Has Boris got the balls to cancel Xmas for London?

[Gobacktothe90s]

Obviously the answer is no, but the huge increase in cases in London should tell anyone it's not a good idea for Xmas mixing. How high will the rates go before he has to step in?

I think rather than cancel Xmas for the worst hit areas the only thing he would do is cancel Xmas mixing for everyone and do a complete u turn rather than single London out.
If however the North west still had high rates he would have no hesitation In stopping the north west mixing at Xmas but allowed other areas to mix.

Theres 7 boroughs with high numbers. So what about the Northern areas with similar numbers
They are the 7 boroughs with the highest numbers, but not the only boroughs where the numbers are high & rising. My borough increased by 40% last week & we are not on the list.
As for northern areas - didn’t the whole of Liverpool get mass testing for all (not just school kids)?

London has a younger , healthier population than some of the really worst affected areas. That skews the data that COBRA are working with.
Hospital beds are also a factor. London has more.
Who knows what will happen, none of it is fair. None of it makes anyone happy.

As for northern areas - didn’t the whole of Liverpool get mass testing for all

Liverpool is a tiny microcosm of "The North"

What an ignorant comment

@AnyFucker

As for northern areas - didn’t the whole of Liverpool get mass testing for all

Liverpool is a tiny microcosm of "The North"

What an ignorant comment

And those 7 boroughs are a tiny part of London.

@nancy75 Liverpool is just one city in the north! What about the whole of West Yorkshire? That's a massive area with cities such as Leeds, Bradford, etc. Both are with a highly dense population. What about the whole of North Yorkshire? Also huge and full of major cities. Then there's Lancashire with cities such as Manchester which is also huge! Liverpool is literally just one city in the north.

[quote TheGremlinsAreComing]@nancy75 Liverpool is just one city in the north! What about the whole of West Yorkshire? That's a massive area with cities such as Leeds, Bradford, etc. Both are with a highly dense population. What about the whole of North Yorkshire? Also huge and full of major cities. Then there's Lancashire with cities such as Manchester which is also huge! Liverpool is literally just one city in the north. [/quote]
And I’ll say again, the 7 boroughs are not the whole of London. 25 boroughs are NOT getting tests.

@nancy75 are you comparing the London in size to the whole of the north of England??

I'll try that again

@nancy75 are you comparing London in size to the whole of the north of England??

TheGremlinsAreComing I’m pointing out that despite what is being said here the vast majority of Londoners are not getting tested, just like the vast majority of people in Northern towns & cities.

Posting to remind you about the West Midlands.

Are those London schools offered testing hit as hard as ours?

Five isolations for my child since Sept, a dose of Covid, 10 per cent of the form of 30 currently have Covid.

Our schools on their knees. It's been desperate for months.

Tier 3 Birmingham ignored in first 50 places to receive the vaccination.

The Govt hates the forgotten Midlands too.

But it's not comparable population density wise!

I hear you @middleager, I have family in Birmingham and they're at a loss. My DB has ended up taking his kids out of school.

@TheGremlinsAreComing

I hear you *@middleager*, I have family in Birmingham and they're at a loss. My DB has ended up taking his kids out of school.

Thank you.

It's dire. My secondary school children have endured 10 weeks and four weeks of isolations respectively.

The schools I work with are experiencing 2-3 cases a day among students, with masses of staff out too.

I just don't know what to do as DC are both GCSE years, but the disruption is constant.

My DC caught Covid at school. Testing was not offered to our schools, rife with cases for months. I'm bitter and angry about this. Yet the region barely gets a mention and Birmingham in particular has been a hot spot of school and community infection/deaths.

@middleager

Posting to remind you about the West Midlands.

Are those London schools offered testing hit as hard as ours?

Five isolations for my child since Sept, a dose of Covid, 10 per cent of the form of 30 currently have Covid.

Our schools on their knees. It's been desperate for months.

Tier 3 Birmingham ignored in first 50 places to receive the vaccination.

The Govt hates the forgotten Midlands too.

Dds London school, which is not getting testing has years 7-10 at home full time. Year 11 is in school, but 60 of them were sent home to isolate on Monday. Some of DD’s friends have done 4/5 lots of isolation & have missed up to 10 weeks of school. Due to the number of teachers off we have been warned year 11 may be sent home next week. Out of 1500 kids there are about 200 still actually going to school.

I don’t know about the schools in the areas being tested because we don’t live in that part of London, but I’d guess they are in a similar situation.

@middleager

Posting to remind you about the West Midlands.

Are those London schools offered testing hit as hard as ours?

Five isolations for my child since Sept, a dose of Covid, 10 per cent of the form of 30 currently have Covid.

Our schools on their knees. It's been desperate for months.

Tier 3 Birmingham ignored in first 50 places to receive the vaccination.

The Govt hates the forgotten Midlands too.

It's not all London schools, it's 7 boroughs out of c. 30.

I'm in the part of Essex that started this testing last weekend. It's the sudden change that's done it, in the last 3 weeks none of our secondaries have had more than 2 year groups in.

As I understand it, here, the sudden increase has been in the 10-19 age wage, whereas further north it was in young adults.

Re: schools. I live in London in a borough which is experiencing a rapid rise in cases, is not one of the seven (although am in short walking distance of two of those, and demographically a very similar profile). I am sure our school bubble closure rates, and indeed our rates generally, are artificially lower than they should be due to a wilful lack of testing even when a child/family is symptomatic. People don’t give a shit, or they don’t give enough of a shit to risk losing pay when everything is already so precarious for them and in many cases even if they are eligible for govt support to cover the gap they don’t have the English or the literacy or the cultural expectation to know that or be able to access it. Or their lives are generally so chaotic and difficult that they don’t have the bandwidth to care enough to deal with a positive covid test, so don’t put themselves in a position where they might have to.

... all of which is undoubtedly also true of other hard/worse-hit areas of both London, the Midlands and the North (and is a huge part of why rates are so high in these areas). It’s not offered as a justification for parts of London getting the school testing while parts of England that have been effectively locked down for months don’t. But it’s a note of caution about too many confident comparisons between covid rates in different areas, because in many areas there is systematic avoidance of covid testing by those most likely to get a positive test, so fuck knows what relationship the published figures bear to the actual numbers.

You cannot "cancel" Christmas.This rhetoric is unhelpful. Christmas will still happen.

You can appeal to people's common sense to scale back their interactions but I think it's highly unlikely to work.

I'm in NI and we're just out of a two week lockdown. I fully expect we will go into full lockdown possibly with schools closed after Christmas.

Figures from the BBC website.

The average number of cases per area in the UK are 134 per 100,000.

Where I live in Surrey, the South East, just outside of the M25, there were 246 cases in the week from 1st-7th December.
For the same period of 1st-7th December, it also had 244 cases per 100,000 - above average.
As the town has a population of 100,000 people this is 0.2% affected.

Westminster (central London), from 1st-7th December has had 267 cases.
For the same period of 1st-7th December, it has had 102 cases per 100,000 - below average.

I used to live in Hammersmith (London travel zone 2).
They have 208 cases in the week from 1st-7th December.
It also has 112 cases per 100,000 - below average.

My family live in Stroud.
There they have 108 cases in the period from 1st-7th December.
It also has 90 cases per 100,000 people - below average.

All areas are Tier 2 - there is no rhyme or reason for ANY of the tiers!
Obviously it is now 12th December so figures will have changed but central London was still doing better than a Surrey commuter town!

@HallFloor in Manchester for example it was largely due to students (within student population it was 700+/100,000). Was mass testing introduced? No. I understand what people are saying about the change but you can’t prioritise that over 5/6 months of high rates and restrictions in the north. Mass testing in Liverpool worked. Why wasn’t it immediately rolled out in Manchester/North Yorkshire/Nottingham/Midlands? Because they don’t care. It doesn’t matter what happens there because London and the south are ticking along. Manchester have lower rates than london. People are getting restless and frustrated. Decisions aren’t made in the best interests of the wider public just the people that matter to the government.

It's also because things have moved on with what we're able to do. 6 weeks ago, here, you couldn't book a test, people were travelling hours. The "new" mass testing isn't new capacity, parents have just been advised to book tests at the existing testing centres, where regular capacity is now much higher.

@Napqueen1234 Yes, the people that matter to the Government most are those in the poorest areas of London controlled by Labour. And I notice that you didn’t answer my question about the mistruth that you were circulating on this thread.

They should u turn for Christmas but they won’t. Plus plenty of people won’t bother anyway.

@Inkpaperstars

Every decision we make carries risk and implications, it isn’t just Christmas. But the fact is that there will be a significant number of people who decide to meet this Christmas who will die as a direct result of that decision, especially older or more vulnerable people who have broadly kept to themselves but suddenly are indoors with teenagers and other family. I don’t know how the families will feel then, I expect them to say it was worth it since they know the risk ahead of time. Seems a madness when some would be vaccinated literally within two or three weeks of Xmas day.

This was my thinking. It’s all very well for my parents to say they don’t care if they get it and are fed up. But it’s us that would need to live with the guilt. Not worth it.

[quote BunsyGirl]@Napqueen1234 There are 32 London boroughs, 7 are getting mass testing in schools. Please explain why you are saying that virtually all London secondary schools are getting mass testing?[/quote]
7 out of 32 is more than 0 out of 10 in Manchester. So although it’s not all it’s significantly more than 0 isn’t it.

Jocasta, it’s also to do with pressure on the NHS. It’s not just figures.