Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Boostin' Kev]

20 minutes ago, RiG said:

Cases in Edinburgh increasing appearing to justify SGs decision to keep it in Tier 3 but what the hell is going on in Midlothian and East Lothian? Cases rates up to 129 and 115 per 100,000 now. Tier 3 again for East Lothian?

People hitting Mussy/EL over the weekend getting battered on pints whilst ordering side portions of pizza until 8, then going round a mates house there for the boxing. 

[mizfit]

Some good news.

[TheScarf]

Can't wait to spend all day in the pub on Saturday.

[renton]

38 minutes ago, RiG said:

Cases in Edinburgh increasing appearing to justify SGs decision to keep it in Tier 3 but what the hell is going on in Midlothian and East Lothian? Cases rates up to 129 and 115 per 100,000 now. Tier 3 again for East Lothian?

I don't think the tier system has been an unqualified success. It has allowed for a more flexible approach to those parts of the county that maybe had a lower prevelance to start with and in terms of demographics and geography maybe had it easier for them to get control of it, but for the central belt it seems like you need to shut just about everything down to get case loads to go down.

As formulated tier 3 can stop your caseloads getting worse, but only tier 4 seems to he able to reduce case loads. Tier 2 seems like the worst of all worlds. You get into it when your prevelance rate is middling and opens up enough to start to pull case loads back up if you are in any kind of metropolitan area. 

The best course would seem to be to chuck everything in the central belt into tier 4 now, until January. Drive case loads down everywhere until you can open up in tier 1. Give some breathing space to have more open, longer while the vaccination program takes hold. Trying to ease down the case load in a graduated fashion isn't going to work. 

Edited December 14, 2020 by renton

[effeffsee_the2nd]

just incase you wanted any more new normal pish, some people within the live entertainment industry think that this could be a sort of taylor report for them , Some are of the opinion that all seated events are the only ones which will get permission in the forseable future. grim if true

[effeffsee_the2nd]

a quick google search shows that as of Friday our cases were 79 per 100l, that puts us at the lower end of tier 2, if we get chucked back into tier 3 after only one week then the entire system if even more of a farce than it already looks like.

[Billy Jean King]

I dunno - I'm just fed up with our 'Cautious Appraoch'

It's nothing to do with a cautious approach in this instance and all to do with logistics. This was always the case with the Pfizer version. AZ will hopefully be the game changer assuming it gets approval.

[welshbairn]

10 minutes ago, TheScarf said:

Can't wait to spend all day in the pub on Saturday.

Aye, maybe catch a game too. What's all the fuss about?

[dirty dingus]

13 minutes ago, mizfit said:

Some good news.

The same charile covid that transported it to the highlands when advised not to travel. he can get himself too f**k.

[effeffsee_the2nd]

10 minutes ago, renton said:

I don't think the tier system has been an unqualified success. It has allowed for a more flexible approach to those parts of the county that maybe had a lower prevelance to start with and in terms of demographics and geography maybe had it easier for them to get control of it, but for the central belt it seems like you need to shut just about everything down to get case loads to go down.

As formulated tier 3 can stop your caseloads getting worse, but only tier 4 seems to he able to reduce case loads. Tier 2 seems like the worst of all worlds. You get into it when your prevelance rate is middling and opens up enough to start to pull case loads back up if you are in any kind of metropolitan area. 

The best course would seem to be to chuck everything in the central belt into tier 4 now, until January. Drive case loads down everywhere until you can open up in tier 1. Give some breathing space to have more open, longer while the vaccination program takes hold. Trying to ease down the case load in a graduated fashion isn't going to work. 

Apologies for triple posting! what you're saying makes sense but in that case the entire national tier system is redundant,  you have 5 tiers with pre set criteria, but very few places actually have the tier which their criteria says they should, and even if they do they are not allowed the full range of liberties which their tier says they should have. 

Area X qualifies for tier one, but you can't have that because it's a densly populated area close to other densly populated areas and we can't enforce any of the rules so no. 

area Y should really be in a higher tier but it's the only large ish town in a mostly rural area with no hotspots for many miles so as you were.

 

In other words, we realised we'd made a c**t of the tier system before we even rolled it out and are now trying to backpeddle as subtly as possible to save face.  

[dirty dingus]

The joys of tier 2. It was murder trying to get a pint. The majority of places with outside facilities had the outside bits closed and all 2 hr slots were booked, luckily a friendly host stuck me and my pal at a wee windae dookit and served us up a nice bowl of parsnip curry soup and staropramen pints. Got 3 pints before we were given the eyes to bolt.  Hopefully they wise up during the week and let folk enjoy a pint without getting force fed scotch eggs.

[101]

21 minutes ago, mizfit said:

Some good news.

You would think after traveling whilst symptomatic you would keep out of the press during a pandemic.

[Ron Aldo]

I don't think the tier system has been an unqualified success. It has allowed for a more flexible approach to those parts of the county that maybe had a lower prevelance to start with and in terms of demographics and geography maybe had it easier for them to get control of it, but for the central belt it seems like you need to shut just about everything down to get case loads to go down.

As formulated tier 3 can stop your caseloads getting worse, but only tier 4 seems to he able to reduce case loads. Tier 2 seems like the worst of all worlds. You get into it when your prevelance rate is middling and opens up enough to start to pull case loads back up if you are in any kind of metropolitan area. 

The best course would seem to be to chuck everything in the central belt into tier 4 now, until January. Drive case loads down everywhere until you can open up in tier 1. Give some breathing space to have more open, longer while the vaccination program takes hold. Trying to ease down the case load in a graduated fashion isn't going to work. 

My thinking was we should keep places (such as the Central belt) in tier 3 where possible with tier 4 only being an absolute last resort if things get out of control. I agree that tier 3 doesn't seem to drastically reduce cases but, at the same time, if they aren't drastically increasing either then I don't think we should be completely shutting down those areas.

 

In saying that, I fully expect the central belt (at least) to be back in tier 4 by the end of January at the latest once the impact of Christmas starts to unfold.

 

[mizfit]

You would think after traveling whilst symptomatic you would keep out of the press during a pandemic.

Charlie isn’t the most intelligent member of the royal family. He must’ve surely known after his actions in March some of the Scottish population wouldn’t want to see him anytime soon.

[Todd_is_God]

25 minutes ago, effeffsee_the2nd said:

just incase you wanted any more new normal pish, some people within the live entertainment industry think that this could be a sort of taylor report for them , Some are of the opinion that all seated events are the only ones which will get permission in the forseable future. grim if true

That seems slightly hysterical IMO.

I could see that perhaps being the case in 2021 (to effectively ban festivals in the summer etc without actually banning them), but not beyond that.

[renton]

2 minutes ago, Ron Aldo said:

My thinking was we should keep places (such as the Central belt) in tier 3 where possible with tier 4 only being an absolute last resort if things get out of control. I agree that tier 3 doesn't seem to drastically reduce cases but, at the same time, if they aren't drastically increasing either then I don't think we should be completely shutting down those areas.

 

In saying that, I fully expect the central belt (at least) to be back in tier 4 by the end of January at the latest once the impact of Christmas starts to unfold.

 

I think the salient lesson is that shutting things down early, and to a greater degree is the best route to having more open for longer. If tier 3 means you can't have hospitality open, and you also can't get case loads down far enough to get it open then why bother? In that scenario tier 4 is your only option. ScotGov worked that out and used it in the West, probably a couple of weeks too late to get more use out of it. Despite a lower overall case loads had Edinburgh been chucked into tier 4 then, it'd conceivably be in tier 1 now.

I get the other factors at play - it's the busiest retail time or the year, so the question becomes: is the immediate economic consequences of keeping that open worth letting case loads rise?

There is, we hope, maybe another 6-8 weeks of this until the levels of vaccinations start to make a serious dent and we can get things open on a more stable footing (allowing for the Ox/AZ vaccine to be approved). If we aren't going to do mass community testing in the meantime then a fairly savage lockdown now seems to me to be the best means of more normality over those 8 weeks.

[effeffsee_the2nd]

1 minute ago, Todd_is_God said:

That seems slightly hysterical IMO.

I could see that perhaps being the case in 2021 (to effectively ban festivals in the summer etc without actually banning them), but not beyond that.

That was kinda what I meant tho, whilst not actualy banning standing outright it could force many venues with standing room to convert to all seater or be kept closed. big money places like the hydro won't be affected but smaller places would have to make the choice.

 

9 minutes ago, Ron Aldo said:

My thinking was we should keep places (such as the Central belt) in tier 3 where possible with tier 4 only being an absolute last resort if things get out of control. I agree that tier 3 doesn't seem to drastically reduce cases but, at the same time, if they aren't drastically increasing either then I don't think we should be completely shutting down those areas.

 

In saying that, I fully expect the central belt (at least) to be back in tier 4 by the end of January at the latest once the impact of Christmas starts to unfold.

 

I don't think 5 days will make much difference, we had home socialising allowed all summer, the schools will be off during xmas so that should counter any jump from household transmissions

[peasy23]

It's nothing to do with a cautious approach in this instance and all to do with logistics. This was always the case with the Pfizer version. AZ will hopefully be the game changer assuming it gets approval.

My mate works in a GP's surgery and said there will be very few ordinary practices that will be able to store anything at such a low temperature as required as the Pfizer vaccine is. That means initially at least that the vaccine will have to be distributed via hospitals.

[Paco]

Cases in Edinburgh increasing appearing to justify SGs decision to keep it in Tier 3 but what the hell is going on in Midlothian and East Lothian? Cases rates up to 129 and 115 per 100,000 now. Tier 3 again for East Lothian?

A stroke of luck for the Scottish Government, certainly. A slight increase at the start of last week was a footnote in the justifications for maintained Level 3, which was effectively you’re near Weegies so tough shit. The local media is still full of expectant stories about an imminent move to Level 2, which simply isn’t going to happen anymore.

Midlothian and East Lothian should really be relegated, unless there are mass testing projects going on there. I can’t find anything to suggest there is.

Very bad time for the East Central Belt to be on an upward trajectory, having really escaped the worst of it since March.

[LongTimeLurker]

26 minutes ago, renton said:

...The best course would seem to be to chuck everything in the central belt into tier 4 now,...

Or finally come to terms with the fact that in the absence of closing down the economy and education there isn't much you can do to stop an epidemic peak from unfolding until vaccination is in full swing and encourage the media to stop obsessing over the numbers so much now that the IFR is known to be around 0.2% rather than the initially feared 2%. A lot of old people die every winter from viral infections, so what is unfolding now is nothing like as out of ordinary as it is being portrayed. 

By all means minimise what is legitimately non-essential and high risk such as having pubs open late at night serving alcohol until vaccination of high risk groups has been achieved but don't close down inherently low risk activities like watching nonleague football while socially distanced outdoors just to be seen to do something to placate a minority of hysterical curtain twitching cranks. The problem is decisions are often being made based on what polls best (the rush to reopen pubs, still OK to go to Shagaluf, and let's have a Christmas free for all etc) rather than what really makes sense in COVID terms.