Anti-Dementor Alliance Thread - learn how to produce your patronus here

[Tappering]

New thread!

drivingdown

I've been following these threads and they've kept me sane, thank you lovely people.

Our class whatsapp was full of "my child isn't going to be a guinea pig" (year one), but any suggestion that actually keyworkers kids have been going in for the last few weeks and there doesn't appear to have been any spike in transmission linked to this is just drowned out in a sea of "not until there's a vaccine".

Hello everyone.

Today I learned on mum's that those of us on furlough are sitting on our fat arses treating the time off like a holiday.

To be fair, my arse is fat. And this time off is like an extended bit between Christmas and New year.

But I didn't choose it. I didn't realise that my industry would pretty much collapse overnight. I don't know if I'll have a job to go back to.

Honestly I feel like dementors won't be happy unless all furloughed workers are put to work picking fruit and being homeless.

I noticed when Boris closed schools people thought he was amazing. Just a man trying his best in a hard situation.

Then he ended up in ICU and he was St Boris and everyone loved him

Now he wants to get everyone back to work and school he's a murderer and using our children as gineau pigs

I think the teachers unions are being ridiculous. They're making out that it will be sudden death whereas for most people it most definitely is not.

I notice nursery workers aren't kicking off because they don't have the luxury of paid time off ( and they actually like their jobs maybe?)

NewYorkIvy I think we must have an almost dementor free school (maybe my patronus is working!). I have one in year one and one in reception and so far all the WhatsApp messages have been along the lines of ‘woohoo!’ .

DH is so pissed off by the dementory frothing emails that starting coming in from the teachers' union last night that he is now threatening to leave the Union! 😄

I really think there is no point whatsoever engaging people on the schools thing. The date has been announced, it'll happen or possibly not depending on the R, and kids will go in. And dementors will start to make mental exceptions/unbend in a way that doesn't give them psychological dissonance, because THEIR kids are now missing out. Or they'll keep them home until Sept, which, fine. But you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.

Our school WhatsApp has been completely silent, which is also fine with me. I know opinion has been divided but I don't feel the need to engage, and once DS is back I'll be able to see who the other evil uncaring sane parents are.

My OH - who is a most notorious gobshite - is still on FB leathering the dementors. The awful thing is that how many of my friends have turned out to be absolute toe-curling wankers (WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIE) I am obliged to be on social media cos of what I do IRL but FFS at the moment I cannot bear it.
I had a PM from one of my friends - a definite thoughts-and-prayers bod - asking how my mum was. (Mum is 80, a recovering alcoholic 12 months sober, and has taken the pragmatic approach of arseholes to it, I'm not being locked up. We live about 200 yards from each other and I go into her flat for personal care reasons every day, and every so often she comes up to my house for a hot meal and some company.) I said she's doing fine, I see her every day, as above. Oh, said my dementor friend - doubtless clutching her pearls - she wouldn't do that if she'd SEEN the virus.... it's vicious.... Actually, she possibly would. She's 80 and she can either have human interaction or she can relapse, in which case she's either a) going to die alone at home of an alcohol-induced ruptured stomach ulcer and choke on her own blood - which has almost happened previously - or b) she'll get the bloody virus and infect several paramedics and a police officer when they have to break down the door to get her out.

@Jourdain11- I've blocked and filtered all the union frothy stuff, I wasn't a member since the start of the year (went back to uni to career change) and they are being an utter fucking embarrassment to be honest. I'm ashamed I ever paid my subscriptions (only did in case I ever got sued to be fair).

Oh god poor DD2's face this morning when she found out her Y2 would be the only class in her infants not going back when they phase return - it broke my heart.

I have a dear friend, she lives alone. I feel horribly guilty about not contacting her, she is spouting such paranoid shit on Facebook that I really dont know what I would say to her.!

It's funny how the dementors think this is just a British thing - people in France and Germany have been protesting about the lockdown - you'd think on here it was just the UK having mixed reactions to the whole thing

she wouldn't do that if she'd SEEN the virus.... it's vicious....

Again, I can't help thinking that people have become detached from death and ill health in a way that is unhealthy. Some people appear to think that pneumonia is a new and terrible thing and not something that's been a common complication of flu, especially in the elderly, for hundreds of years. There are many deaths uglier than a Covid one.

My experience of having Covid (it was a virus, I was under the weather for about a week, then recovering for a week, then fine; I've had significantly worse flus) is also presumably fictional to the dementors.

Good luck today Jourdain11

One tiny bright side for ds2 (12) today- we can now order KFC for delivery from our nearest shop.

So to soften the blow that he won't be returning to school until September, that's what we're having tonight.

I'm gonna get banned for shooting down the hypothetical hyperbolic fuckwits the mood I'm in this morning.

I’ve just hidden half the people on my FB feed, feel much better now, I’m sure by the end of this I will have about three people left. A friend told me last night she wouldn’t be sending her DC back to school because there wasn’t enough data but she would immediately vaccinate.....I pointed out there wouldn’t be much data on the vaccine safety/effectiveness......that’s different apparently

I've just had an email back from my uni tutor looking at if we can explore possibly me going part time with my degree if the schools are still fucked up by September. Must be nice to be able to waft around in a big garden with older kids who can entertain themselves judging others and demanding the world stops for ever.

This week's headline from 'MD' (their medical writer) in Private Eye:

Lose-lose scenario

Pandemic planning is the ultimate lose-lose scenario. The lives and livelihoods lost from the virus have to be balanced against the lives and livelihoods lost from the 'treatment'.

This virus is causing a surge of deaths particularly in the sick and elderly, whereas lockdown is causing a smaller surge in non-Covid deaths and a steady, sustained increase in harm to those who have their whole lives ahead of them.

Brutally put, 100 percent of us are making sacrifices to save 0.5 percent of us (or less). Children are being harmed to save adults; the poor are being harmed more than the rich; and some people have become so conditioned to 'stay at home' that not even a medical emergency will tempt them to seek help.

Given such staggering complexity, the best one can hope for is an overall 'harm minimisation' strategy. To get there, experts from all disciplines need to subject their models and data on the benefits and harms of any strategy to full public scrutiny. And politicians need to admit their errors in real time.

It has taken us more than three months to move from Patient Zero to mass testing and tracing. It would be churlish not to welcome Matt Hancock's 100,000 tests a day (even though they included requests and promptly fell again) but thousands more lives might have been saved by earlier action. It is time for an apology.

Meanwhile, after the mothballing of the little-used Nightingale hospital in London, questions will be asked about the money and precious resources spent on the hospital - but it's worth noting that the NHS needs extra capacity in case it gets a second spike in infection.

I have deleted my Facebook. It's my first stretch without it in years and I am close to using heroin to cope with the withdrawal symptoms but I simply cannot cope with the frothing and panic. And I say that as someone who has a lot of sympathy for panic. It is doing me so much good, though. I highly recommend it. I'm scaring myself but I've actually taken up whispers reading to fill the gaps in my time.

Shudder.

And I can't understand all these people going 'but for some, the virus causes LONG TERM DAMAGE.'

Look, it might in a minority. That is really dreadful if so and the idea of that does worry me a bit. But it isn't everyone. There are far more people on here saying they've had it and are fine. And I have definitely known young, healthy people who've had a bad dose of flu in previous years and ended up having nasty last effects for weeks to months. But we don't really know about LONG TERM DAMAGE as no one has had this virus for more than a few weeks (months? I don't know) at most. The body is pretty clever at healing itself in all sorts of ways even with damage showing to lungs on scans and all sorts.

Just logged on to work email and there was something interesting from the council (who I work for) about their strategy going forward - unlock, live with Covid, recovery.

It's that "live with Covid" bit that dementors are really going to struggle with. Their sense of risk management is so screwed that the thought of "living" with something "so deadly" is beyond them.

@NewYorkIvy they’ll be more accepting when furlough stops

The Facebook schools dementors out in force. I'm close to giving up on FB too. I posted what I thought was a relatively positive news story and a dementor started posting doom mongering comments.

I deleted my Facebook and Instagram 5 years ago and never looked back. I thoroughly recommend it!

And @Tappering that's a great summary. I want two things from the government: more transparency (where are the models? what are the assumptions/scenarios? how have they changed?) and a recognition that there were mistakes made. I'm absolutely sick of these Churchillian announcements and stupid slogans. If you're being "guided by the science" then show us the science!

Oh, thanks @Tappering!! I've been searching for a copy of Privare Eye but suspect it's been censored by the dementor Scottish Government- I wanted to read that in full 😃