Did it seem a bit odd that the tone of today's announcement was so sombre?

[secretintrovert]

Bojo should have been doing his victory dance for freedom day! Instead the three of them looked as miserable as sin. There's trouble afoot methinks. This will be very very temporary

I've got to say, I've consciously made more of an effort to talk to the 80 year old lady who walks past my house a couple of times a week in the last year.

She stands and looks at whats growing in my garden and its been one of the joys that she's had for the last year apparently because she can see it changing and she likes to see whats new.

Her husband has alzheimer's and was hospitalised recently.

In the depths of lockdown I was definitely one of the few human contacts she had, so I would chat to her as she passed the house. Its a simple thing but I think it made a difference to her.

PrincessNutNuts

And that consists of...

Things they should do differently right now as Opposed to things you think they should have done in the past

Do you have any constructive suggestions or you just want to do some knee jerk Tory bashing? I mean Boris is a twat. I wish people weren't so stupid as to vote for him but I don't know what else he can do now that is going to save lives overall ie Covid deaths AND other excess deaths.

Oh for God's sake please stop it! This is not a party political issue. Red Toothbrush has nailed it and BJ was honest for probably the first time in his life last night. The description Terminus for July 29 was always a bit strange, but when you appreciate the message we are now being given, it's totally appropriate. This is it. This is the limit of what the Government can do to protect us. We can bicker about mask wearing until the cows come home, but the big throw of the dice that was the vaccine drive has already largely been played. We are already more fortunate than any other generation facing a Pandemic, in that we have found a vaccine at all so quickly, but this is where we are now on our own. We can accept a (slightly) more risky future, or we can cower and demand that "somebody does something to make it all go away". Our choice.

29=19th obv!

What are these amazing things that other countries are doing??

Being like Scotland and wasting lots of time chasing the golden pot at the end of the rainbow called Zero Covid.
And now have 6 out of 10 top Covid spots in Europe. So that was really successful.

I said a year ago that it was too soon to judge who handled Covid the best. People will analyse data for years. Because you can't look at response to covid in isolation. You have to consider, age and health of the population, the capacity in the health services, how many unintentionally of other things (cancer diagnosed too late, other illnesses missed, suicide, and substance abuse).

@CovoidOfAllHumanity

I am no fan of this Tory government and it would be a cold day in hell before I voted for Boris but honestly I don't know what he really could do at this point.

Yeh he could have left compulsory masks inside. I wouldn't care at all if he did that but it's honestly not going to have a huge impact. Remember when they said at the start it didn't make much difference. That is in fact still true. It makes a tiny difference if everyone does it and that seemed worth it at the time but it's got nothing on fresh air.
I think masks are to a large degree virtue signalling really although I comply and I will likely still do.

Social distancing he can't leave in place because the capacity limitations are screwing with the economy and indeed non Covid NHS and other essential stuff

What are these amazing things that other countries are doing??
Vaccine- done
Lockdown- risks outweigh benefits
Stuff short of that- mostly pissing in the wind, fig leaf of caution with no real impact.

And yes it will in a very tangible way help people's mental health if they can meet family and friends, have a hug, go to groups and activities, even just have casual social contacts on a bus or in a shop without fear. Many of my clients are so lonely that some casual contacts on the bus and the man at the corner shop are actually huge part of their social network. Many of them saw a sum total of no-one face to face for months on end and no wonder really that some turned to drink and drugs or got so depressed they didn't get out of bed for days on end. It has to stop.

I know this is true, it’s really sad

What alternatives do we have NOW?

Stay in restrictions until what point? Over 90% of people have some antibodies. The vulnerable have all had vaccinations if they want them / can have them. Zero covid isn't viable. Harms come from restrictions, but because they are less quantifible than nice neat 'deaths from covid' charts they are easier to ignore.

What are we waiting for?

Is that criterica achievable? What are those conditions likely to be achieved if they are?

How do you prevent spontaneous collapse in adherence to restricts as the public effectively withdraws its consent in practice due to falling compliance? When does lack of compliance become such a problem that you either abandon restrictions or seek new ways to enforce them? How do you enforce them without public resentment and potentially conflict?

FWIW, I think I may have covered how much I dislike Johnson on MN over the last few years...

Someone a long way back in this post talked about the numbers of 60 year old who have been double jabbed dying.

The numbers if people who have been double jabbed and die will increase as more people get double jabbed. If 100% of the population get double jabbed, 100%of those who die will have been double jabbed. Some people will die from covid anyway, vaccine or not. However, many more will not. Some people also due when they fall over putting their trousers on. It's not ideal but we don't ban trousers. 5 people each day die in road traffic accidents, in spite of seat belts, traffic lights, rules about which side of the road to drive on and speed limits but we don't stop everyone driving or crossing the road.

Any time the government in power decides to mount an effective covid response things will get better.

All the time they don't, this chaos continues.

The best time to do it would have been at the beginning.

The next best would have been at any of the times when people were on here posting how low the daily numbers are and declaring covid to be over.

The next best time is now.

@PrincessNutNuts

Any time the government in power decides to mount an effective covid response things will get better.

All the time they don't, this chaos continues.

The best time to do it would have been at the beginning.

The next best would have been at any of the times when people were on here posting how low the daily numbers are and declaring covid to be over.

The next best time is now.

Can you actually post something meanful rather than bleating about how its all awful.

Try making actual suggestion for what policies should be employed, criteria for easing restrictions and when you expect these targets might be achieved.

You won't do this, because you head is in la la land and mired in ideology rather than practical reality. Its easy to just make whinging noises about how you don't like things rather than come up with an actual strategy.

It says a lot.

I will say it again: Define what you mean by an effective covid response which is ground in reality rather than the pink fluffy clouds in your head.

1. Effective test trace and isolate system

1. Effective border policy and quarantine.

Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, has told the Local Government Association that rates of long Covid will increase significantly, and that this won’t be a trivial problem. He told the LGA:

*"Since there’s a lot of Covid at the moment and the rates are going up I regret to say I think we will get a significant amount more long Covid, particularly in the younger ages where the vaccination rates are currently much lower.

Fundamentally the two ways to prevent long Covid in my view are to keep Covid rates right down and make sure everyone is vaccinated so they get very mild disease and I think we really just need to push hell for leather for those two.

The deaths from Covid I think are mercifully going to be much lower in this wave compared to the previous ones as a proportion of cases but long Covid remains, I think, a worry.
We don’t know how big an issue it’s going to be but I think we should assume it’s not going to be trivial."*

We only need those things if we are going for a zero Covid strategy
I can't see how any country is actually going to maintain Zero Covid long term.
Once people are vaccinated it just isn't going to be worth the substantial effort and cost involved vs the risk to public health.

If vaccination has broken the link between contracting Covid and becoming seriously ill then why do we need to track and trace it anymore?

Track and trace and putting people into isolation recurrently is harmful to them and to wider society. We need to ask is this justified any longer?
We do have other serious diseases that are notifiable like cholera, plague and yellow
fever but we are not going around looking for cases of these.

Similarly one of these days we need to open up our borders and be able to travel again for the sake of the tourism industry at least which employs a lot of people. If vaccination can reduce the chances of catching Covid, the lethality and the chances of passing it on then why harm our industry and our citizens by banging them up in quarantine and effectively preventing travel when the chances of harm are now much reduced. Is it proportionate any longer?

@PrincessNutNuts

1. Effective test trace and isolate system

1. Effective border policy and quarantine.

1) Behavioural science comes into this. As does the fact we are not an authoritarian state. Not everyone will test, trace and isolate - part of this is to do with a lack of trust in government and Johnson himself (irony klaxon).

We fucked up last Summer on this, and learnt some lessons about where we went wrong. It was obvious it was going to be a problem with anyone with a brain when the schools went back.

But we also found that even with these catatrosphic oversights there were limitations as to how effective test, trace and isolate could ever be due particular to socio-economic issues in the UK, which made us different to many other countries. We had an underlying weakness than made us vulnerable. We could throw money at this, but there is no guarantee this would solve the issue either.

We could hand over things to local level - indeed we should have last year, but all these things take time. Time, at this point, we don't have. Time, which when the problem became apparent, we didn't really have.

We know that tracing only works when you have low case numbers. We haven't actually really been in that position at many moments during the pandemic where we could start to get back on top of this as we didn't have the time to set it up before we were in crisis point and then the explosion in cases overwhelmed the system.

At this point in time, how do we go about changing this immediately to deal with Delta dominant? We don't have the luxury to go back in time and fix the issue. We don't have the luxury of revamping the system given where we are. We have to work with what we have really. Unfortunately.

It has to be noted that even trace systems where cases are low - as in Australia are struggling with this with Delta.

Unless we go full on dictatorship you are ultimately working with good will and if you go full on dictatorship in the UK, you are going to end up with a whole load of other issues...

The isolate system isn't really working for children... I won't go into the details on that one.

Basically the UK is an imperfect beast. Our liberal beliefs don't really mix well with invasive monitoring of our social lives. Once things had gone tits up, regaining control was damn near impossible. Test, trace and isolate systems in other western liberal countries have all had their spare of problems.

Our testing capacity and ability is now one of the best in the world. We are testing more than most countries and we are able to identify variants better than many others. How else would you like to improve our actual testing?

2. Effective border policy is fucking pointless if you have a domestic issue with covid. Our geography doesn't lend itself to do so. We need food. We need to import things. Or method of doing this involves humans not containers. We are not Australia or New Zealand but this seems to be a difficult concept to comprehend. Our supply chains are different to Australia. Effectively abandoning your citizens abroad isn't something to aspire to either.

And thats before we get to the point about how quaratine and border policy for Australia is working so bloody well.

3. At what point do you decide these measures are no longer appriopriate or effective? Are we going to have border controls forever?

4. Its dead easy to focus on the stuff we've done wrong. The fact we still have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and our death rate has flatlined before it started to anywhere else.

Your points don't exactly address where we are and how we achieve these things either. How do we have effect border policy and quaratinr with the NI / Ireland question? How do we quarantine lorry drivers and still maintain essential supplies and exports without crippling us? Keeping in mind the car crash at Dover at Christmas.

Honestly away with the fairy, high minded idealism.

I wish we lived in a perfect land.

The reality is that any other uk government would have faced similar problems due to logistics, timescales, capacity. Perhaps they wouldn't have had cronyism but then maybe we would have spent longer with procurement etc, particularly with vaccines. Perhaps we wouldn't have had the same issues with case load due to eat out to help out, but maybe we still would have had an overloaded system when the schools returned because procurement was so much slower...

Point is we don't know. Swings. Roundabout. The argument is pointless.

The only relevant argument is what do we do NOW and how effective viable is that?

Reality is a bitch. Hindsight is merely theorectical.

You need to do a bit better than saying those two points. You need to explain how and timescales.

I think we need to have as much economic activity, emotional support for vulnerable people and getting out and having fun basically over the summer - as safely as possible.

I think we shouldn't be having huge crowds at football matches or festivals.

We need to import food but we should be limiting overseas travel for holidays, we don't absolutely need that in the same way as food.

Zero covid would be great but it has always seemed a long way from the reality of where we are and the difficulty of pursuing contacts.

Effective track and trace requires low numbers and good organisation and has also seemed a long way from our reality.

Keeping numbers low and staying safe as Chris Whitty suggests sounds realistic. We are keeping vulnerable people safe and helping the NHS if we can keep numbers down. Wearing masks indoors, trying to avoid crowds, taking care to wear masks where people are vulnerable.

I know everyone's tired of it all, but the lower the numbers are over the summer, the lower they will be as we go into autumn and winter.

If good health is the goal - moving forward - just focus on keeping a good immune system - eat well, exercise. enjoy your social life, enjoy your family. None of us know how long we have.
PS be mindful of waste and the health of the planet.

The best thing a lot of us can do to reduce our Covid risk is to try and reduce our BMI

theguideliverpool.com/sainsburys-is-set-to-end-its-compulsory-mask-wearing-police-from-july-19/

The NHS is already on the verge of collapse and struggling to meet demand and hospitals are already cancelling elective surgery (no doubt already delayed) because covid cases are rising.

The more covid there is, the less other stuff the NHS can do. It's fairly simple I don't know why people don't understand this.

Unless the suggestion is that the NHS doesn't treat covid anymore.

Keeping infections as low as possible is good because a) less long covid (less pressure on NHS ) b) less diversion of NHS resources to increase in covid patients and c) less chance of a vaccine resistant variant taking over and putting us back to square one.

I see no need to ditch masks and ventilation. The objection to these mitigations is purely ideological and will end badly.

But while we're at it, let's all stop requiring people to wear seatbelts or obey the speed limit, driving safely can be left to personal responsibility too.

What alternatives do we have NOW?

What the scientific and medical experts, including those at the WHO, advise.

Mitigation measures. Like masks.

Also, many avoidable deaths negligent manslaughter aside, Long Covid makes Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure ever more relevant.

Long Covid will have devastating health AND financial impacts. Long term.

It really isn't anymore though

No-one is cancelling elective surgery due to Covid. At Christmas we were but now we are not because there is hardly anyone in hospital with Covid compared to the peak

If anything the NHS is struggling for staff due to bloody pointless isolations of asymptomatic vaccinated people and childcare issues with kids off school. The end to contact isolation will help us massively

We are struggling with the backlog no doubt about that but right now Covid really isn't crippling hospitals anything like as much as Covid containment measures are. We are still running much reduced capacity due to distancing and airing theatres and extra cleaning and constant swabbing.

It's exactly this pretend it will magic away, don't think beyond the middle of next week attitude, failing to deal with it all, that has got us to this crisis point. It's absolute deja vu.

Of course Boris doesn't care about Long Covid. He'll have done a Cameron by the time the full extent of the damage - the long term impact (on health and economy), will become apparent.

Experts were warning today how people, the young included, face going almost overnight from fit and healthy to one of The Vulnerable. The consequences of Long Covid.

Can anybody tell me why can't we can't smoke on public transport or in pubs? I thought we were meant to take personal responsibility?

@theemperorhasnoclothes "Is the NHS on the verge of collapse" The newsreader on an episode of 1970s NINETEEN SEVENTIE"S comedy series Man About the House.

Also why is it acceptable for a government to tell the people who fund them, the general public aka taxpayers, that tens of thousands of deaths are expected. And the government will not only do nothing to prevent that, but is taking action that will actively make things worse.

Yet the same government tells people they are not allowed to exercise personal responsibility and choice in choosing assisted suicide?

Why is it ok to condemn people to Covid death or disability, whilst at the same time denying the freedom to choose a peaceful and painless death?