Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford
Wales will move into Tier 4 restrictions on Christmas Eve. This is just cruel now.https://t.co/59c2uS3gG2
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) December 16, 2020
Utterly Daffyt.
Coronavirus control plan: alert levels in Wales (WalesGov)
Covid: Boxing Day sales off in Wales ahead of lockdown on 28 December (BBC)
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“Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Paul McCartneys looking a bit ropey
He’s knackered after making th new album
Jeasus. He’s the spit of him!
…could Broadsheets man in Wales not use his influence?
Jonah?
…he’s been called worse…
Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court Justice, says the government “have been preaching the gospel of lockdown for eight months… The fact is they do not work. If we were all to be sedated, locked in wooden boxes permanently and fed by robots that might work.”
https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1339124700744716291
Really interesting guy, highly recommend his Reith Lectures on the BBC. However, in this instance he is drawing a simple conclusion about a complex intractable situation. It’s not a case of working or not working, hospitals are filling up what do you do? If you don’t do a New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan etc… you have awful decisions to make no matter what. What would you like us to do?
My own opinion is zero-coved, and yes I know it’s not going to happen… so instead we’re stuck with the choice of full hospitals, 1000’s of avoidable death, untreated patients, general chaos, people looking to go to the pub, people dying alone etc… not matter what other choice we make.
Are hospitals ‘filling up’ anymore than usual though? Overall fatalities for 2020 are well within a five year envelope so- where are the bodies?
CoVid-19 is not a virus, it is a set of symptoms- SARS-CoV-2 is a virus. A virus which has been proven to be in circulation six months before the CoVid-19 outbreaks- the latest being early November in Italy.
Is it not a bit silly to be trying to lock people up for something that has been around for at least six months before we even knew about it?
In other countries, yes – whatever you want to call it in terms of a virus or a symptom it does not change the fact that there seems to be a lot of people in the US, Central America, UK and Europe with a serious case of the deads, way above normal in many places.
I don’t agree with a lockdown as a way to deal with this, so I suspect there will be plenty of other deaths due to non-treatment, suicide, isolation etc. I think a lockdown will result in noticeably fewer deaths than not locking down and it will keep ICU’s from being swamped – but an elimination strategy is the only way to deal with transmission. I also think that Ireland’s population density has protected us somewhat and helped for the most part to avoid the worst – it’s not just because we’re that much better at following the rules – but those ambulances in the North are not fake news, we could very quickly be in that position.
In terms of when the disease was or was not circulating – bit of a moot point, I look at New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, and some other places – they seem to be having a pretty normal life and a lot less deaths. Is it not a bit silly to go a different way from them?
Well said ce.
Food for thought there SOQ?
“ deaths due to non-treatment, suicide, isolation etc”
Yer dead right there Ce. Sure look at all the operations and screenings that have been postponed or cancelled. How many lives lost there?
And the lives now shortened because of alcohol and drug abuse and mental health problems. People need structure in their lives and it’s been taken away from them. How many lives lost there?
55% of people who die from Covid don’t even get brought to hospital. What does that say about the overal demographic?
While there will undoubtedly be deaths caused by lockdowns, the other alternative would also cause non-Covid related deaths.
In California at the moment the hospitals are now full because they didn’t have enough extra capacity to death with business-as-usual PLUS a surge in Covid ‘cases’ (real people sick *with* Covid). This has had a knock-on affect where operations are being cancelled, people are afraid to attend hospital with other ailments, medical staff are over-worked and making mistakes, ambulances are backed up, .
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-16/icu-hitting-capacity-hospitals-desperate-measures
In these situations there isn’t one “good solution” and lots of bad solutions. People will die whatever choices are made. There are lots of bad choices, but some of them are less bad than others.
It’s a hard one to call indeed Cian
I guess each person will have to decide what sits right for themselves.
Personally, I think the death of a young person is more tragic than the death of an old person – but that’s just me. A Life lived and all that.
I know people on here have gone mental at me because of that opinion before.
To each their own.
@ ce- I think you’ll find the north’s problem is more to do with admission capacity than bed spaces- but sure queuing ambulances look great- or bad- depending on your perspective.
As for overall fatalities in the rest of Europe, there is a direct link between previous mild seasons and peaks this year- dry tinder’ is the term used. If SARS-CoV-2 was around for so much longer than we knew- which it was- why did CoVid-19 only kick off when it did? Genuine question.
Lockdowns have never been tried before- they are a social experiment- so why are people so adamant that they will work?
At best all they do is kick the can down the road or in the case of Wales and NI, not even that. How could both now have rising hospital admissions if lockdowns are so effective?
Sorry tier 4? Did they unlock a new level? I thought the UK was doing 1-3.
Is Ireland doing secret levels too or are we sticking to the add-on package e.g. level 3 +
Didn’t we have a level 3.5 at one stage a couple of weeks after the 5 tier system was announced?
Subtle-ish Clint ref there Bodger.
Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.