Guilt free railing

[WouldBeGood]

The place to vent, moan, rail, cheer: whatever you’re feeling about Covid, and the rules, and life and the universe.

I’ve started this as I’m feeling scared and fed up with increasing restrictions despite vaccines. I feel that what should be a more positive time is instead bringing more and more doom.

I want the simple pleasures of life back, as well as all the big stuff.

couldn't agree more - natural borders are a huge reason many EU countries and Scotland couldn't replicate NZ/AUS 'success'. Even if Scotland were fully independent, the 'border' is porous.

And we didn't check up on people doing at home quarantine or enforce self isolation properly before now as it was too hard (Ferrier et al) to start with.

Epidemiologists seem to be working on a closed economy model of the UK in the 1960s/70s where people's entire families live locally, nobody travels very far or needs to for their job. It's like the clock has been turned back (but not in a good way to 1997 :)

[quote rookiemere]@Cocacola12 yes absolutely. We often make it in the morning for use in the evening.
I've had to hide the third jar purchased of Nutella from teenage DSs night maraudings so we have some for tomorrow.[/quote]
This is funny, I bought Nutella yesterday but have warned ds that when it’s gone, it’s gone!

@anon444877 that’s an excellent description. It’s quite weird.

@MaxNormal yes, and I think NZ relies heavily on tourism? No one will travel there with the threat of perpetual lockdown, even if they’re allowed in.

Never mind 60s/70s. It's like Stepford wives on acid.

I grew up in the 70s. My DM, in common with all my friends' parents, rarely knew where I was from about age 5. Idea of locking us down would have been regarded as farcical.

DD2 has her own Nutella supply. It's just easier that way. I never let it go done - choose your battles and all that.

I think the 60s/70s taking resonates in the way that to want or need to travel, or eat out, etc, makes you somehow demanding and high falutin’

spoiled - what more could you want wouldbegood we've got tins we can boil and we're aspiring to a small fridge.

@Callisto1

Well the variants have already happened. The SA one is bad news and it's been detected all over uk. We will have to wait till autumn for AZ to update their vaccine so we really don't want that variant to spread.

Think some of the other vaccines do better against SA variant, but Pfizer supply is limited at the moment and the others are not coming until April.

Except it doesn't seem to much of an issue in SA

I’ll open the Goblin burgers, and wait for the telly to warm up whilst I count my blessings 😃

What time is the briefing tomorrow ?

I'm so sorry to hear of all your struggles . I know I rail a lot, but I think overall I am very lucky even though it is so hard to cope some days. So those of you with extra burdens, I honestly don't know how I'd manage. You're all .

So sorry to hear that @Dinosauratemydaffodils there really is so little escape from all the anxiety of it all

I so wish toddler groups etc would open again it but I think that will be the very last thing. I don’t think soft play has ever reopened since last March. Would be fine in a warm country but really need the indoor options in Scotland

I wish they would actually come out and say what the new benchmarks will be. Surely zero Covid is just not feasible

@MaxNormal

Dinnafashyersel I even have my doubts re Zero Covid in terms of New Zealand and Australia - a normality that can be whisked away at any point in time and closed borders. I too wonder how the re-opening will go with the vaccines given what will be a very low tolerance for cases, a population with naive immune systems and the limitations of what the vaccines can realistically achieve in that context.

For a European country where the virus is now endemic, where we have the level of reliance on food import that we do, that is a major international transit hub and where the economy relies on all of that.... I don't see how it's possible, or at least possible without some extremely scary changes to our way of life.
For one region of a country to attempt it while the rest follows a different strategy, seems to me to be out and out insane.

I completely agree with you on the NZ/ Aus approach. I said it somewhere else, though and was roundly attacked for being stupid, not understanding the bigger picture, being a Tory stooge (obviously) and caring more about money than lives so I've not pushed it since!

I think they have been very lucky in betting the house on a quick and effective vaccine, or otherwise they'd have had closed borders for goodness knows how long. And even with the vaccine, if they are locking down Auckland over 3 cases, they will keep having to do this if they open back up, as the vaccine won't prevent every single case. Obviously it's an effective strategy, but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best for a country so dependent on international tourism. I just can't see how they will be able to recover their way of life, or when we will get to see DBIL and his family who are over there. Obviously we don't see them often as it is, but it would be nice to think there will be face to face meetings at some point in the next decade...

@WouldBeGood

I’ll open the Goblin burgers, and wait for the telly to warm up whilst I count my blessings 😃

Haha! We still refer to warming the telly up... it takes a while for all the Internet stuff to kick in and buffer and whatnot.

NotAnActualSheep the other thing that concerns me quite deeply about Scotland's approach is that the policy advisors, at least the ones that seem to have the highest media profiles, are not scientists.

Devi Sridhar has a philosophy degree and Linda Bauld studied political science. While I'm not saying that one shouldn't have people from a variety of backgrounds on board to inform the bigger picture, I feel like they have Zero Covid as some sort of pet theory and are being very much listened to both by the SG and various sections of the media.

caring more about money than lives

That's the one that always amuses me. We all do. I don't live with the bare minimum essentials for life and send the rest of my money to help feed or provide essential medical care to desperate people. I buy things I don't need, I treat myself, I take unecessary car journeys, flights for pleasure (or at least I used to!). Each of those decisions is literally at the expense of other human lives if you think about it in that sense.

I never have quite been able to understand what makes covid deaths somehow sadder. Don't get me wrong, of course I understand why measures were needed to mitigate health services being overwhelmed, although I'm sure people will spend years in the future arguing if they were right, too lax, too harsh, not proportionate. But I understand that governments felt that they had to act, and were all finding their own way forward in a very new set of circumstances.

I don't understand it beyond that, how the whole thing is almost deified and how some will insist that everything else be secondary to it. I will never agree with that.

Yes. They are very clever and expert in their fields, and I'm sure they have some expertise in public health related stuff, but it's obviously more than that that needs to be considered.

I get very wound up by experts making definitive public statements outside their expertise. Like when some medical person says x industrial process can release y nasty chemical which causes cancer, so x industrial process causes cancer. Even though an unphotogenic engineer in the background says "but our version of X doesn't produce y..." The media will report it as "expert doctor and moneygrabbing company clash over whether y causes cancer" whereas its obviously not that at all...

It seems at the moment we've got the expert doctors, but the boring technical people in the background working on mitigating the relevant harms aren't really getting their say.

The strategy we seem to be adopting just makes the future seem so bleak and insular. I want my kids to travel and see other cultures. That seems a lifetime away.

I completely agree with you on the NZ/ Aus approach. I said it somewhere else, though and was roundly attacked for being stupid, not understanding the bigger picture, being a Tory stooge (obviously) and caring more about money than lives hmm so I've not pushed it since!

Yes it’s weird. A lot of people seem to think the only alternative to ‘zero covid’ is ‘loads of covid! we love covid!’

I think NZ did better than us in the short term and I’d rather be living there than here now. But come ON, people can’t reasonably think they’re going to keep borders closed forever? Or doing crash 3-day lockdowns for any detected case forever? And as for “oh they won’t have to because they’ll have an effective test trace isolate system as we could do that too” - we have enough trouble getting people to isolate NOW and you think people will voluntarily sit at home on SSP for two weeks once everyone’s been vaccinated forevermore? Realllllllly?

Not sure if anyone saw on uft earlier ( I'm a voyeur rather than poster) but suggestion on there is that P1-3 back on the 22nd, P4-7 mid March and high school after Easter holiday. I wonder if there will be any leaks before tomorrow's announcement in line with this?

here I am!
I've turned up to moan again about fucking face masks and social distancing - neither of which I can do due to multiple disabilities.
Also considered vulnerable, but not vulnerable enough to be told when I will get my jag. I think I will email my GP to ask WTF as I've heard nothing about a jag even though he said I'm vulnerable.
On top of the above, I'm not even allowed to drive atm (not that I can go anywhere anyway but STILL)
And bloody chris whitty hinting SD measures might be here every winter.
He was the scientist I liked. I can't stand Devi, Linda and Jason who all seem to want fame. Now Chris Whitty is pissing me off too.
FFS

I don't even know why they're speculating jabba, they don't even know for sure what's going to happen in two weeks so I'd take it with a large pinch of salt. I wish they'd be more circumspect in what they speculated about pointlessly, to stop people worrying. If it's not an actual plan it's hot air.

Do ring your GP or email Nicola to find out where the jag is.