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

They mean 3rd class to 6th class.

3 year olds don't go to school.

They will not tweak any remaining measures; they will either stay in place as they are or go in their entirety. February 28 may be a good bet for the end of them.

Given you have the likes of Pat Kenny calling for 2 year olds to be masked previously, it wouldn't surprise me if they had tried something in playschools as well.

Kids, period, shouldn't be masked. It's actually depressing to see them in shops with them because some people still think there's a "deadly virus" out there.

Won what battle? The purpose of covid certs was to keep unvaccinated people out of high-risk areas and help prevent overloaded hospitals. I think you'll find in reality the covid certs won.

The unvaccinated have "won" nothing. Certs weren't dropped because of them. There was never a campaign or plan to force vaccinations that they "fought" against. They literally had to "fight" by doing nothing.

In anti-vaxxer heads they believe there was some grand plan to force everyone to get vaccinated and lock them out of society. And they've "won" by holding firm.

Really easy to win a battle when your foe is completely imaginary.

Very interesting and concerning to hear Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who was first saying Omicron is mild back in November and that European countries were overreacting, say today that she faced immense pressure from European politicians not to say that Omicron was mild.

It fits with the continuing reluctance to lift restrictions and the chasing of mandate legislation by some of the more... historically predisposed. But it makes you wonder why.

If the point of the covid certs were as you say, you would expect the media worriers to be concerned about potential rising infections and hospital ovewhelm.

They're not. They're worried about no longer having a means to coerce people into vaccination. And they are saying so openly.

Ultimately the pandemic showed that it is not the first order often most immediate consequences of our decisions that matter but those 2nd and 3rd order consequences that we ought to optimise for. It is only now that the latter will come up to the surface and will be judged.

Fundamentals for dealing with covid have been very solid from the early days. We knew that it affected very tiny portion of the population with everybody else with virtually at zero risk. If anything the fundamentals improved over time while the strategy of dealing with covid went the opposite direction - measures became more and more disproportional to the risk. That is something that needs to be answered as there is a massive gap between the science & data and policies that were forced upon us.

Hats off to those men and women who early on saw the pandemic for what it was and those who were not afraid to change their minds in time. It has been a pandemic of a very mild virus with totalitarian measures designed to enforce compliance and desired behaviour of the population.

Open to correction,but was Germany's social distance set at 1.5 Metre ?

I agree that it's mad.

But I also object to being called an anti-vaxxer as someone who's taken (and had their children take) all other vaccines ever offered (plus a few I had to seek out myself), has volunteered to help with measles uptake efforts in the past, has never advised anyone else not to take a vaccine, but has reservations about vaccines made on a condensed timeline with novel ingredients. So your mileage may vary, regardless.