LongTimeLurker

Haven't been reading up about it recently but a few weeks back the main bottleneck on ramping up vaccination was reported to be the special type of glass needed for the vials.

CFR will inherently be much higher than IFR if very little testing is taking place. Have a sneaking suspicion that Yemen doesn't feature very highly on the tests per capita table given it's in the midsts of a civil war right now. One of the main reasons for all the mass hysteria over COVID is that many people do not seem to grasp the difference between CFR and IFR, so when a 2% CFR number was being reported from Wuhan it was generally assumed to mean that 2% of everybody infected would die. We now know it is probably under 0.2% on IFR and very much skewed towards > 70 year olds placing it in unusually bad flu season sort of territory rather than a rerun of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

They tested for asymptomatic cases unlike the other two, so the efficacy numbers reported are not directly comparable as far as I am aware.

Fleg protests in Belfast maybe, but guess NI is a special case where state authority is generally viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. The moment you question all the over the top nanny state stuff there will be someone along telling us that Sweden got it disastrously wrong even though in reality their per capita cumulative mortality rate is probably still lower than the UK's quicker than you can say Sven Goran Eriksson. Somebody with a posh accent said it on the telly so it must be true.

Tweeting about something she clearly doesn't understand.

If there is one thing we have learned over the last ten months it is to not underestimate the level of mass hysteria over this and the way politicians are responding to that rather than being driven by rationality.

If it stops high risk people from developing severe symptoms, job done. There was no expectation that the first generation of COVID-19 vaccines were going to provide sterilising immunity that would completely prevent people from ever becoming infected with COVID.

Think this will be the new JFK assassination in the years ahead:

Definite signs that the UK establishment is now gently ushering NI towards the exit after the DUPes campaigned for something that was very much not in Ulster Unionism's long term interest: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-55783805 Would a BBC Scotland website story highlight a pro-Referendum angle if the poll numbers were breaking 47:42 in the No side's favour, given the BBC's state broadcaster role? Enda has been placed there for a reason.

The old alignment from close to Haymarket to Granton was in the original tram plans and will probably get used for that eventually after the Newhaven extension is completed. The South Sub and most of the Leith lines were always primarily about freight rather than passengers unlike the Cathcart circle in Glasgow that was mainly aimed at suburban passenger traffic. In Edinburgh, buses actually did make more sense in the Beeching era, but with the benefit of hindsight 50+ years on it would have been better for us in the present day if they had kept and modernised the tram network like many continental European cities did.

People tend to forget that Edinburgh also had a tram network in that era:

Problems are that the old alignment has also been built over with some housing before you even get close enough into the town centre for a well used west station and a lot of people (for the sake of argument lets call them the Green Party) are going to argue that the Longannet line makes more sense for implementing Alloa/Stirling traffic from the existing main town station because Edinburgh can also be involved that way albeit with a double back. Edinburgh is where people from the Alloa area are more likely to want to go, with no offence intended to the west end of Dunfermline. The main problem with anything ever happening on Dunfermline to Alloa and the reason that the Green Party are not being listended to is that the Longannet line and any double back are so cumbersome that you might as well just service Alloa via Stirling to Waverley. It was always mainly meant as a slow goods line while the line via Oakley was the double track main line designed with rapid passenger services in mind. The 500 lb gorilla in the room is also that Fife Circle-> Dalmeny -> Falkirk -> Queen Street is the more direct way to do any Glasgow train service (think there actually is one direct train per day from Kirkcaldy). Any route via Stirling is going to struggle to compete with express buses running over the Kincardine bridge for convenience. There was a Leith Central station (where the trainspotting one liner from Begbie's father happens) that could definitely have been used that way if more services from Glasgow and the west ran through rather than terminating at Waverley. It got closed because buses worked much better for most local traffic and there maybe wasn't as much scope for long distance travel from there as there would be now.

Most of that old line would be very easy as you describe but the biggest and in all likelihood most insurmountable problem is around where the old Dunfermline Upper station used to be: There are other issues in Dunfermline related to new housing that would also escalate the price tag and create a lot of fierce local opposition. Some local councils have protected old railway alignments in planning terms to help make future reinstements like Bathgate to Airdrie and Dalkeith to Gala financially viable. Fife didn't with this line and it's really unfortunate because it was still being used to move coal well into the 80s and probably would have been quickly reopened after the Alloa to Glasgow service did so well so we are looking at not much more than a 15 year window where a lack of foresight in planning terms damaged the future connectivity of the passenger rail network.