Guilt Free Railing 16

[WouldBeGood]

The festive special!

As always, all railing welcome, along with good things or humorous asides. No resilience wankery. This is the safe place to let out anything that’s doing your head in.

Word on Twitter is no more restrictions for England

Taken my tree and decorations down and cleared up a bit. Phew!

WouldBeGood I normally like it down early too but since it only went up on Christmas Even this year I'm going to keep it till the 1st I think.

Given word on the (virtual) street, I would also be surprised if England introduces further restrictions today. The range of responses to omicron now seem so broad that people must not know if they are coming or going - everything from "lock down now or this will be the worst wave of deaths ever" to "it's just a mild cold now".

So for a second year in a row I have cancelled DS birthday party as I can't see restrictions lifting in time

I know main boards will go it's a child's birthday party so what and don't you know there is a pandemic on etc etc etc. Which the obvious answer is yes I do. But he has had 1 normal birthday ever! He is never getting his toddler years back. Just glad that nursery make a big fuss of their birthdays as they know how much they miss out on!

Will order a fancy cake for him instead like last year and hope that friends will join us at the playground or come to our house but we have a lot of rule follower friends so will just have to wait and see!

@Scottishskifun that's so sad  kids birthdays are a big deal and I totally get why you're sad.

@WouldBeGood I'm dying to get the tree and decorations down and clean up but ds1 will be upset so I'll give him a couple more days.

Just popped the tv on and the news was on.
Looks like the positive case numbers are around 10k average for each of the last three days. But is expected to be higher than that!
Let’s place our bets that we will be under harsher restrictions by end of week and get told off for being naughty children and mixing so much at Xmas!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-59802261

I do believe the only thing to stop schools going back will be lack of staff. We got info from DD high school about how they’d manage staff shortages and s4-6 are being prioritised. The rest will have a three week rolling rota with at least 3 days a week in school. Among my own colleagues we have had 3 isolating (2 of whom have covid) since we closed, a 4th has just had a positive in their household and I’m not sure about the others. I’d imagine we will have more and that will start to make reopening tricky.

So case numbers are high - as expected- but England has introduced no new restrictions.

I'm struggling to understand why Scotland and Wales have taken a different stance to England. I understand more cautious yadayadayada vote gaining differences between Scotland and England just as I understand that Boris has some pressure from the far right which encourages a more cavalier attitude.

But surely the data cannot be that different in Scotland than it is in England ? Or if we're taking more precautions then does that mean the Scottish NHS is less well equipped to cope, but I believe gets more funding.

Either Boris is making a grossly irresponsible decision - which I'm prepared to concede is entirely possible - or the data is ambiguous, but trending positive as it was widely expected that there would be restrictions in England for NY earlier thus week.

If omicron cases are going to go through the roof we can't go on with entire households isolating. It simply won't be sustainable to run society in Scotland.
Train and bus drivers, food chain suppliers and supermarket staff, energy suppliers, medical staff.
Schools may be the least of our problems.
Bearing in mind the fact exemptions are voluntary

rookiemere if the additional measures do manage to suppress cases then my guess would be a higher peak than England further down the line due to less natural immunity to omicron, as thats been roughly the pattern before.

@MaxNormal

rookiemere if the additional measures do manage to suppress cases then my guess would be a higher peak than England further down the line due to less natural immunity to omicron, as thats been roughly the pattern before.

That's it in a nut shell, restrictions aren't really helping. Sooner or later we need to start building natural resistance to covid, we can't rely on vaccines for every variant.

People will soon become reluctant to go for vaccines every few months, esp if they are causing sore arms, or people to feel unwell after them.

I think people are going to get sick of everyone being affected by the restrictions. People fully vaccinated are being subject to the same restrictions are the non vaccinated. This can't go on, the country is grinding to a halt.
If i was in charge I'd first of all get the exemptions sorted. If you can't get the vaccines due to medical reasons you're exempt. No messing with that. But if you're not exempt, you live with strict restrictions, no going into shops, restaurants, cinemas etc. Go to work and stay at home and thats that. Everyone else fully vaccinated or on their way to fully vaccinated lives a normal life. Or even more extreme, non vaccinated people pay for hospital treatment if they are hospitalised due to covid.
I really think that's the only way to go, until this starts going away.

As i said, first thing sort out the exemptions. Then deal with the vaccine refusers. And let the exempt people decide their own risk. And let everyone else get on with life.

@MaxNormal the truly ironic thing is that Omicron is so contagious I don't think the new restrictions will make any difference whatsoeverexcept to hospitality and night club takings.

@rookiemere yep. Like the restrictions in South Africa. Their predominant effect was on the economy.

Went to Edinburgh today with the kids and ds2 wanted to go on a ride in the Christmas market. However as numbers have been cut to 500 for outdoor events now you have to stand in a queue in princes street gardens for over an hour and that’s if they even let you in the queue which was at capacity and closed when we were there. My 9 year old child could see the complete lack of sense in restricting numbers (to an outdoor event!) and then making everyone stand huddled together in a queue (in the rain) instead! Needless to say the event staff and my child are not fans of Nicola sturgeon now 😀

Friend who has been on several holidays during covid time just got back, 4 out of 5 of them have tested positive, thankfully on the arrival back test.

I do wonder how much longer it's going to be before the isolation period gets reduced.

I see the SNP starting to talk in more general terms about nhs strain rather than focusing on the number of hospitalisations.

I think you're right about vaccination fatigue. I've a friend (early 30s) who's been pretty compliant so far, had his first two vaccines straight away, who's not bothering with the booster as he's not allowed to go to the football, pubs have been fecked up, and he doesn't want to suffer the side effects of the booster, without seeing any real rewards. There's nothing in it for the majority of people any more. They told us if we got vaccinated we could go back to our lives, but look where we are, 3 jags in.

I think you guys are right about vaccinations going forward.
We are a highly vaccinated household but my 18 yr old is not sure about having the booster, saying she didn't sign up to having a jag every few months when she's low risk.
We oldies have the jag to protect ourselves but we need to incentivise youngsters to have regular vaccinations by not keeping rules the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated.
And not continually closing the venues they had the jag in order to be able to go to

From the article @runningpink linked - 'Ms Sturgeon added: "Keep any essential indoor gatherings to a maximum of three households'. Essential indoor gatherings?? What does that even mean? It doesn't have to be bloody essential fgs, if I want to go to my mum's I will. On the flip side, that is essential to me IMO. They're like wee parrots, repeating words and phrases like 'essential', 'socially distanced', 'keep everyone safe', 'vaccination programme'. It doesn't mean anything any more.

"Either Boris is making a grossly irresponsible decision - which I'm prepared to concede is entirely possible - or the data is ambiguous, but trending positive as it was widely expected that there would be restrictions in England for NY earlier thus week."

I suspect it's the latter @rookiemere. We had good data out of SA but for some reason the UK authorities have been suspicious of this, and now we're generating our own data it's telling the same story of a highly infectious but milder variant. I think the hospitalisation data from London in particular has been much more positive than perhaps was expected, but then we insist on only modelling worst case scenarios.. 🙄 Given that all restrictions have consequences (sorry, not on board with the 'protections' rebranding bullshit at all), and with a variant this infectious are unlikely to have much impact anyway, it makes sense to err towards avoiding unjustified restrictions rather than shutting things as a first response.

I am also a bit concerned that the Scottish NHS may be a bit more vulnerable than elsewhere in the UK, but I hope that isn't really the case, and it's just a case of Sturgeon's go to being to shut things down because she feels she needs to do 'something' even is that something is damaging and/or ineffective

ecceromani tbh I think a better way forward would be to offer boosters for the older and more vulnerable as per flu.
I don't think there's a huge benefit doing mass rollouts of booster after booster for young healthy groups that have had prior covid exposure.

And I obviously personally hate the idea of restrictions specifically for the unvaccinated.

Yep, theres just no incentive for the young to get the vaccine. Theres no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated so unless you're more at risk, like me and dh late 50s, or CEV, why bother?!? And ds's pcr took over 2 days to come back and he sat in his room the 2 days he could have went out before nightclubs shut. At xmas. That matters at 20.

The government's need to step up now.

No idea if this has already been mentioned but why are police not considered frontline workers in respect of being given the booster sooner. I believe school teachers and staff are, rightly so, but my son is a police officer and has only just had his booster, he is also asthmatic and should have been given his flu vaccine today but due to the roll out of COVID boosters he wasn’t offered it. It doesn’t make sense to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

I don't hate the idea of restrictions for the unvaccinated at all. Its their choice.