Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[doulikefish]

3 minutes ago, Elixir said:

'Please, please continue to restrict my freedom of movement and civil liberties long after population vaccine coverage has been achieved!'

Jeepers Nelson Mandela is alive 

[Detournement]

1 minute ago, Snafu said:

No we won't, the vax companies are working on upgrading their vaccines to head off the threat from the new variants. Tweaking a vaccine can be completed a lot faster than starting a vaccine from scratch.

Vaccine roll out in the UK by the looks of it takes 12 weeks for one jab and 24 weeks if two are required. Do you want to be locked down while this goes on?

[Caledonian1]

1 minute ago, Arch Stanton said:

There's only one appendage I'd be interested in growing.

Good for you I say.  I am lucky I already have one and suspect many on here have too....but you go for it....what do you want us to call you when it grows?

[Detournement]

4 minutes ago, Elixir said:

At current rates of vaccination, which are inevitably going to increase in the months ahead.

Nor is it about where I'm 'choking to go' right now.

You are obviously desperate to get somewhere!

[Arch Stanton]

Just now, Caledonian1 said:

Good for you I say.  I am lucky I already have one and suspect many on here have too....but you go for it....what do you want us to call you when it grows?

The tripod 

[strichener]

1 hour ago, Todd_is_God said:

He was only a temporary Captain, though.

If he held this for 6 months or more then he would be automatically be granted the honorary rank of the highest acting rank that he held.

[Detournement]

9 minutes ago, The Stig said:

Would the English figures include refusals as it may have been offered to everyone but have a refusal rate of almost 10%? this could be due to a number of factors such a higher percentage of BAME workers. who will not take it for thier own reasons.  Is this not why Scotland can only report a 98% vaccination % as people may have refused or not been able to be vaccinated ?

They also can't vaccinate if there is an outbreak in the home which are more prevalent in England than Scotland at the moment. 

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Detournement said:

I don't think the WHO official is scare mongering.

If tests are showing that vaccines already have reduced efficacy against some variants then it's likely that problem is going to get worse as the year goes on. If our winter 2021-22 strategy is based around protection against this generation of vaccines then we need to minimise the chance of variants that undermine herd immunity entering the country or we will risk being locked down again next winter. 

The problem with this though is that "new variants" are likely to be with us forever and most certainly the next few years, with or without a vaccine.

So does that mean no international travel at all potentially forever ? or is it just for a few years we'll be locked up in the country ??

Don't get me wrong, I know the importance of minimising deaths and serious illness but I also think the reality / potential reality needs to be spelled out to people and more importantly the rationale behind the decisions being taken.

Is this about safeguarding against death and serious illness or is it now about something else ????

[Dons_1988]

'If you want schools to open the entire adult population has to suffer' is an interesting way of winning hearts and minds.

 

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

30 minutes ago, Juanhourjoe said:

Maybe, once the other country you want to go to has vaccinated their vulnerable groups. If you can still transmit the virus even with both doses. It would seem selfish to head off to other places, just cause we're in the clear. Btw most countries will be no where near that by the end of the year.

Helen Lovejoy nonsense. No one is advocating going to countries which don’t have their vulnerable groups vaccinated, would have thought that would be obvious. 

[NotThePars]

1 hour ago, pandarilla said:

The issue of punishing those who break the rules has been a huge problem from the very beginning, and there are no easy solutions.


Maybe have a trial of a forced and co-ordinated visit to a local hospital, hearing from some of the doctors and nurses dealing with this shit, or having to listen to someone who lost a loved one. A kind of brutal example of community service - showing first hand the effects of being a fanny.

 

1 hour ago, WATTOO said:

I've said from the beginning that fines are pointless, the rich don't care as it's peanuts to them, and the poor are going to be unable o pay anyway, so makes no odds to them either.

Your idea may work with some, however others will have no conscience and won't give a flying fcuk about other people suffering.

I'd probably go down the community payback route where you're physically made to do some sort of unpaid manual labour (picking up litter), (tidying up gardens / public areas), (painting varnishing etc) whether you like it or not, similar to a chain gang situation in the states but obviously not "chained" or at least socially distanced at a minimum. 

This is such a laughably petty and authoritarian measure that would appeal to the British mindset that I'm actually surprised Priti Patel hasn't proposed it. It would be the perfect and punitive way to deflect from how utterly disastrous the government's handling of this has been.

[Detournement]

7 minutes ago, WATTOO said:

The problem with this though is that "new variants" are likely to be with us forever and most certainly the next few years, with or without a vaccine.

So does that mean no international travel at all potentially forever ? or is it just for a few years we'll be locked up in the country ??

Don't get me wrong, I know the importance of minimising deaths and serious illness but I also think the reality / potential reality needs to be spelled out to people and more importantly the rationale behind the decisions being taken.

Is this about safeguarding against death and serious illness or is it now about something else ????

Once a high percentage of the world population is naturally immune or vaccinated there will be less transmission and therefore variants. 3 winters/waves was the original estimate.

I'm mainly interested in ensuring that this is the final lockdown but it's obviously possible that a newer vaccine resistant variant being introduced in the autumn could lead to a third wave of mortality. 

[ICTChris]

It took 45 days for 10% of the UKs population to get vaccinated.

It's taken 13 days to get to 20%.

 

[pandarilla]

Aye mate, I'm sure what every person who's lost a loved one due to this virus wants to do is sit down in front of an 18 year old COVID denier and pour their heart out. 

Why would every person who lost a loved one have to sit down and pour their heart out?

What a strange post.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of folk who would want to show people how this has affected them. I've seen it work very well with folk who've lost loved ones in car crashes speaking to groups of teenagers. The kids are almost always affected in quite a big way.

But either way, i was throwing out a suggestion, and you've jumped to an extreme place to try and dismiss it.

[Bairnardo]

16 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

This is such a laughably petty and authoritarian measure that would appeal to the British mindset that I'm actually surprised Priti Patel hasn't proposed it. It would be the perfect and punitive way to deflect from how utterly disastrous the government's handling of this has been.

Certainly, when families are struggling to see sick loved ones, up to and including on their death beds in some cases, and when prospective fathers have to shield themselves for two weeks at their own expense to be present at the birth of their child I can see a potential issue with marching anti maskers round the hospital like a fucking viral Blair Drummond.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Bairnardo

[Detournement]

11 minutes ago, Snafu said:

We are locked down now if you haven't noticed

One of my work colleagues Dad had his second jab after only two weeks, he lives in Liverpool.

I must say they build them differently down in Merseyside.

I'm obviously talking about a hypothetical program of booster shots to deal with a new variant. 

[ICTChris]

It probably would be a deterrent to take people on forced marches through Covid wards as some of them would catch Covid from doing it and some of them would die. 

It would also cause spread of the disease and take up the valuable time of medics so my proposal would be that we take all the people convicted of breaching restrictions, get Neil Ferguson to produce a model on how many of them would likely die if they walked around a Covid ward all day and then randomly select people to be shot to meet the quota.

[Ron Aldo]

Vaccine roll out in the UK by the looks of it takes 12 weeks for one jab and 24 weeks if two are required. Do you want to be locked down while this goes on?

Don't really understand what you're getting at here. Are you suggesting an ongoing situation where people get vaccinated, a new variant emerges, we lockdown again until the vaccine is tweaked and then repeat this cycle?

The current vaccines do what they have to do which is prevent severe illness. Once everyone has been jagged there's no reason for restrictions to be put in place ever again. New variants will emerge (as they probably have been doing since day 1 of the pandemic) and the vaccines will probably need to be constantly updated but there's no need for us to go back into hiding for months at a time while we wait on that happening.

[Detournement]

2 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

 get Neil Ferguson to produce a model on how many of them would likely die if they walked around a Covid ward all day and then randomly select people to be shot to meet the quota.

There's a good chance that the bold Neil would estimate 200 billion deaths and we would need to kill everyone on Earth plus some alien races. 

[djchapsticks]

35 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Vaccine roll out in the UK by the looks of it takes 12 weeks for one jab and 24 weeks if two are required. Do you want to be locked down while this goes on?

You've had it explained to you on more than one occasion why this wouldn't be the case for an updated vaccine, why every time a booster or an updated version comes out, it does not render the old version useless or ineffective but you don't seem intent on taking the information on board.

You've also had it explained that a booster would more than likely not be rolled out to the entire population, only those that needed it. The existing jab would provide more than sufficient immunity to the healthy and a booster would provide that extra immunity to the vulnerable.

Edited February 4, 2021 by djchapsticks