LongTimeLurker

...my understanding is that the new vaccine technology that is making it through the more streamlined emergency approval process is a lot easier to repurpose than traditional approaches would have been. That could have very positive consequences elsewhere in medical terms in the years ahead once the novel delivery system involved has been proven safe.

There are people posting on here who are scientifically literate so you are going to encounter perspectives that differ from tabloid level fear porn. Viruses mutate. There were always going to be variants and a need over time to adjust the vaccines to reflect that. The real cause for concern would be something different enough from the Wuhan bat soup patient zero virus type to be referred to as a new strain.

Odds on Scotland isn't getting supplied as quickly as other parts of the UK so BJ can make the SNP look bad on vaccination rates. Anything related to AZ and the EU is out in the open by now.

Last season the various playoffs could not be played because of the lockdown. If Cove Rangers could go up based on PPG and Hearts could be emptied out of the top tier on that basis, then Club 42 could have been determined that way as well.

If it takes 10 days for the vaccine to start working well after the first dose and around 11 days for an infection to result in hospitalisation you need to wind back at least three weeks to see what portion of the high risk demographics were vaccinated at that point. Add another 10 days or so on deaths and we are still looking at what was happening a month ago.

It's a bit like global warming. The most extreme politicised doomster predictions about imminent melting ice caps attract the attention of the tabloids/activists, while more nuanced opinions and research findings get completely sidelined by all the attention seeking fear porn. As long as it is variants that are involved the vaccines are more likely to still work than not and can be easily adjusted because the virus has only modified slightly. If they start using the words new strain instead of new variant, there is more cause for concern.

Except vaccines alone can solve this and a lot of these tweets are about attention seeking more than anything else. The vaccines can be adjusted to fit new variants as they emerge and booster shots can be provided on that basis.

...with pandemics there is scope for emergency approvals and removing the ability to sue.

Looking good on the Valneva vaccine (the one fae West Lothian) apparently: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-55840567

To answer my own question, Public Health England state around 15,000 deaths annually from Influenza between 2014-2019. In 2014/15, there were 28,000 deaths. I can't find stats on actual infections rates, but they will be large I'd expect. COVID-19 is roughly comparable statistically on IFR and deaths occuring to a once every 25 years or so event on influenza pandemics with particularly bad strains. Those historically have not resulted in the sort of lockdowns we have had over the last year. It was more of an unknown quantity though with a scarily high R0 number and longer incubation time so there were rational reasons for it being handled differently but some of the measures implemented have been over the top at times and more about populism than public health. COVID-19 isn't even close on mortality compared to the 1918 Spanish flu, so it could have been much worse and we may still experience something much worse in future in the decades ahead. Once the vulnerable groups get vaccinated the population needs to start being told to get a grip on their hysteria and prepare for a return to normality.

At that point though the SFA could still accept a PPG outcome for LL and HL entrants and tests could be done for the playoffs. May is a long way off in terms of what vaccines will do, so way too early to be throwing in the towel.

Top youth clubs who want to complete their development pathway are also prime suspects on this (e.g. St Cadoc's, BSC Glasgow, Cumbernauld Colts, Gartcairn, Rossvale and Bonnyton in recent years). West Lothian junior clubs (certainly some strong rumours circulating where Harthill Royal are concerned) may also be a factor.

In Saltcoats apparently: https://scottishamateurfootballnews.com/2021/01/25/kilbride-set-out-vision-for-a-home-of-their-own/

The new variant wasn't around in the summer, so the issues on the second wave in a UK context are more recent. Common sense measures that could keep R0 relatively low but with the economy functioning reasonably normally were a necessity because the economy can't simply be put into cold storage for months on end without creating issues that are every bit as serious elsewhere. What will probably get looked at very closely with the benefit of hindsight is BJ's decision making more recently in the context of imminent vaccine implementation when it was easier to justify a few weeks of stricter measures in certain inherently higher risk contexts to limit new infections as vulnerable groups received the vaccine. The populism surrounding the idea of suppressing numbers temporarily with brief periods of harsher measures in October and November to improve the optics of a normal Christmas was always questionable from a public health standpoint as politicians were intentionally creating conditions that were ripe for a large spike in new cases in the second half of December should a more easily transmissible variant or strain emerge, and the policy of keeping schools open even after it became clear that a new variant was spreading rapidly in London amongst the younger age cohorts suggests that decisions were still being made primarily on political expediency.

Think the reality is that it had arrived during the peak season for respiratory infections in the UK and had started to spread in the community sooner than was realised, so if life continued normally it was only a matter of time before there was going to be the Italian scenario even if borders had been closed a month sooner. Lockdown related measures like social distancing, hand sanitising and mask wearing that we are familiar with now are what could have made a significant difference in late January by suppressing the R0 number. Doing that later was largely a case of bolting the stable door after the horse had already bolted by late March once the exponential curve was rocketing upwards. A much larger portion of the population than is generally realised got their chance to play Russian roulette with the virus at that point. The biggest cockup was believing the completely over the top modelling numbers from Imperial College and emptying hospitals in anticipation of the massive number of severe cases that would arrive if the IFR was really 2.0%. That never came close materialising (a bit like those Dyson ventilators Boris ordered), because the IFR was only a tenth of what the models had assumed in reality. In the process of emptying hospital wards, elderly patients with COVID were being moved back into care homes without proper testing leading to a wave of deaths in that context that often could have been avoided with better shielding policies.

I'd be wary over what having a second club in Bo'ness does to the BUs long term, but obviously if the people involved are determined to do it and the EoS clubs vote them in then that's what is going to happen.

Definitely, in my opinion. Think an all-inclusive national nonleague cup will probably happen eventually but it's going to take time for some people to get junior vs senior tribalism out of their system and the HL probably needs to lose another club in numbers terms before it would fit into their fixture list.

You are aware that WoS clubs are now allowed into the SJC as they were allowed to retain their SJFA membership? Rules have already been changed in a big way. As things stand at the moment the LL has a role in overseeing the WoS, but it will start flying solo soon with its own officeholders. There's scope for all sorts of fun and games in terms of blazer politics in the months and years ahead, if the next set of officeholders were SJFA-orientated. No idea how likely that is. The sensible things to happen next would be that all West Lothian clubs join the EoS, the various tribute acts go back to being amateur, Harthill get to choose because they legitimately straddle the line in terms of their local community, the mess in Tayside gets fixed through constructive engagement rather than having that part of the country being viewed as way too far to travel by all and sundry, and the SJFA, WoS, EoS, HL, LL and SoS find a way to have a national nonleague cup similar to the FA Trophy and Vase down south.

The angle that may also be very important to some people at a club like Armadale (judging from the content of their twitter feed in recent years anyway) is that they can stay in the SJFA as part of the WoS. It might not only be about geography. Best thing that could happen is that the SCC and SJC are simply merged pronto to form an even bigger and better competition than the SJC of old but it's Scottish football, so that particular saga may drag on for a few more years if bitter old men with blazers want their cup to be seen to vanquish the other one.

Politicians are terrified of being accused of callously allowing lots of people to die so they play it ultra-safe and find ways to create a narrative in which subsequent infection waves are due to yobs not following their nanny state rules rather than new more readily transmissible variants messing with the R0 number until herd immunity is achieved again. A party that is generally perceived as having handled a pandemic badly could easily be in opposition for a generation or mess up that chance of an independence referendum they are completely obsessive about.

Haven't been reading up about it recently but a few weeks back the main bottleneck on ramping up vaccination was reported to be the special type of glass needed for the vials.

CFR will inherently be much higher than IFR if very little testing is taking place. Have a sneaking suspicion that Yemen doesn't feature very highly on the tests per capita table given it's in the midsts of a civil war right now. One of the main reasons for all the mass hysteria over COVID is that many people do not seem to grasp the difference between CFR and IFR, so when a 2% CFR number was being reported from Wuhan it was generally assumed to mean that 2% of everybody infected would die. We now know it is probably under 0.2% on IFR and very much skewed towards > 70 year olds placing it in unusually bad flu season sort of territory rather than a rerun of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

They tested for asymptomatic cases unlike the other two, so the efficacy numbers reported are not directly comparable as far as I am aware.

Fleg protests in Belfast maybe, but guess NI is a special case where state authority is generally viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. The moment you question all the over the top nanny state stuff there will be someone along telling us that Sweden got it disastrously wrong even though in reality their per capita cumulative mortality rate is probably still lower than the UK's quicker than you can say Sven Goran Eriksson. Somebody with a posh accent said it on the telly so it must be true.

Tweeting about something she clearly doesn't understand.