New Boris Statement: Where is this going?

[DadAManger]

‘We recommend masks but only recommend them’
‘Deaths will increase and we may reach 100,000 new cases per day’
‘We must open now and if not now, when?’
‘The slower we take it, the smaller number of people will die’
‘Return to the office of you can, otherwise keep working from home’

Just before Boris spoke, there was a BBC piece claiming that 10-20% of all Covid cases (mild, without symptoms, or otherwise) will be long-Covid cases of some sort or another. Now there a million long-Covid cases.

Are we aiming for herd immunity? Anyone else think this is going to be confusing for most and lead to a default setting of ‘normal’? Where is this going?

There seems to be a strong correlation between long Covid and over-generous sickness terms in the public sector. I doubt it’s a coincidence

It was predictable that some would flame you for this, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. I'd hope most of us would feel for anyone genuinely suffering, but it might be handy to know who they are first - especially remembering the disparity in sick leave between public and private sector staff

No doubt someone will now mention the "specialist units being set up to deal with Long Covid", but let's wait and see if they turn out to be another Nightingales thing before we assume too much

@MitzyMooo

Our freedom will only last as long as the MP's summer holidays.

Yes!

Thanks @Notonthestairs
Ah so the hybrid remote model will continue. No 'Freedom Day' for Parliament - for MPs to have a full reopening - it seems.

@Tealightsandd

People can still contract it after vaccination too.

But often less seriously (depending on which vaccine). So far data from America looks promising. 99.5% of their Covid deaths are now in the unvaccinated.

Of course things might change when the UK produces a vaccine resistant variant. Which seems to be what the Westminster government is aiming for.

Yes, but your point was irt herd immunity, not severity of infection. Even people with mild infections can still transmit it.

@NannyAndJohn I have just been told on the pregnancy forum pregnant women shouldn’t
Of got pregnant and we have no right to moan abs just suck it up. 🤦🏼‍♀️

@NannyAndJohn

The vulnerable, pregnant women, and children completely thrown to the wolves.

I could weep.

I could fucking weep.

Get over yourself! We have to live with this disease. We all recognise the dangers but how else do we do this? Our children are going to be burdened with debt repayments as it is. We need to restart the economy and buy British. Avoid Chinese goods at all cost.

FGS encourage anyone who's offered to get vaccinated

They're killing off the most vulnerable in society.

You mean the virus will kill off some of the most vulnerable in society. You do know the government aren’t personally responsible for killing everyone off - whatever your views on them individually, loathe them fine - but they are not going around sniping people?

There was a CV woman on the news earlier saying something along the vein of “I am immuno-suppressed and have had both jabs AND actually had covid and I’m still open to catching it again as I have no antibodies”…
And my honest reaction was “And”? So she’s had covid and survived? I mean, what exactly does she expect the rest of society to do? I could be run over by a bus tomorrow, or get cancer. I feel very sorry for her, it must be scary and I feel for anyone with a CV child but honestly, what should we do? Covid is here to stay. Keeping restrictions is just kicking the can further down the road. I’m guessing if you are that ill/CV you could also be killed by catching flu or another virus?
There are going to be so many people/kids who are going to have shit lives and die of other things not because of but relating to covid. Industries lost/businesses shutting down/kids bearing the brunt of this is so many different ways/people’s mental health down the toilet.

We need to start making money. There is no magic money tree - without people to work and pay taxes there will be no NHS. The economy needs to start moving again. We are going to be paying back the cost of covid for years and years - not just financially.

What do people who want to stay with restrictions/lockdowns expect the government to actually do?

And don’t say keep masks as they are next to useless anyway (I’m going to wear mine in enclosed spaces to help others feel safer but I do not believe it really protects me or others much).

The vaccine seems to be working very well. They cannot wait to ease restrictions until September when most adults will be vaccinated to open up, as then it will be too close to winter and the usual pressure on the NHS when cases inevitably rise.

There will probably never be a “good” time to do it, but opening now gives us a better chance of not having the NHS overwhelmed.

NotPersephone Mon 12-Jul-21 18:30:49
"There seems to be a strong correlation between long Covid and over-generous sickness terms in the public sector. I doubt it’s a coincidence."

I suggest you watch "Long Covid : willI ever get better? on BBC i player if you missed the programme that has just aired. Maybe you will think more critically before posting ridiculous statements.

Mr Johnson only acted in the first place because he feared hospitals being overwhelmed and similar scenes to those in Lombardy in Italy. He only then acted in November some six weeks late and in January some four weeks late for the same reason.

His inaction or late actions I am sure have led to at least 10,000 more deaths than would have occurred with an alternative Tory leader.

My lifelong opposition to the death penalty is the sole reason why I do not think Mr Johnson, a serial killer in all but name, should hang.

To sum it up, those trapped in urban shit holes will pay for this, and the rest of us will probably be ok. No change there then

You're probably right, but forgot to mention that sadly, vulnerable ethnic minorities may pay most of all - something the Guardian all-too-predictably leapt upon

A pity, then, that the sterling work being done locally towards encouraging vaccines had to be squashed because even this was said to be racist targeting. Never mind that much of the door to door work was being done by HCP community members themselves - apparently they were "shaming their community" so were pressured to stop

There will probably never be a “good” time to do it, but opening now gives us a better chance of not having the NHS overwhelmed

What do you call 14 hour waits at AE and 5.4m waiting lists, rising to 13m according to Javid.

If thats not overwhelmed i don't know what is... and thats before these lifting of restrictions.

@WorraLiberty

I think we've given it our best shot and now we'll just have to learn to live with it.

Sad but true imo.

Spot on

[quote onceivepostedidontcomeback]@oneglassandpuzzled see above, i even came back for it![/quote]
You need to read my post again instead of being all offended as I didn’t say that anyone who wasn’t vaccinated was a yob—see the brackets.

Here you are:

Unvaccinated yobs (not saying this is all the unvaccinated group, of course) aren’t likely to wear masks on the tube or self-isolate.

@TeddingtonTrashbag

BBC piece claiming that 10-20% of all Covid cases (mild, without symptoms, or otherwise) will be long-Covid cases of some sort or another. Now there a million long-Covid cases ‘long covid’ is the BBC desperately clinging to the sensational and unproven to appeal to its dwindling audience of gullibles. Who else watched ot these days except the terminally thick?

This. 100%

The thing is, I don't think we've given it our best shot. I think we are where we are but definitely not given it our best shot. We've had the worst of both worlds (health and economy) due to locking down too late. I think the winter lockdown was horrid and then a lot of that effort was pissed all over by Boris refusing to put India on the red list. People see this and obviously scenes from the last few weeks etc whilst isolating with kids at home, hoping theirs isn't the 10 or 20 percent that will get long covid.

If we are going to live with it, at the very least put some investment into ventilation like other countries have done etc. Try to stem some of the damage of long covid and permanent disability. It must be cheaper in the long run not to pay out for medical interventions and to have people fully able to work.

There are so many shades of grey between "letting it rip" and "lockdown". If they're going to bang on about personal responsibility, how does that fit in with not allowing CEV kids to stay home for a while or how they treated Greenwich last year? "Personal responsibility" from a government that are morally reprehensible and never properly held to account!

I don't get the logic of objecting to the opening. People seem to think that if the restrictions are kept then the vulnerable are somehow 'safe' - how on earth do they figure that? Even with the tightest restrictions people still got covid - the most common place to get it is in hospital, ie the place where many people are likely to be CEV. So you can have restrictions and run the risk of covid, or have no restrictions and run the risk of covid. Yes, for a while after the restrictions are lifted there will be more people with covid, but it's always been the case that if there's one person with covid in your vicinity you could get it from them - while more infected people means more chances, the only way to have zero risk is to never come into contact with a single other human being.

This opening up was by the far the most likely thing to happen. I've been saying since March last year that at some point they will just have to stop with the idea that you can hold a virus back and just accept an upsurge - there really is no other choice. Some other scenarios could have played out - it could have fizzled out, vaccination could have been amazingly effective - but those didn't happen, so here we are. Restricting, locking down, constantly running scared isn't a strategy. It has serious long term effects for a society. It simply has to stop at some point. It should have stopped months and months ago, but they're stopping it now, finally.

My guess is that someone finally said 'you know that Imperial Model that scared you all shitless with endless exponential growth, it's a load of horseshit' and they've finally listened. Anywhere that has had few/no restrictions and an upsurge of infections (most notable is India) has found that, much like every other virus in the history of the world, there is an upsurge and a steep drop off, because - surprise surprise - there isn't an infinite number of people to infect and people don't get infected on a Tuesday and get infected again the following Tuesday. People also tend to stay at home by default when they're ill. All things the Imperial model (which is built by physicists with no actual reference to human behaviour) failed to incorporate.

Locking down delays infections, it doesn't prevent them. So anyone going on about being 'thrown to the wolves' isn't really understanding what the last 16 months have been about. The scenario in which everyone was permanently 'safe' just wasn't a real possibility. The problem with lockdowns and restrictions is that while they delay infections they also cause heaps and heaps of other problems - they just exchange one problem for many many others.

The most enraging thing is that all this 'protecting the NHS' did bugger all - in spite of lockdown, which was there supposedly to allow the NHS to function, the NHS did not function properly (unlike in countries like Germany where the health system carried on entirely as normal). So on top of all the fallout of lockdown, we also have the fallout of a system that behaved as if it was overrun, by cancelling appointments, treatments and operations, even when it wasn't. What on earth was the point????

Remember India, with their lack of restrictions? Yes things were bad there for a while - their healthcare system is very patchy and was underprepared. Cases grew and grew and then just dropped - in one month they fell by 300,000. That's what viruses do. Here's the graph:

@lovescats3

I think no masks will backfire economically because a lot of people will not want to use public transport and go to galleries etc - if they kept masks these people would go out

I strongly suspect that the number of people who will use public transport or visit a gallery once masks are no longer compulsory will be more than those who choose not to

and of course, there is nothing to prevent anyone choosing to continue wearing a mask if they wish

"Personal responsibility" is the biggest cop-out I've ever heard. As I think has been pointed out already, how would that work for traffic speed-limits?

Even people with mild infections can still transmit it.

There's nothing to transmit if and when the majority (80-90%) are vaccinated.

Biden was right about vaccine patent waiver. It's the best and quickest way to get the whole of the world vaccinated.

and if the govt wants to 'kill of the vulnerable' then they are not doing a good job of it given that currently Covid barely accounts any deaths

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/latest
Of the deaths registered in Week 25 in England and Wales, 99 mentioned "novel coronavirus (COVID-19)", accounting for 1.1% of all deaths; this was a slight decrease compared with Week 24 (102 deaths).

and of course, there is nothing to prevent anyone choosing to continue wearing a mask if they wish

Why are smokers not allowed to exercise their personal responsibility to smoke in public indoor spaces. There's nothing to prevent non smokers not smoking if they don't wish to do so.

@Tealightsandd

and of course, there is nothing to prevent anyone choosing to continue wearing a mask if they wish

Why are smokers not allowed to exercise their personal responsibility to smoke in public indoor spaces. There's nothing to prevent non smokers not smoking if they don't wish to do so.

This is a truly strange comparison. Are you seriously equating lighting up a carcinogenic drug with simply being a breathing human being? What has happened to people??

@Rockitrosie this is controversial but I know you said about the money tree, we were in 2 world wars, all health men and women were forced to go to war, to do their part!!!
Fast forward to Covid healthy men and women told to hide at home and claim furlough!! These people could of been used in hospitals, care homes, test centres handing food out to the vulnerable etc. . We didn’t need to waste millions paying people to do nothing!!! But these seemed fine to people, no one was that bothered (esp in summer). All the nice family things being done. How society changed to something so selfish.

I think at this point, attempts to downplay and minimalise the huge number of deaths and disabilities caused by Covid, just show up a complete fool.

@Tealightsandd

I think at this point, attempts to downplay and minimalise the huge number of deaths and disabilities caused by Covid, just show up a complete fool.

Sadly that fool is our prime minister.