfortunate test case that shows how the doubling rate could have continued in November; it's not some mythical idea. In October they had 1.9m cases. In November they had 4m cases. They are now getting close to that April peak of 2,572 deaths in a single day; this Wednesday they had 2,300. To get to those numbers they're hospitalising 50% more people with covid than they were back in April.

It is entirely possible that the UK would have experienced exactly the same problem without the "lockdown" and the strict regional tiers beforehand. Instead of continuing that rapid growth they've fallen back to where they were at the beginning of October. While it doesn't feel like much of a success that "only" 500 people are dying, the objective of the lockdown was to stop that from reaching 1,000. It has unequivocally done that so it's dangerous to dismiss the impact of it. It wasn't as severe as it was in April, which is both good and bad, but without it there's every reason to expect we'd be in a much worse place.
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Seem amazing that people don't get that all restrictions can be working even if thi gs are getting worse because they could be getting much worse more quickly.
 
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