Obviously, now. But by the very end of August? It might be fine, it might not, but no festival is going to bet the farm on that. Hence the insurance.
And why should the taxpayer bet the farm on your festival?
There's a bloody pandemic on. You know there's a pandemic on. You can't claim that it's unexpected. If you were to attempt to purchase insurance, at some kind of reasonable actuarial rate, against the possibility of the pandemic still being on in August, you'd probably need to pay between half and two-thirds of the sum covered as a premium.
Obviously, now. But by the very end of August? It might be fine, it might not, but no festival is going to bet the farm on that. Hence the insurance.
And why should the taxpayer bet the farm on your festival?
There's a bloody pandemic on. You know there's a pandemic on. You can't claim that it's unexpected. If you were to attempt to purchase insurance, at some kind of reasonable actuarial rate, against the possibility of the pandemic still being on in August, you'd probably need to pay between half and two-thirds of the sum covered as a premium.
My guess is that you wouldn't want to do that.
Hahahaha. But no.
Literally no insurance firm will touch the festival circuit with a bargepole at the moment. Which is why, if the government wants A Great British SummerTM they will have to be the underwriters of last resort. This has been explained to them repeatedly and often, but they've not moved. Willing to spaff billions on their mates for Eat Out, not a few million to the (largely independent) festival sector.
Finally! Finally I am feeling much better for longer. Thanks to everyone who offered prayers on my behalf. I still have problems with my senses of smell and taste disappearing but that's more annoying than anything.
So very good to hear from you! As for the sense of smell & taste, I have lived my whole life with a crappy sense of smell and (hence) taste. It is the one symptom of COVID that made me burst out laughing---because I would never know if I had it.
As you say, it is annoying, but you can live with it. I'd be happy to share my soup recipes with you: they are all designed for a person who doesn't really have a decent sense of smell!!
@Hedgehog ah yes, trialling the mustards. We had quite a collection by the end!
And
I do recall Mr Alba shuddering as he viewed the sheer volume of Marmite that I needed to heap onto toast before it made Any impact
Lots of comments that the Indian variant has been allowed into UK, as the govt didn't want to close the borders. One reason being suggested is the promise of a trade deal with India. Eh? Hopefully it will be contained.
Lots of comments that the Indian variant has been allowed into UK, as the govt didn't want to close the borders. One reason being suggested is the promise of a trade deal with India. Eh? Hopefully it will be contained.
Here we go again folks... hold onto your hats.
Glasgow & Moray remain in level 4 whilst the rest of Scotland goes down a level (or two) as cases are rising again. How long before Blackburn & Darwen and Bolton are restricted again I wonder?
Sorry, Glasgow & Moray in level 3.
I'm not agin keeping the current restrictions in place given cases are rising again, but I'm really not in the least surprised that they are...
Meanwhile, over here, the CDC has said that fully vaccinated people need no longer wear masks indoors or out. It seems, though, that some states are choosing not to follow the recommendation.
I'm sure the CDC backs its decision with good science, but my gut feeling is that it's a tad too early to be relaxing restrictions to that extent. I've gotten so used to wearing a mask that I think I'm going to feel underdressed without one.
I'm sure the CDC backs its decision with good science
It's a dirty recommendation, not a clean one.
Here's what I mean. At some point, the CDC said that it was now OK for kids in schools to sit 3 feet apart rather than 6 feet apart. They did not do this in response to new information that said that actually, virus droplets don't migrate as far as they'd previously thought. They did this in response to the knowledge that the rates weren't horrific, that elderly people were starting to get vaccinated, and that virtual school really sucked for lots of kids.
This recommendation is the same. It's based on the calculus that says "if we say that vaccinated people can go maskless, then more people will get vaccinated faster, and that will mean less Covid than we cause by having vaccinated people going around maskless."
I will continue to wear a mask. I think it's basic courtesy to those around me. (I've had both my shots, and my two week timer is up on Tuesday.)
A year ago, my thinking was that masks do not prevent the wearer from getting infected -- they merely prevent an infected person from spreading germs. Being reasonably sure I was not infected, I did not wear a mask in public. Whenever I encountered someone wearing a mask, I automatically assumed they were infected, and I kept my distance.
Then came the mandate that we must all wear masks. My thinking then was that good citizen that I am, I will wear one. And whenever I encountered anyone not wearing one (or wearing one with nose uncovered, or -- worst of all -- wearing one down around the chin) I automatically assumed "bad citizen, super spreader, shame!" and again kept my distance.
To tell you the truth, now I really don't know what to think.
There is no way I am going out in public without a mask. If nothing else I do not want the common cold and or any such thing I can bring home to Mr. Image while he is under treatment for his cancer. CDC also tells us even with vaccination we can still get a mild case of the virus so if this is true why would they say skip the mask.
It's been over a year since I've had a cold, but I attribute it to the fact that my contact with other people has been severely limited, mask or no mask.
Ditto; but in my case a combination of obsessive hand hygiene as well as masking in the workplace and on public transport.
A cold would ( for me and others) be a damned nuisance as it would mean staying away from work pending a COVID swab ( despite having had both Pfizer vaccination and this year's flu jab) which ( apart form everything else) make life harder for my esteemed colleagues.
Also a mild case of Covid19 can be followed by Long Covid. And there are concerns how many young people are being affected by Long Covid.
I must admit I thought Marvin was being ironic, because, as you and @Doublethink say, even mild cases do indeed matter - and will, I suspect, continue to matter for a very long time.
The evidence is very clear that masks very significantly reduce the chances of someone who's infected passing on the virus, and slightly reduce the chance of someone not infected from catching it. We also know that the vaccine reduces the chances of catching and passing on the virus. And, finally we know a lot of people don't know they're infected (even with a recent negative test you can still be infected and infectious). Combining measures to reduce transmission is the best option. If we want to reduce the chances of someone with an immune deficiency contracting the virus then we all need to get vaccinated and continue to wear masks until such a time as the virus stops transmitting through our communities. Likewise, if we want to reduce the chance of a new variant appearing that can bypass the vaccine then we want to minimise transmission of the virus, and so also continue to wear masks as well as get vaccinated. Reduction in transmission of other respiratory diseases is a definite bonus of wearing a mask.
The evidence is very clear that masks very significantly reduce the chances of someone who's infected passing on the virus, and slightly reduce the chance of someone not infected from catching it.
This. It's also the case, as you mention, that people are at their most infectious before they display any symptoms, so unless you really never have contact with other humans, being "reasonably certain that you're not infected" is a difficult statement.
Plus people are binary, which is a source of endless frustration to me. I overheard a snatch of conversation the other day, where one speaker was talking about a person he knows, and reporting that "he had a positive Covid test on Friday, and a negative one on Saturday, so he doesn't know what to think".
The temptation to interrupt and say "he should think he's got Covid, and should quarantine himself" was almost irresistible. But the idea of a false negative on a test didn't enter in to their thinking.
CDC also tells us even with vaccination we can still get a mild case of the virus so if this is true why would they say skip the mask.
Because mild cases don’t matter.
They matter if your loved one currently has fuck all immune system.
On an individual level, yes fair enough. But at the level of society as a whole we shouldn’t be imposing restrictions on the entire population just to protect the immune compromised. We never felt the need to do so before COVID, and after all if you’re immune compromised then it doesn’t really matter which virus you catch.
Mild cases of COVID don’t overwhelm the health services (which has always been the primary reason for locking down, NOT elimination of the virus), don’t have a significant impact on the vast majority of those who have them, and help us get closer to the herd immunity that will mean this whole fucking thing is finally over and we can actually live our lives again.
People with Long Covid may beg to differ @Marvin the Martian. They are often young and have a very mild version of Covid, but they then suffer for months - with no sign of it going away. Some are still off work after twelve months.
Mild cases of COVID don’t overwhelm the health services (which has always been the primary reason for locking down, NOT elimination of the virus), don’t have a significant impact on the vast majority of those who have them, and help us get closer to the herd immunity that will mean this whole fucking thing is finally over and we can actually live our lives again.
There's a whole stack of wrong here, which everybody including Marvin knows, so to sum up, fuck you.
Mild cases of COVID don’t overwhelm the health services (which has always been the primary reason for locking down, NOT elimination of the virus), don’t have a significant impact on the vast majority of those who have them, and help us get closer to the herd immunity that will mean this whole fucking thing is finally over and we can actually live our lives again.
There's a whole stack of wrong here, which everybody including Marvin knows, so to sum up, fuck you.
A whole stack of wrong, you say. Ok.
I made precisely four claims in that post:
1- that mild cases don’t overwhelm the health services. Since mild cases don’t involve hospitalisation, that’s self-evidently true.
2- that protecting the NHS has always been the main reason for locking down. Again, surely uncontroversial - its what the whole “flatten the curve” thing was about, and “protect the NHS” was one of the key slogans used by the government.
4- that herd immunity will mean we can get back to living our lives. Well, yeah - that’s the whole point of having a vaccination programme.
So 3/4 of the claims are true and the other (claim 3) is definitely arguable depending on your interpretation of the phrase “vast majority”. Some “whole stack of wrong” that is. I’d hate to know what you’d call a post that actually contains things that are incorrect!
1- that mild cases don’t overwhelm the health services. Since mild cases don’t involve hospitalisation, that’s self-evidently true.
Though, 122,000 professionals in the health services have some form of long-term health impact from covid (and, of course, 100s who have died) mean that the capacity of the health services have been significantly impacted by the pandemic - the health and care services were chronically understaffed before the pandemic, so taking even more of those staff out of the front line isn't going to help .... our hospitals may have (just) missed running out of beds and oxygen to treat covid cases but are you sure they're not going to be overwhelmed with treating cancers, broken bones, hip replacements and all the other services that the NHS was struggling to treat before the pandemic now that a) there's a longer waiting list and b) there are fewer staff (and those there are have been working very hard with very few breaks for more than a year)?
Anything that keeps the covid case load on hospitals and other health services down to the minimum and stops even more health staff from getting sick is a good thing.
2- that protecting the NHS has always been the main reason for locking down. Again, surely uncontroversial - its what the whole “flatten the curve” thing was about, and “protect the NHS” was one of the key slogans used by the government.
That was, eventually, the stated aim of the government once they started listening to scientists saying that herd immunity acquired through natural infection would kill Tory voters at a faster rate than Labour voters (cos, older people are more likely to vote Tory). If they were serious about protecting the NHS then the government a) wouldn't have cut it to the bone such that it was barely coping without a pandemic, and b) wouldn't have waited weeks after it was clear that a lockdown was needed before doing so - and we could add a whole string of subsequent actions like not requiring people entering the country from quarantine until after there were outbreaks associated with people coming into the country.
It's your moral compass that is wrong. You're wrong in part about the facts, but it's the sheer callous disregard for human life you show. You share that with the government, so fuck them too.
It was wrong when the government decided not to eliminate the virus (which it could have done), it was wrong when it threw the people of this country under the bus (~150,000 dead and counting), wrong when it decided that herd immunity could be achieved by allowing infections (which they're still doing) without consideration to any of the long term effects - I face surgery, Master Tor has symptoms a year later, my next door neighbours (my age and younger) were hospitalised and still feel the effects, and get back to living our lives? Sick joke for many people.
it's the sheer callous disregard for human life you show.
Mild cases, by definition, don’t kill. In which case you’re actually talking about quality of life rather than life itself.
So is it better to accept a certain level of risk to the quality of life of a relative handful of people, or to deliberately reduce the quality of life of everyone?
it's the sheer callous disregard for human life you show.
Mild cases, by definition, don’t kill. In which case you’re actually talking about quality of life rather than life itself.
So is it better to accept a certain level of risk to the quality of life of a relative handful of people, or to deliberately reduce the quality of life of everyone?
Yeah, sure. The only person you're concerned about is you, so stop with the everyone.
Handful. Given that (by your own figures) we're looking at just short of 10 million people, or around 1 in 7 of the UK population, I'm again left questioning your morality. Covid is a bastard of a disease - it's a complete lottery as to whether any one person gets it asymptomatically, all the way up to death. That could be you, and I guess you've made that judgement already - but it's not up to you to make that call for anyone else.
It's an infectious disease. It doesn't care about your liberty.
it's the sheer callous disregard for human life you show.
Mild cases, by definition, don’t kill. In which case you’re actually talking about quality of life rather than life itself.
So is it better to accept a certain level of risk to the quality of life of a relative handful of people, or to deliberately reduce the quality of life of everyone?
Yeah, sure. The only person you're concerned about is you, so stop with the everyone.
Thank you for telling me what I really think. I’m so glad you’re here to let me know these things.
Handful. Given that (by your own figures) we're looking at just short of 10 million people, or around 1 in 7 of the UK population, I'm again left questioning your morality.
You seem to be assuming that herd immunity means everybody gets the disease. That’s not the case. For one thing, over 20 million people in the UK have already been vaccinated.
Covid is a bastard of a disease - it's a complete lottery as to whether any one person gets it asymptomatically, all the way up to death. That could be you, and I guess you've made that judgement already - but it's not up to you to make that call for anyone else.
It’s not a complete lottery at all. If it was then there wouldn’t be more or less vulnerable people.
And there are plenty of other bastards of diseases that we don’t shut down the entire country over. Covid will soon be just another one of them, killing a few people every winter but essentially ignored. And that’s ok. Not for the people killed, of course, but for society as a whole it’s the lesser evil.
It's an infectious disease. It doesn't care about your liberty.
it's the sheer callous disregard for human life you show.
Mild cases, by definition, don’t kill. In which case you’re actually talking about quality of life rather than life itself.
So is it better to accept a certain level of risk to the quality of life of a relative handful of people, or to deliberately reduce the quality of life of everyone?
Yeah, sure. The only person you're concerned about is you, so stop with the everyone.
Thank you for telling me what I really think. I’m so glad you’re here to let me know these things.
No, you've been letting us know what you really think for years. I'm simply remembering.
Handful. Given that (by your own figures) we're looking at just short of 10 million people, or around 1 in 7 of the UK population, I'm again left questioning your morality.
You seem to be assuming that herd immunity means everybody gets the disease. That’s not the case. For one thing, over 20 million people in the UK have already been vaccinated.
Again, from memory, you don't care how herd immunity is reached. That vaccines are being rolled out quickly is a good thing, because it means that fewer people end up with the disease and fewer people end up passing it on. Let's just hang on a little longer until we get there - currently there are thousands of people being newly infected every day, and our schools are rife with it. Some of those children will never recover. Some of those teachers (of which Miss Tor is one) are hoping beyond hope they don't go down with it.
Covid is a bastard of a disease - it's a complete lottery as to whether any one person gets it asymptomatically, all the way up to death. That could be you, and I guess you've made that judgement already - but it's not up to you to make that call for anyone else.
It’s not a complete lottery at all. If it was then there wouldn’t be more or less vulnerable people.
Again, you want to take a risk that only affects you, knock yourself out. Instead, you want to take a risk that puts others at risk, and to reiterate, you don't know how it's going to affect you, or anyone else. Some elderly people have sailed through it. Some young people have been killed by it. You don't know. Neither do they.
And there are plenty of other bastards of diseases that we don’t shut down the entire country over. Covid will soon be just another one of them, killing a few people every winter but essentially ignored. And that’s ok. Not for the people killed, of course, but for society as a whole it’s the lesser evil.
Being blasé about a highly virulent infectious disease is very on brand for you.
It's an infectious disease. It doesn't care about your liberty.
Nor do you.
Either we're all free or none of us are. Look on it as an incentive to be more altruistic.
And there are plenty of other bastards of diseases that we don’t shut down the entire country over.
But, for many of those we take sensible precautions to protect people from the risks others wish to take - and, sometimes when those restrictions were introduced we were told it would be the death knell of many businesses that (we were told) relied on people endangering others. An obvious example is the harm done by smoking where we now have smoking bans in enclosed public spaces so that those who don't smoke avoid the worst risks caused by breathing in the smoke from those who chose to take that risk. I'm sure you remember how we were told that this would put thousands of pubs out of business because people wouldn't come in if they couldn't smoke ... well, there don't seem to be a shortage of pubs and bars.
I'm sure you remember how we were told that this would put thousands of pubs out of business because people wouldn't come in if they couldn't smoke ... well, there don't seem to be a shortage of pubs and bars.
There have been thousands of pub closures since the smoking ban. See this report from the Institute for Economic Affairs:
A survey of publicans reported that 54 per cent of pub customers smoked in 2006 and it is highly telling that the same survey showed that this number had fallen to 38 per cent in 2008 following the introduction of smoking bans in Scotland (March 2006) and the rest of the UK (April and July 2007) (FLVA, 2008: 2). The survey also reported that there was a net reduction of 74 per cent in smokers’ visits to pubs whereas there was only a six per cent net increase in nonsmokers’ visits to pubs (ibid.: 2008: 3). These trends are supported by a mass of other data showing that the smoking ban has been highly damaging for many, but not all, pubs.
I'm sure you remember how we were told that this would put thousands of pubs out of business because people wouldn't come in if they couldn't smoke ... well, there don't seem to be a shortage of pubs and bars.
There have been thousands of pub closures since the smoking ban. See this report from the Institute for Economic Affairs:
A survey of publicans reported that 54 per cent of pub customers smoked in 2006 and it is highly telling that the same survey showed that this number had fallen to 38 per cent in 2008 following the introduction of smoking bans in Scotland (March 2006) and the rest of the UK (April and July 2007) (FLVA, 2008: 2). The survey also reported that there was a net reduction of 74 per cent in smokers’ visits to pubs whereas there was only a six per cent net increase in nonsmokers’ visits to pubs (ibid.: 2008: 3). These trends are supported by a mass of other data showing that the smoking ban has been highly damaging for many, but not all, pubs.
Any data about the lives saved due to the cumulative and environmental/cultural effects of smoking ban? Just a little thing, I know, not worth considering in some people's minds, but it would be interesting to know the other side to the argument of smoking bans in confined public spaces. I have to say the huge numbers of pubs in all the places I've lived in in the past decade or so don't seem to have been struggling notably to find patrons (apart from this past year).
On the issue of Covid entering the arena as one more pervasive easily transmissible illness having a widespread effect on the general population, it's as well to remember that sick people cost employers and businesses - and therefore the Blessed Economy and its taxpayers - money. Money that often can be ill afforded (pun intended). The UK already loses billions of pounds to sick days. To say nothing of the numerous knock-on effects of people not being available to do their jobs, provide services, etc. It would make financial sense to have a very secure handle on Covid-19 and its variants, even if the preservation of human life isn't much of an incentive.
As a member of CAMRA I've been aware of the closures of many pubs over the past few years - and while the smoking ban may have been a factor, there are other factors which have nothing to do with smoking. For instance the economic situation has meant that more people drink at home, buying cheap supermarket booze.
My (hypothetical) asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic *mild* case of Covid could kill my neighbour. Taking neighbour in the sense of 'who is my neighbour', I take the view that I have a responsibility - in fact, a duty - to protect them. I am beginning to think I should ask everyone I meet if they are Marvin the Martian before I try very hard.
Comments
And why should the taxpayer bet the farm on your festival?
There's a bloody pandemic on. You know there's a pandemic on. You can't claim that it's unexpected. If you were to attempt to purchase insurance, at some kind of reasonable actuarial rate, against the possibility of the pandemic still being on in August, you'd probably need to pay between half and two-thirds of the sum covered as a premium.
My guess is that you wouldn't want to do that.
Hahahaha. But no.
Literally no insurance firm will touch the festival circuit with a bargepole at the moment. Which is why, if the government wants A Great British SummerTM they will have to be the underwriters of last resort. This has been explained to them repeatedly and often, but they've not moved. Willing to spaff billions on their mates for Eat Out, not a few million to the (largely independent) festival sector.
As you say, it is annoying, but you can live with it. I'd be happy to share my soup recipes with you: they are all designed for a person who doesn't really have a decent sense of smell!!
And
I do recall Mr Alba shuddering as he viewed the sheer volume of Marmite that I needed to heap onto toast before it made Any impact
Always follow the money for the explanation 😡😢
https://theguardian.com/world/2021/may/14/india-covid-variant-could-lead-to-third-wave-uk
I don't suppose King Bozzie will stop easing restrictions - as you say, follow the money. It's all part of his Master Plan for World Domination.
Glasgow & Moray remain in level 4 whilst the rest of Scotland goes down a level (or two) as cases are rising again. How long before Blackburn & Darwen and Bolton are restricted again I wonder?
I'm not agin keeping the current restrictions in place given cases are rising again, but I'm really not in the least surprised that they are...
I'm sure the CDC backs its decision with good science, but my gut feeling is that it's a tad too early to be relaxing restrictions to that extent. I've gotten so used to wearing a mask that I think I'm going to feel underdressed without one.
It's a dirty recommendation, not a clean one.
Here's what I mean. At some point, the CDC said that it was now OK for kids in schools to sit 3 feet apart rather than 6 feet apart. They did not do this in response to new information that said that actually, virus droplets don't migrate as far as they'd previously thought. They did this in response to the knowledge that the rates weren't horrific, that elderly people were starting to get vaccinated, and that virtual school really sucked for lots of kids.
This recommendation is the same. It's based on the calculus that says "if we say that vaccinated people can go maskless, then more people will get vaccinated faster, and that will mean less Covid than we cause by having vaccinated people going around maskless."
I will continue to wear a mask. I think it's basic courtesy to those around me. (I've had both my shots, and my two week timer is up on Tuesday.)
Then came the mandate that we must all wear masks. My thinking then was that good citizen that I am, I will wear one. And whenever I encountered anyone not wearing one (or wearing one with nose uncovered, or -- worst of all -- wearing one down around the chin) I automatically assumed "bad citizen, super spreader, shame!" and again kept my distance.
To tell you the truth, now I really don't know what to think.
Because mild cases don’t matter.
It's been over a year since I've had a cold, but I attribute it to the fact that my contact with other people has been severely limited, mask or no mask.
A cold would ( for me and others) be a damned nuisance as it would mean staying away from work pending a COVID swab ( despite having had both Pfizer vaccination and this year's flu jab) which ( apart form everything else) make life harder for my esteemed colleagues.
They matter if your loved one currently has fuck all immune system.
I must admit I thought Marvin was being ironic, because, as you and @Doublethink say, even mild cases do indeed matter - and will, I suspect, continue to matter for a very long time.
This. It's also the case, as you mention, that people are at their most infectious before they display any symptoms, so unless you really never have contact with other humans, being "reasonably certain that you're not infected" is a difficult statement.
Plus people are binary, which is a source of endless frustration to me. I overheard a snatch of conversation the other day, where one speaker was talking about a person he knows, and reporting that "he had a positive Covid test on Friday, and a negative one on Saturday, so he doesn't know what to think".
The temptation to interrupt and say "he should think he's got Covid, and should quarantine himself" was almost irresistible. But the idea of a false negative on a test didn't enter in to their thinking.
On an individual level, yes fair enough. But at the level of society as a whole we shouldn’t be imposing restrictions on the entire population just to protect the immune compromised. We never felt the need to do so before COVID, and after all if you’re immune compromised then it doesn’t really matter which virus you catch.
Mild cases of COVID don’t overwhelm the health services (which has always been the primary reason for locking down, NOT elimination of the virus), don’t have a significant impact on the vast majority of those who have them, and help us get closer to the herd immunity that will mean this whole fucking thing is finally over and we can actually live our lives again.
There's a whole stack of wrong here, which everybody including Marvin knows, so to sum up, fuck you.
A whole stack of wrong, you say. Ok.
I made precisely four claims in that post:
1- that mild cases don’t overwhelm the health services. Since mild cases don’t involve hospitalisation, that’s self-evidently true.
2- that protecting the NHS has always been the main reason for locking down. Again, surely uncontroversial - its what the whole “flatten the curve” thing was about, and “protect the NHS” was one of the key slogans used by the government.
3- that mild cases don’t have a significant effect on the vast majority of those who have them. Given that so many cases are completely asymptomatic, they must perforce have no impact on those who have them. Of those who did have symptoms, the ONS (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1april2021) estimates a 13.7% prevalence of extended symptoms, not all of which will be full-on long Covid. So at least 86.3% of ALL Covid cases (including the serious ones) had no significant lasting effect. That’s what I’d call a vast majority, but you may differ.
4- that herd immunity will mean we can get back to living our lives. Well, yeah - that’s the whole point of having a vaccination programme.
So 3/4 of the claims are true and the other (claim 3) is definitely arguable depending on your interpretation of the phrase “vast majority”. Some “whole stack of wrong” that is. I’d hate to know what you’d call a post that actually contains things that are incorrect!
Anything that keeps the covid case load on hospitals and other health services down to the minimum and stops even more health staff from getting sick is a good thing.
That was, eventually, the stated aim of the government once they started listening to scientists saying that herd immunity acquired through natural infection would kill Tory voters at a faster rate than Labour voters (cos, older people are more likely to vote Tory). If they were serious about protecting the NHS then the government a) wouldn't have cut it to the bone such that it was barely coping without a pandemic, and b) wouldn't have waited weeks after it was clear that a lockdown was needed before doing so - and we could add a whole string of subsequent actions like not requiring people entering the country from quarantine until after there were outbreaks associated with people coming into the country.
So, and I reiterate, fuck you.
It was wrong when the government decided not to eliminate the virus (which it could have done), it was wrong when it threw the people of this country under the bus (~150,000 dead and counting), wrong when it decided that herd immunity could be achieved by allowing infections (which they're still doing) without consideration to any of the long term effects - I face surgery, Master Tor has symptoms a year later, my next door neighbours (my age and younger) were hospitalised and still feel the effects, and get back to living our lives? Sick joke for many people.
And since I have permission, fuck you.
Mild cases, by definition, don’t kill. In which case you’re actually talking about quality of life rather than life itself.
So is it better to accept a certain level of risk to the quality of life of a relative handful of people, or to deliberately reduce the quality of life of everyone?
Yeah, sure. The only person you're concerned about is you, so stop with the everyone.
Handful. Given that (by your own figures) we're looking at just short of 10 million people, or around 1 in 7 of the UK population, I'm again left questioning your morality. Covid is a bastard of a disease - it's a complete lottery as to whether any one person gets it asymptomatically, all the way up to death. That could be you, and I guess you've made that judgement already - but it's not up to you to make that call for anyone else.
It's an infectious disease. It doesn't care about your liberty.
Thank you for telling me what I really think. I’m so glad you’re here to let me know these things.
You seem to be assuming that herd immunity means everybody gets the disease. That’s not the case. For one thing, over 20 million people in the UK have already been vaccinated.
It’s not a complete lottery at all. If it was then there wouldn’t be more or less vulnerable people.
And there are plenty of other bastards of diseases that we don’t shut down the entire country over. Covid will soon be just another one of them, killing a few people every winter but essentially ignored. And that’s ok. Not for the people killed, of course, but for society as a whole it’s the lesser evil.
Nor do you.
No, you've been letting us know what you really think for years. I'm simply remembering.
Again, from memory, you don't care how herd immunity is reached. That vaccines are being rolled out quickly is a good thing, because it means that fewer people end up with the disease and fewer people end up passing it on. Let's just hang on a little longer until we get there - currently there are thousands of people being newly infected every day, and our schools are rife with it. Some of those children will never recover. Some of those teachers (of which Miss Tor is one) are hoping beyond hope they don't go down with it.
Again, you want to take a risk that only affects you, knock yourself out. Instead, you want to take a risk that puts others at risk, and to reiterate, you don't know how it's going to affect you, or anyone else. Some elderly people have sailed through it. Some young people have been killed by it. You don't know. Neither do they.
Being blasé about a highly virulent infectious disease is very on brand for you.
Either we're all free or none of us are. Look on it as an incentive to be more altruistic.
That’s the biggest thing about which we disagree. Especially when it means you’d rather have nobody free than some people free.
There have been thousands of pub closures since the smoking ban. See this report from the Institute for Economic Affairs:
https://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Briefing_Closing time_web.pdf
Any data about the lives saved due to the cumulative and environmental/cultural effects of smoking ban? Just a little thing, I know, not worth considering in some people's minds, but it would be interesting to know the other side to the argument of smoking bans in confined public spaces. I have to say the huge numbers of pubs in all the places I've lived in in the past decade or so don't seem to have been struggling notably to find patrons (apart from this past year).
On the issue of Covid entering the arena as one more pervasive easily transmissible illness having a widespread effect on the general population, it's as well to remember that sick people cost employers and businesses - and therefore the Blessed Economy and its taxpayers - money. Money that often can be ill afforded (pun intended). The UK already loses billions of pounds to sick days. To say nothing of the numerous knock-on effects of people not being available to do their jobs, provide services, etc. It would make financial sense to have a very secure handle on Covid-19 and its variants, even if the preservation of human life isn't much of an incentive.
Oh, this isn't an opinion. It's a fact. It's what you do with that fact that's important.
You're ignoring it, while I'm acknowledging it.