Can someone explain the logic to me please

[ChristmasScrooge]

How does this make sense?

We have to mask up on public transport and shops... but you can go into a nightclub where people are hugging/mingling more and you don't have to wear one?

WHERE IS THE LOGIC?

Anyone else fed up of all coronavirus crap? Let us live, the death toll isn't correct. Whose to say those people didn't test positive but yet died of cancer? Or got hit by a bus or whatever?

And how does having a vaccine protect others? When you can still catch covid and pass it on?

None of it makes any sense.

@Happypootle Call me dim all you like. It's very amusing given it comes from someone so incredibly ignorant and ill informed.

Yes, it would indeed be better to have masks in all enclosed indoor spaces. That doesn't make having them in some places, the places vulnerable people are least likely to be able to avoid, remotely pointless. Sorry you're so unable to think in a way that isn't black and white.

If it makes you feel any better, you can expect them to be mandated in all or most indoor spaces fairly soon. This is just the initial move to get people more used to wearing them again before stricter measures are brought in. Hope that helps your brain adjust.

dabby I'm not anti-mask in all circumstances as I have already said. In the case of mask wearing in shops, I question whether it is introduced because it's actually efficacious, or just because its easy. The same for masking in school corridors, which is also being reintroduced. I'm always happy to update my views in line with evidence. I don't believe this makes me ignorant or ill informed.

Yes it is pure nonsense.

You can be in a packed office, nightclub, restaurant, café, cinema, gym but Covid will politely avoid infecting you in these locations. But if you go in the shop of course the virus can tell the difference and knows that this is a verboten location to be maskless and will therefore gleefully infect you....seriously?

I was reading today that in SA the people who were had the new variant had mild symptoms and recovered quickly. So WTF are we not reporting this as well and instead are going into hyperbole and maximum scaremongering?

@ElectraBlue

Yes it is pure nonsense.

You can be in a packed office, nightclub, restaurant, café, cinema, gym but Covid will politely avoid infecting you in these locations. But if you go in the shop of course the virus can tell the difference and knows that this is a verboten location to be maskless and will therefore gleefully infect you....seriously?

I was reading today that in SA the people who were had the new variant had mild symptoms and recovered quickly. So WTF are we not reporting this as well and instead are going into hyperbole and maximum scaremongering?

most people who have COVID have no or mild symptoms

it's whether is has the potential to cause a new global wave due to evading prior immunity -as always it's a numbers game. If many are re-infected, even a small percentage of illness/death is catatrosphic.

Until more is known it makes sense to be cautious.

@AlohaMolly

It’s the vaccine passports that baffle me. It makes more sense for everyone to show a negative test to get in to cinemas etc than it does for someone that has had two jabs five months and 15 days ago to wave a vaccine passport around, when they can still have and pass on covid. But as someone upthread said - it’s performance theatre.

@AlohaMolly completely agree. Well summarised!

@stressedy

were heading for a lockdown i wont comply with masks and i wont comply with a lockdown.

agreed , work in retail so this means iv got to go back to wearing a mask for 18 hours a week and its not happening , bought an exemption lanyard from amazon ages ago although never used it and its getting worn as of tues even though im not medically exempt , im not going back to complying with this again . did the first time , just cant face it now

my point was more that basing entrance to establishments shouldn’t be based on the have/have nots in relation to vaccines

LOL haven't seen this particular version of weasel words before but let's be clear, there are no have/have nots in relation to vaccines, there are only choose/choose nots.

Casting it as 'haves' vs 'have nots' is a really transparent ploy to imply that we should show some compassion for the unfortunate, discriminated-against unvaccinated (in the same way people feel compassion for those who are socio-economically disadvantaged).

Whereas the reality is that anyone who is unvaccinated right now has made a clear personal choice to be that way, one that could be changed in an afternoon, unlike climbing out of poverty.

[quote SmellyOldOwls]**@Chloemol I can hear the frustration behind your posts. I'm getting sick of wilfully stupid people too. [/quote]
Me too.

@Chloemol I commend your sound logic but I feel you're wasting your time trying to reason with people who deliberately don't want to act responsibly and don't want to understand. It's the "I'm so done with this" brigade.

(sigh)

@CheekyHobson or it could have literally been HAVE had the vaccine or HAVE NOT had the vaccine

You are right, though. It is a very clear personal choice to have the vaccine or not. I wholly believe that what someone puts in their body is a personal choice and should not be mandated. However, my post wasn’t about the rights or wrongs of having/not having the vaccine. You read my post, so you know that. My post very clearly said that I didn’t think basing entrance to establishments on vaccine status was logical.

As for ‘weasel words…’ I think that’s pretty offensive. You have cherry picked a phrase from a post about something else and extrapolated out to your own highly emotive statements. It’s quite a manipulative thing to do, so, in my opinion, that makes your words the weasel ones.

Before you ask, you can find my vaccine status through advance search, I imagine.

@CheekyHobson

my point was more that basing entrance to establishments shouldn’t be based on the have/have nots in relation to vaccines

LOL haven't seen this particular version of weasel words before but let's be clear, there are no have/have nots in relation to vaccines, there are only choose/choose nots.

Casting it as 'haves' vs 'have nots' is a really transparent ploy to imply that we should show some compassion for the unfortunate, discriminated-against unvaccinated (in the same way people feel compassion for those who are socio-economically disadvantaged).

Whereas the reality is that anyone who is unvaccinated right now has made a clear personal choice to be that way, one that could be changed in an afternoon, unlike climbing out of poverty.

100%!! Exactly this. If you choose not to be vaccinated, live with the consequences. I'm sick of unvaccinated people going on as if they're some poor discriminated against group and not ill informed, stupid people who are vastly overestimating their own intelligence and think the rest of us are the idiots.

Here in the UK we are some of the luckiest people on earth, first in line for free, safe and effective vaccines which are almost 100% effective in keeping us out of hospital and relieving the pressure on the NHS. Don't want to play ball? Fine. Don't complain when you don't get to participate in society. You don't get to have it both ways.

Look at it the other way around - they haven’t taken ALL your freedoms (yet). Would you prefer that?

Vulnerable people need to use public transport and shops. They don’t need to use pubs, restaurants and nightclubs. Their families know they are vulnerable and can act accordingly.

Seems a logical start to me.

The government eases us into restrictions like we’re children starting Reception.

[quote AlohaMolly]@CheekyHobson or it could have literally been HAVE had the vaccine or HAVE NOT had the vaccine

You are right, though. It is a very clear personal choice to have the vaccine or not. I wholly believe that what someone puts in their body is a personal choice and should not be mandated. However, my post wasn’t about the rights or wrongs of having/not having the vaccine. You read my post, so you know that. My post very clearly said that I didn’t think basing entrance to establishments on vaccine status was logical.

As for ‘weasel words…’ I think that’s pretty offensive. You have cherry picked a phrase from a post about something else and extrapolated out to your own highly emotive statements. It’s quite a manipulative thing to do, so, in my opinion, that makes your words the weasel ones.[/quote]
First of all, let's clarify your belief that "what someone puts in their body is a personal choice and should not be mandated". This is hard to disagree with, but the good news is that nobody has actually been mandated to 'put the vaccine in their body'.

Mandates exist around whether or not people can perform a certain job role if they aren't vaccinated, but this is not at all the same thing as 'mandating someone to put something (presumably a vaccination) into their body.'

So to the next issue, if I understand you correctly, your belief is that negative tests for entry to venues are a much better and more manageable system for reducing Covid spread while allowing businesses to operate. Is that right?

Thirdly, I have no interest in going through your posts to determine your vaccination status. You can tell me if you like but I don't see how it's relevant to whether your logical argument holds up or not.

@AlohaMolly you're right of course. The only worthwhile covid passport is one which checks current levels of infectivity. It's another example of us introducing measures which are easy without necessarily being efficacious. Please ignore posters who are deliberately misrepresenting you. They seem to have limited critical faculties and just like to shout loudly

The vaccine passport doesn’t make any sense. People double jabbed can still get covid. They could still pass it on, unknowingly, but can prove they’ve had the jabs if asked.
You can go to a pub/ nightclub and dance the night away drunk with strangers.
Yet now you have to mask up in a shop.
Why didn’t Boris just keep everyone wearing masks when restrictions were lifted in the summer?
Now people need to be told again to wear face coverings. More hassle for shop staff.
None of it makes sense to me.
And now Boris is back to his old ways of talking about three week reviews.
Three weeks seems to be the magic number for this whole bloody pandemic.
Which by the way is a week before Xmas.
Although I doubt they’ll cancel Xmas again as they know people won’t abide by it.
What happened to living with it?
People dying of covid had a positive result within 28 days.
They didn’t all die just because of covid.

@Hearwego

The vaccine passport doesn’t make any sense. People double jabbed can still get covid. They could still pass it on, unknowingly, but can prove they’ve had the jabs if asked. You can go to a pub/ nightclub and dance the night away drunk with strangers. Yet now you have to mask up in a shop. Why didn’t Boris just keep everyone wearing masks when restrictions were lifted in the summer? Now people need to be told again to wear face coverings. More hassle for shop staff. None of it makes sense to me. And now Boris is back to his old ways of talking about three week reviews. Three weeks seems to be the magic number for this whole bloody pandemic. Which by the way is a week before Xmas. Although I doubt they’ll cancel Xmas again as they know people won’t abide by it. What happened to living with it? People dying of covid had a positive result within 28 days. They didn’t all die just because of covid.

It's very wearing reading posts like this. Yes, people double jabbed can still get covid but they are FAR less likely to get it than an unvaccinated person. The risk is never going to be zero, but if you're going to be in a room full of maskless people, your chances of not getting covid are much better if they've all been vaccinated. Why do you just ignore the entire concept of risk reduction? You're surely familiar with seatbelts? Condoms? Those things aren't 100% effective but they're hell of a lot better than nothing, aren't they? You don't refuse to use them because they 'might not make any difference'.

I agree with you that the mask policies make no sense, but that doesn't stop you using your noggin and acknowledging the reality that mitigations work. It's not and all or nothing situation. If we can reduce the number of people in hospital by say, 20-50% using mitigations, that's a lot of pressure off the NHS. We're not trying to eradicate covid, we're trying to keep hospitalisations at a level where the entire health system won't collapse, so that if you have an accident, you aren't left to bleed to death on a stretcher outside A&E because there wasn't any space for you.

@Happypootle

The only worthwhile covid passport is one which checks current levels of infectivity. It's another example of us introducing measures which are easy without necessarily being efficacious. Please ignore posters who are deliberately misrepresenting you. They seem to have limited critical faculties and just like to shout loudly

I would be very happy to engage in an exercise of critical faculties around your statement that a 'current infectivity passport' would be more efficacious than a vaccine passport if you're interested in breaking down the logic behind it. Prefer to refrain from calling each other 'dim' or any other personal insults though.

@CheekyHobson

nobody yet has actually been mandated to 'put the vaccine in their body'in the UK

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but haven’t Austria made it compulsory from February 1st? All adults in Indonesia, Micronesia and Turkmenistan must be vaccinated too, according to Reuters.com. Germany is also looking at making them compulsory.

I’d also argue that, while making the covid vaccine essential for certain roles for new starters, making care workers and medical staff already working, choose between having a vaccine or losing their job, is basically demanding compulsory vaccination, but that is probably semantics.

On to the issue that was the premise of my original post(s) - no. I said it was more logical to present a negative test at entrance to a venue. I don’t doubt that people can argue that tests aren’t as manageable a system as vaccine passports, but, essentially, someone at the entrance is either checking for a vaccine passport or a negative test.

I don’t really understand why that is an issue for you. You took umbrage at a very literal phrase I used and have constructed two posts that only fleetingly mention the point that I was making, in favour of what seems like goading me into saying something that I never said - along the lines of vaccines are bad. That has never been a point I’ve made on this thread. In fact, I believe I wrote that vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalisation and death.

Again why didn’t they just keep face masks in place for supermarkets and public transport, they knew that in winter infections would naturally rise.
Also surely the government cannot be surprised that we have a new variant? We knew the virus would mutate so I don’t see why they seem to be taken by surprise by this.
Having said that , the only restrictions in place are countries going onto the red list and wearing a mask in a shop.
Nothing major in my opinion.
So it’s nothing as bad as last year.

Prefer to refrain from calling each other 'dim' or any other personal insults though

Quite happy to refer to other people’s words as weasel words though…

@ChristmasScrooge

How does this make sense?

We have to mask up on public transport and shops... but you can go into a nightclub where people are hugging/mingling more and you don't have to wear one?

WHERE IS THE LOGIC?

Anyone else fed up of all coronavirus crap? Let us live, the death toll isn't correct. Whose to say those people didn't test positive but yet died of cancer? Or got hit by a bus or whatever?

And how does having a vaccine protect others? When you can still catch covid and pass it on?

None of it makes any sense.

The government has to be seen to be doing something, so chose something that some people are already doing, and those that aren't still aren't, so the government can say, well if only people followed the rules likes Boris, Hancock and Cummings then this whole thing would be over.

But let’s just say we didn’t have the vaccine. What would have happened?
Surely people couldn’t be locked down or have restrictions forever?
How long would furlough have happened for?
Millions of people would have ended up unemployed, possibly forever?
Yes the NHS would have been protected, but surely it would have gone bust because people wouldn’t be paying enough tax to pay for it?
Also surely the country would have gone bankrupt at some point,had we have stayed in lockdown?
I can’t see how we could have stayed locked down , in the instance of not having a vaccine.

I think the entire approach is really odd because by simply having better ventilation, we could reduce the spread, having pubs open doors and windows every half hour /hour, restaurants and so on... But its never mentioned!!

Quite happy to refer to other people’s words as weasel words though…

A phrase is not a person.

@CheekyHobson OK to call me ignorant and ill-informed though?

Anyway, as a means to ensure the safety of a venue then yes I think current LFT proof is better than proof of vaccination. I am fully vaxxed (assume @alohamolly is too) but showing evidence that I had the vaccine in June doesn't mean much going to the theatre in December. I am more than happy to be exposed to your critical faculties on this one if you think otherwise.