Relaxation of Restrictions, Part XII *Read OP For Mod Warnings*

Turn off the news and current affair shows I don't get why people continue to listen to this rubbish and then complain about it.

Or did you just want to let us know about the holiday?

I do my best to ignore it but unfortunately it's present on every form of mainstream media and is heavily present in many social media mediums. You can't just switch it off.

It's my 5th holiday this year seeing as you are so interested 👌

How nice for them. What an absolute farce.

It's hard to think anything more totally against the spirit of Christianity than barring unvaccinated people from churches.

Are they going to tear up the Gospel of Luke and replace it with NHS leaflets?

Good for you, a whole two weeks just remember to tune out of the shows that are bothering you.

Firstly, I don’t fully buy the assertion that the government is desperate to avoid these measures and only brings them in when they feel it absolutely necessary. They have spent most of 2021 almost religiously avoiding lifting measures and pubs/restaurants were still operating under heavy restrictions even in warm weather and even when the vaccine rollout to the vulnerable was well advanced. So this argument that the government only imposes these measures with an eye on hospital capacity is simply not true — the measures are imposed on the basis of what is ultra cautious and ultra conservative — the abundance of caution as they call it, not the application of proportionality.

Secondly, this constant waving of the question “Are you OK with overwhelmed hospitals and people being left to die without treatment?” has become ever-more tiresome. That is because you are posing the question along what appears to be the government’s appreciation of the risk scenarios — that there are only two options: ultra cautiousness or all-out health care apocalypse. My argument is not end all restrictions, but to be braver in pushing up our tolerance of what we are willing to risk. We keep getting told about this Hospital apocalypse without anyone ever seeming able to describe how long this apparent worse case scenario would persist — are we talking a couple of weeks over the winter? A month? A year? And it is also posed as a situation we apparently simply could not retrieve if we started to approach the stage where it was abundantly clear (and not simply clear on worst case modelling) that it was going to transpire.

We were told that the UK had jumped the gun, that they were foolish, that their reopening policy would cost lives (and it has) — we were told that morally and ethically purer Irish approach of “slow and steady wins the race” would pay dividends and that abandoning caution would mean abandoning lives. And here we are.

Depends what pub you go to. My local wasn't checking anything last Saturday night. I was only inside when going to the bar/toilets anyway as the live music was outside.

The latest is 200,000 new cases minimum in December, that's an average of about 6,450 a day... Let's see how good his modelling is now...

Honestly if I had predicted 100-120k deaths last year I'd be keeping quiet right about now

One of my work mates was saying the government arent that bothered in theory how many people get covid there just looking out for each other. They gave a good example

I'm out having a pint and I get into a fight and get knocked out. The guards will have to be called followed by ambulance crew who will then bring me to the hospital. That's 6-10 public servants been used for such a small incident

Delta.

It isn't clear from media reporting (or from this forum) but when talking about figures like "vaccines are 90% effective at keeping people out of hospital", this 90% is measured relative to the number of unvaccinated people who would end up in hospital.

Key thing is here that it's improbable for most people to end up in hospital even when infected. So it isn't that 10% of vaccinated will end up in hospital, or 90% of unvaccinated will. It's just that, on average, if you took the number of unvaccinated who DO end up in hospital, you would expect the number of vaccinated to be 90% less (per population)