Maybe the fact that there's been relatively little COVID in Australia means that ridiculous conspiracy theories can flourish?Quote:
Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie
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Maybe the fact that there's been relatively little COVID in Australia means that ridiculous conspiracy theories can flourish?Quote:
Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie
Would there be enough anti-vaxxers there to boo loud enough?Quote:
Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie
Seems absolute madness
Some very encouraging vaccine.news from Scotland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56153600
To be honest, I haven't heard the boos myself so I don't know.Quote:
Originally Posted by Croesy Blue
We will get english date backing this up later too which should give a much bigger sample size.Quote:
Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
So much for quasi ineffective from Macron and Germany about the AZ vaccines. Absolutely the worst bit of playing politics I've ever seen.
The confidence intervals obviously overlap but this shows AZ is more effectove than Pfizer at preventing serious illness.
So much focus was giving to that study in south africa that didn't even have enough participants to be statistically significant.
This is great news, we should be getting a normal summer after this
Yes, I thought that was a rash decision at the time and would come back to bite them. I would imagine that there must be quite a few folks over there who will be upset to hear the news today, the ones whose elderly relatives, i.e. the over 65's, have died, and whose lives might well have been saved had they been given the chance to have the vaccine.Quote:
Originally Posted by Croesy Blue
Quite glad to be free of the clutches of Europe now.....roll out seems a bit of a mess over there tooQuote:
Originally Posted by Croesy Blue
Not giving it to over 65s will literally have killed people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gofer Blue
I know Macron enjoys f*cking grannies but this is taking it too far imo
I think this is the one thing that has made me think being out of the EU is a good thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by goats
I don't think it was worth giving up our free trade and freedom of movement but this has been a positive.
I think the tory government would have gone on their own with the vaccine campaign anyway. We committed money to Oxford nd AZ while still in the EU remember.
See Boris has uttered the obvious that people must learn to live with the coronavirus just as they do with flu in the long term due to the availability of a vaccine .
"The only reason I'm able to say...we must learn to live with COVID as we live with flu...in the long term is of course because we have this vaccination program and the capability to evolve our vaccines," he told parliament.
Makes sense to me.
We weren't in the EU, were were in the transition period, discussing a trade deal, given 12 moths for the old status quo to cease.Quote:
Originally Posted by Croesy Blue
Another interesting thread from main journalist at Walesonline looking at covid. When we talk about lessons learnt from covid we should recognise that so much of what's happened has been built on the decade(s) before.Quote:
I spoke to Heather Lewis who's a public health consultant working for Public Health Wales leads a specialist team in the Cwm Taf area which monitors and informs public health decisions on managing the virus there.
She helped inform the local lockdown we saw there in the autumn. She laid out a few reasons why RCT has been so unable to shake off high levels of community transmission.
These include:
- Mobility -
Car ownership is much lower in RCT than other places.
As people are more reliant on public transport which opens up more lines of transmission. Especially elderly people are reliant on others giving them a lift to get to places like a doctor's appointment.
This mixing of vulnerable people with those who may well be asymptomatic is another way the virus can spread.
This inability to travel also poses an issue for healthcare planners with regard to testing.
If people are not able to travel far, they may be unable to get a test (you wouldn’t want people with symptoms hopping on the bus).
This means it is harder to get a handle on just how much Covid there is in the area.
- Employment -
People in RCT are more likely to be in roles which require face to face interaction with others.
Carers, supermarket workers, manual labourers - all those professions that we gladly clapped for months because the pandemic showed us just how essential they are.
But it is the nature of these roles that you are more likely to catch Covid as you have more face to face contact with people.
Added to this you have the fact these jobs are, in the main, not well paid and often insecure, which leads to people feeling they cannot miss work.
- Family ties -
This is a big one and in part ties into the employment side.
With lower incomes childcare is less affordable and jobs are less likely to be done from home.
This means a reliance on grandparents and other relatives. This increases lines of transmission.
Plus, the lockdown necessitated a bigger behavior change in the Valleys than Cardiff for example.
Often in the some Valley community there are multiple families living on one street.
I live in Cardiff & know no one on my street and never go in their house. My behaviour didn't have to change.
If my mum lived on my street the transition would've been a harder one to make in terms of the change to day to day life.
- Housing -
Even if you had 100% compliance with the rules, the nature of much of the housing in the area means the virus easily spread.
Smaller houses mean it's harder to isolate and social distance.
It also makes the lockdown harder to endure, esp when you can't leave home.
Even if all these other factors that help the virus spread were not in place, RCT would still likely have more deaths than average.
All those underlying health conditions like heart disease, obesity, diabetes and stroke are above average in the Valleys.
This is just a snap shot. You can read the full analysis here:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/w...death-19776398
Doesn’t make a difference we were operating under the rules.Quote:
Originally Posted by xsnaggle
Being in the EU wouldn’t have presented any barrier to how we invested in the development of the vaccine.
No I don't think it would have stopped them at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Croesy Blue
https://twitter.com/allthecitizens/s...956734980?s=19
this thread...
will I'm afraid be ignored by so many who now believe that Johnson and his Cabinet of political pygmies and chancers have earned their vote because they have, finally, done something that has worked when it comes to tackling Covid and, let's not forget, they also "got Brexit done".Quote:
Originally Posted by Rjk
Meanwhile, as we approach the first anniversary of the claim that 20,000 dead in the UK would be a "good" outcome, 100,000 more than that figure have now died - around a year ago, Gluey was posting links to forecasts which said only around 7,000 would die in the UK, that many, and more, were dying in a week until recently. Despite this, none of it seems to affect those who have had the ultimate responsibility for deciding our Covid policy and I have to wonder what more needs to go wrong before the forty odd per cent start to abandon their blind faith in the UK Government?
Maybe folks think no other party would have done much different? Unprecedented times as we keep hearing.....who knows?Quote:
Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
That implies that a year ago people were expecting to receive news that, no matter what party was in power, people were expecting the Prime Minister to take a holiday as the virus was establishing itself in this country, they expected the PM not to bother attending the first five COBRA meetings in which the virus was discussed, they expected the PM to contradict scientific advice on shaking hands with the result that he ended up in intensive care with Covid. People expected all sorts of wildly optimistic claims about "having the virus on the run" despite ten years of Conservative government having left us dangerously low on PPE and a "dress rehearsal" back in 2017 for what might happen in the event of a pandemic hitting this country which was basically just ignored.Quote:
Originally Posted by goats
I could go on and on and on about the number of mistakes, cock ups and misjudgements made by the UK Government when it comes to Covid because the list is almost endless, but I won't - instead, this video only goes up to early May last year;-
https://twitter.com/bydonkeys/status...75393327153152
There's a hundred different slants you can put on this. The UK has a high death rate because we have so many obese/diabetic people, and we record deaths differently. The fact that cases & deaths trickled to almost zero after everything in that blog before surging to the heights of this winter suggests that those things had no real affect. The fact we left the EU after all those idiots who didn't know better voted for it, and now watch as the EU regions are in a civil war over lack of vaccines.Quote:
Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
Seriously, do you ever let up on having a go at the Tories ? Personally I couldn't care about any of them..
you have to wonder why Labour haven't gone on the offensive more. at the announcement yesterday Starmer was completely passive. if anything Johnson attacked him more than the other way around.Quote:
Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
I can only imagine that they are purposefully keeping their tinder dry at the moment, so as not to be seen to be undermining the efforts to curb the virus, as I don't think an overly combative approach would go down well with a lot of people at the moment.
hopefully there will be an inquiry at the end of this all, and at that point they will at least look to land some punches.
He’s not is he....I don’t vote Tory or labour, but I really doubt Corbyn would have done any better, it’s a bit sad to keep going on and on about it.....Quote:
Originally Posted by A Quiet Monkfish
I think they would have been a lot less likely to resist locking down early enough in lockdown's 1 and 2, or open back up too early, as a lot of the pressure to do that came from the right of the tory party.Quote:
Originally Posted by goats
We will never know though.
One thing's for sure is the press would have been many times more critical of ANY Corbyn response than they have been of Johnson, who has been demonstrably incompetent at times.
A lot of the "Tory Press " has been quite scathing about Boris Johnson at timesQuote:
Originally Posted by Rjk
One minute he’s too easy going though like last summer, now he’s being too cautious.....you gotta laughQuote:
Originally Posted by Rjk
I think it's awkward for any opposition party because we're on as close to a war footing as nearly all of us have seen during our lifetimes and so a governing party can play the loyalty card and imply that criticism of their actions is, somehow, unpatriotic. I think that's rubbish and would do if the WAG tried such an approach as well, but I'd say it's quite a tough charge to disprove if you're a political party, so other parties in Westminster are having to perform a pretty tricky balancing act.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rjk
We're seeing in recent replies to my posts that there are many who are, it seems, indifferent to, for example, the sort of unlawful acts Matt Hancock has indulged in - you and I may find that thread you posted a link to shocking, but I think we're probably in a small minority.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/56151863
Up to 10,000 fans could be allowed back in by mid-May in England
Or 25% capacity. City should be able to therefore accommodate more than three times as many as Bournemouth will be able to.Quote:
Originally Posted by City123
Oops
So about 8,000 at the CCSQuote:
Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie
I've never accused any of the UK leaders of being too cautious in this pandemic. the fact we have about the highest death rate in the world suggests we could probably have been a tad more cautious throughoutQuote:
Originally Posted by goats
Follow Boris setting out England's exit from lockdown Sturgeon is announcing Scotland's plan at the moment.
Will Drakeford make a statement now or will he stick to his three week plan and only update in March?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56170916Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Morris
Possibly, she’s doing this to take attention away from domestic issues? I should think there will be some pressure on Drakeford after this though.
Boris both has and hasn't set a plan out. There are a lot of if's but's and maybe's:Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Morris
Is it better to have dates and an order to look forward to, which can change without much effort, even if in 5 months each nation might be at exactly the same point?Quote:
As I've said this afternoon, up to a point. Even though we've had a lot of documents today, we don't really know what the exact criteria is, what the data is the govt is looking for.
Lots of talk about “the four tests”- but in reality, they’re quite vague, their calculation could be made in several different ways. And the government hasn’t given detail on exactly what they’re looking for. Given that, wonder how immovable the dates will be, in practice.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/st...30425626927113
I don't think there is any need. He set a date 3 weeks away, BJ is talking about 5 weeks. No reason to change.Quote:
Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/h...eaths-19946505
Good news rates falling. RCT now under 50 per 100 000 a condition to be in Tier 1. But we are all still in tier 4.
But with cases continuing to fall hospitality (even outdoors only) is not even being considered in the next 2 reviews in Wales.
I dont think they should open for the Easter weekend but surely with low rates and vaccination going well after the Easter Break hospitality at least outdoors should have some hope for opening.
One can only assume they are going for almost zero covid like in NZ and Oz before re opening.....bit strange with the vaccine rollout going so well but I think everyone is now so brain dead and numb to it no one cares and probably won’t come out again anyway.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Hilts
you only have to look at how quickly it shot up fro mid semptember to understand why they arent opening up very quickly yetQuote:
Originally Posted by goats
Yes but if all the people that get affected are now vaccinated, unlike last sept/Oct, we should be ok anyway. Transmission rates have plummeted. I imagine they will continue too as the over 50’s are vaccinated nowQuote:
Originally Posted by Rjk
Has there been any news regarding improving ventilation in schools/other enclosed areas yet?Quote:
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj....campaign=usage
As children have mild forms of disease and teachers are able to protect themselves effectively—their rate of infection is similar to that of adults of the same age and sex2—the biggest risk associated with schools lies in transmission of the virus from children to parents and grandparents vulnerable to developing severe forms of covid-19...
The emerging consensus is that schools do not seem to be amplifiers of transmission, and that cases in schools simply reflect prevalence within the local community...
Most European countries have introduced measures220 to reduce transmission such as cohorting of pupils, physical distancing, improving ventilation of indoor settings, moving physical activities outdoors, regular cleaning of surfaces, and improving hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette. These measures also need to apply beyond the classroom, particularly transport to and from school, during pick-up and drop-off times for both children and adults, and during meal times in the school day...
The most important thing we can do to keep schools safe is to reduce transmission in the community particularly in areas of social deprivation. Reopening of schools should be phased, at a time when community transmission of the virus is controlled, and with primary school aged children prioritised for returning to the classroom to minimise both transmission within schools and the disruption caused by school closures. Although the roll-out of effective vaccines has begun, controlling transmission is even more important to keeping children in the classroom as viral variants with increased transmissibility gain hold in many countries around the world.
Has there been any news on prioritising deprived areas for the vaccine?