Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Monkey Tennis]

1 hour ago, Squalor Vic said:

If exams don't go ahead this year my daughter has the very real possibility of leaving school without sitting any formal exams (last year was close but they were termed as assessments and they used classroom evidence too I believe) 

Bit mental that, but I'm confident it'll be fine this year for exams to take place properly 

I am too.

Plenty of kids do already leave without sitting any exams of course, and will do this year even if exams run normally.  The crazy bit this year without them, though, would be that there would be kids leaving S6 and heading to university having never sat a formal exam.

I really don't think that'll be the case though.

[Billy Jean King]

I am too.
Plenty of kids do already leave without sitting any exams of course, and will do this year even if exams run normally.  The crazy bit this year without them, though, would be that there would be kids leaving S6 and heading to university having never sat a formal exam.
I really don't think that'll be the case though.

They wouldn't have noticed much different at Uni to be fair. Far greater disruption than schools

[djchapsticks]

2 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Yes, all pretty minor and cosmetic.

 

2 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Should you not be running another bullying thread, while expressing concern elsewhere over mental health issues?

 

2 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

This one sounded pretty chirpy about the fate of defenceless employees.

 

2 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

I  wouldn't have called this one downbeat either.

 

2 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Gleeful.

 And when you put it all together there's the model of a charmless man 

[Monkey Tennis]

16 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:

26 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

I am too.
Plenty of kids do already leave without sitting any exams of course, and will do this year even if exams run normally.  The crazy bit this year without them, though, would be that there would be kids leaving S6 and heading to university having never sat a formal exam.
I really don't think that'll be the case though.

They wouldn't have noticed much different at Uni to be fair. Far greater disruption than schools

Big difference.

At schools the staff turn up at work and teach.  I'm well aware of what uni provision has often looked like so far. 

 

I was asking those in the know about it on here a few months back, and got offered some very useful insights on it from people in that sector.  The thread can sometimes have value.

 

[Squalor Vic]

28 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

I am too.

Plenty of kids do already leave without sitting any exams of course, and will do this year even if exams run normally.  The crazy bit this year without them, though, would be that there would be kids leaving S6 and heading to university having never sat a formal exam.

I really don't think that'll be the case though.

Yeah I get that, my daughter is S6 and I feel for all the kids in that bracket. Exams are pressure enough as it is, the whole feeling of 'fail this and you've failed at life' sword of damoclese that hangs over them, without the huge disruption in their learning. 

 

[Monkey Tennis]

1 hour ago, strichener said:

 

I notice that you have went from folk being gleeful to not being downbeat.

I suppose there's no great surprise that you don't get how language can be varied for effect, if you're capable of writing "have went".

[Elixir]

Hahahahahahaha

 

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Do you reckon?
I think exams will go ahead and it'll unfold relatively smoothly.
The statement from the SQA last week also highlighted that courses had been modified at the outset to allow for any disruption to attendance of staff and pupils.
Surely we can't have a third successive year of undermined grading.

I genuinely think there might be issues.

Pupils who've never sat exams, some with weeks missed due to self-isolation, on more than one occasion, what could possibly go wrong . . .

I've already heard rumblings from one local school about covering their backs because of potential legal action from certain parents.

[ayrunitedfw]

What’s the rules around testing when returning to the UK? I’m travelling to Cancun on 25th January and returning on 4th February. I’m hoping to attend the Ayr game the next day. I take it that’s totally out the question? 

[Frankie S]

8 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Would it not be rather strange to say "England had a pretty good 2021 in terms of COVID" by way of contrast with Scotland anyway?  (I know you didn't say it by the way)

In terms of deaths, neither did great.  In terms of restrictions, they spent much of the year following pretty similar paths.  It was only really at the very end of 2021 that we saw significant divergence.

I know your schtick here is to be the contrarian ‘voice of reason’ who sets the wrong-thinking dolts right, delivering your insights with your customary dose of condescension, but you’re just blatantly wrong here.

I’ll bypass the relative differences in approach which saw me sitting with my son in an empty Hampden a full 3 hours before the opening Euro match against Czech Republic nursing a cup of lukewarm water (and my prescribed maximum A4-sized bag of snacks brought from home) with the cold beers and steak pie I enjoyed at Wembley for the England v Italy final, and confine myself to the restrictions that affected my businesses in 2021, and how these differed from those imposed on their English counterparts.

In my sectors (hospitality, live music, nightclubs and events) the differences between Scotland and England, in terms of restrictions, were never as marginal as Scot Gov’s apologists would have us believe. 

We spent the early months of 2021 in lockdown, which eventually gave way to the purgatorial realm of the Scottish tier system. Thankfully Scot Gov’s absurd recorded music ban was lifted (the only such ban in the civilised world), which after the sector reopened in late July 2020 (implemented mid Aug 2020) had eliminated what little atmosphere it was possible to generate in socially-distanced bars, a characteristically joyless act of a puritanical government that has absolutely no affinity for music or for culture, and little tolerance for the demon drink.

On 17th May 2021, indoor hospitality venues in England were permitted to reopen (with normal licensing hours) and Scotland (with the initial exception of Glasgow) was permitted to move to level 2 restrictions, in which pubs could reopen (those of us that hadn’t jumped at the irresistible opportunity of repurposing ourselves as cafes and serving soft drinks and coffees / teas with a 6.00pm curfew in Tier 3), serving alcohol only with a meal, and with a strict curfew of 10.30pm (which meant customers vacating the building at that time, so effectively last orders at 10.00pm, as if the virus only came out at night) and maximum group sizes of 6 from 3 households. England’s ‘rule of 6’ never stipulated a maximum number of households, so 6 from 6 was acceptable there. Most pubs (mine included) do the majority of their business between 10.00 and 1.00am, so arbitrarily closing bars at the back of 10.00pm effectively rendered hitherto viable businesses completely unprofitable, which in tandem with the vastly reduced capacities associated with social distancing was a terminal two-pronged threat for many outlets. 

By contrast with England, Scot Gov burdened Scottish businesses with this early curfew nonsense, which merely resulted in people being decanted en masse at the same time from socially-distanced managed environnements with Covid mitigations in place into non-socially-distanced environments with no such mitigations, such as house parties and similar gatherings, and Scot Gov also insisted on an advance bookings only policy, in strict two hour time slots, which merely encouraged people to book multiple outlets, only ever planning to go to one, resulting in hordes of no shows, with those customers that did show up having to leave after two hours to go somewhere else (presumably dispersing the virus rather more efficiently than having customers stay put) while outlets wondered if the next table booking was even going to show up.

On 19th July 2021, nightclubs reopened in England - live music concerts could take place at 100% capacity and social distancing in hospitality and related sectors was abandoned. In Scotland, by contrast, nightclubs did not reopen. Nightclubs weren’t even allowed to open in Tier 0 of the tier system. Non socially distanced concerts could not take place, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which contributes massively to the Scottish economy, and which is predicated on the raison d’être of small events in small indoor venues, was effectively cancelled for the second year in a row, with a farcically emaciated facsimile of the event scheduled to take place almost exclusively in large socially-distanced outdoor gazebos, as socially distanced gigs are simply not viable in indoors settings, small clubs especially. Meanwhile English gigs, cabaret, comedy and other events were taking place in late July and early August at full capacity. As it happens, Scot Gov finally lifted Covid restrictions on August 9th, one week into the Fringe calendar and far too late for venues to schedule any meaningful programmes of events, non socially distanced gigs were allowed to take place again and nightclubs were finally allowed ro reopen, three weeks after England. Might not seem like a long time, but England had been signalling the end of restrictions leading up to 19th July for months, while Scotland characteristically prevaricated and effectively sabotaged one of its major cultural assets - the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.

And of course in Scotland, we just had to make life that bit more difficult for our already beleaguered events, live music and nightclub sectors by introducing vaccine passports barely a couple of months after these long-shuttered businesses had finally reopened, with the shonkiest least fit-for-purpose app imaginable, which (initially at least) almost no-one could get to work, and which resulted in an immediate loss of footfall of circa 40% across these sectors.

Needless to say, just when businesses were starting to recover from that massive blow, Omicron reared it’s head and the vaccine passport regime, implemented at great cost, and requiring the recruitment of additional dedicated staff to enforce, proved (like the extensive and expensive Covid mitigations implemented throughout hospitality) to be absolutely no protection to these businesses being shuttered or heavily restricted again at the first opportunity.

In early December, Scot Gov decimated Scottish businesses’ lucrative Christmas trade with its entirely predictable overreaction to the Omicron variant, which the data from South Africa had already suggested was milder by far than Delta. The perennial bête noires nightclubs were closed again. Public Health Scotland, the FM and her Scot Gov minions told people to cancel their Christmas nights out and avoid busy hospitality settings, absolutely destroying (by far) the most profitable month of the year for these businesses, after almost two full punishing years of restrictions. As we know, England carried on more or less as normal, with little appreciable difference in case incidence or indeed in rates of hospitalisations or deaths. 

‘Business in Scotland’ statistics suggest that 20,000 Scottish businesses failed during the first 12 months of the pandemic, to March 2021. I wonder what that figure is now? I imagine the Scottish government will be dreading the release of the updated figures.

So, spare me your trite, Ill-informed nonsense about how Scotland’s regime of restrictions has varied little from England’s, because as someone who is very familiar with the minutiae of the restrictions and regulations to date, it’s patent nonsense. Scottish businesses have since virtually Day 1 one of the pandemic been subject to significantly tighter restrictions than their English counterparts (with these regulations often being arbitrary, counter-productive, inconsistent and self-contradictory), and with generally less government support to boot.

I sat in on a Zoom meeting on Tuesday with representatives of live music venues from throughout the U.K. (as I have often done over the last couple of years) and the general reaction from our English counterparts when discussing the consistently more onerous Scottish (and Welsh and Northern Irish for that matter) restrictions is a mixture of sympathy and incredulity. We have rarely if ever been on the same page as our English counterparts.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Frankie S

[Dons_1988]

8 hours ago, Monkey Tennis said:

What?

I'm still not seeing much that tells me I'd have had a wildly different first 51 weeks of 2021, had I lived 30 miles further south.

Oh ok, so it’s about your own personal experience of it? Noted. 

@Frankie S has already given you a much bigger humbling than I could anyway. 

 

 

[Monkey Tennis]

5 hours ago, RAITHROVERS84 said:

 I’d be back in Scotland the next day where the lesbo krankie has us living in misery. 

Gosh.

[Monkey Tennis]

19 minutes ago, Dons_1988 said:

Oh ok, so it’s about your own personal experience of it? Noted. 

@Frankie S has already given you a much bigger humbling than I could anyway. 

Frankie's input is of course, also entirely reliant on his own experience of it.

 

 

Frankie's input is of course, also entirely reliant on his own experience of it.

I largely accept what he's saying though.  The night time sectors did have more  different approaches than I'd appreciated.  I had already conceded that our Festive picture was quite different though, so that part was unnecessary.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Monkey Tennis

[ddfg]

6 hours ago, ayrunitedfw said:

What’s the rules around testing when returning to the UK? I’m travelling to Cancun on 25th January and returning on 4th February. I’m hoping to attend the Ayr game the next day. I take it that’s totally out the question? 

Depends on your vaccination status but if thats all done you don't need to isolate unless you test postive when you do your mandatory LFT. 

BBC News - Covid in Scotland: Pre-departure travel tests to be scrapped
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-59901144

[jimbaxters]

3 hours ago, Frankie S said:

I know your schtick here is to be the contrarian ‘voice of reason’ who sets the wrong-thinking dolts right, delivering your insights with your customary dose of condescension, but you’re just blatantly wrong here.

I’ll bypass the relative differences in approach which saw me sitting with my son in an empty Hampden a full 3 hours before the opening Euro match against Czech Republic nursing a cup of lukewarm water (and my prescribed maximum A4-sized bag of snacks brought from home) with the cold beers and steak pie I enjoyed at Wembley for the England v Italy final, and confine myself to the restrictions that affected my businesses in 2021, and how these differed from those imposed on their English counterparts.

In my sectors (hospitality, live music, nightclubs and events) the differences between Scotland and England, in terms of restrictions, were never as marginal as Scot Gov’s apologists would have us believe. 

We spent the early months of 2021 in lockdown, which eventually gave way to the purgatorial realm of the Scottish tier system. Thankfully Scot Gov’s absurd recorded music ban was lifted (the only such ban in the civilised world), which after the sector reopened in late July 2020 (implemented mid Aug 2020) had eliminated what little atmosphere it was possible to generate in socially-distanced bars, a characteristically joyless act of a puritanical government that has absolutely no affinity for music or for culture, and little tolerance for the demon drink.

On 17th May 2021, indoor hospitality venues in England were permitted to reopen (with normal licensing hours) and Scotland (with the initial exception of Glasgow) was permitted to move to level 2 restrictions, in which pubs could reopen (those of us that hadn’t jumped at the irresistible opportunity of repurposing ourselves as cafes and serving soft drinks and coffees / teas with a 6.00pm curfew in Tier 3), serving alcohol only with a meal, and with a strict curfew of 10.30pm (which meant customers vacating the building at that time, so effectively last orders at 10.00pm, as if the virus only came out at night) and maximum group sizes of 6 from 3 households. England’s ‘rule of 6’ never stipulated a maximum number of households, so 6 from 6 was acceptable there. Most pubs (mine included) do the majority of their business between 10.00 and 1.00am, so arbitrarily closing bars at the back of 10.00pm effectively rendered hitherto viable businesses completely unprofitable, which in tandem with the vastly reduced capacities associated with social distancing was a terminal two-pronged threat for many outlets. 

By contrast with England, Scot Gov burdened Scottish businesses with this early curfew nonsense, which merely resulted in people being decanted en masse at the same time from socially-distanced managed environnements with Covid mitigations in place into non-socially-distanced environments with no such mitigations, such as house parties and similar gatherings, and Scot Gov also insisted on an advance bookings only policy, in strict two hour time slots, which merely encouraged people to book multiple outlets, only ever planning to go to one, resulting in hordes of no shows, with those customers that did show up having to leave after two hours to go somewhere else (presumably dispersing the virus rather more efficiently than having customers stay put) while outlets wondered if the next table booking was even going to show up.

On 19th July 2021, nightclubs reopened in England - live music concerts could take place at 100% capacity and social distancing in hospitality and related sectors was abandoned. In Scotland, by contrast, nightclubs did not reopen. Nightclubs weren’t even allowed to open in Tier 0 of the tier system. Non socially distanced concerts could not take place, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which contributes massively to the Scottish economy, and which is predicated on the raison d’être of small events in small indoor venues, was effectively cancelled for the second year in a row, with a farcically emaciated facsimile of the event scheduled to take place almost exclusively in large socially-distanced outdoor gazebos, as socially distanced gigs are simply not viable in indoors settings, small clubs especially. Meanwhile English gigs, cabaret, comedy and other events were taking place in late July and early August at full capacity. As it happens, Scot Gov finally lifted Covid restrictions on August 9th, one week into the Fringe calendar and far too late for venues to schedule any meaningful programmes of events, non socially distanced gigs were allowed to take place again and nightclubs were finally allowed ro reopen, three weeks after England. Might not seem like a long time, but England had been signalling the end of restrictions leading up to 19th July for months, while Scotland characteristically prevaricated and effectively sabotaged one of its major cultural assets - the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.

And of course in Scotland, we just had to make life that bit more difficult for our already beleaguered events, live music and nightclub sectors by introducing vaccine passports barely a couple of months after these long-shuttered businesses had finally reopened, with the shonkiest least fit-for-purpose app imaginable, which (initially at least) almost no-one could get to work, and which resulted in an immediate loss of footfall of circa 40% across these sectors.

Needless to say, just when businesses were starting to recover from that massive blow, Omicron reared it’s head and the vaccine passport regime, implemented at great cost, and requiring the recruitment of additional dedicated staff to enforce, proved (like the extensive and expensive Covid mitigations implemented throughout hospitality) to be absolutely no protection to these businesses being shuttered or heavily restricted again at the first opportunity.

In early December, Scot Gov decimated Scottish businesses’ lucrative Christmas trade with its entirely predictable overreaction to the Omicron variant, which the data from South Africa had already suggested was milder by far than Delta. The perennial bête noires nightclubs were closed again. Public Health Scotland, the FM and her Scot Gov minions told people to cancel their Christmas nights out and avoid busy hospitality settings, absolutely destroying (by far) the most profitable month of the year for these businesses, after almost two full punishing years of restrictions. As we know, England carried on more or less as normal, with little appreciable difference in case incidence or indeed in rates of hospitalisations or deaths. 

‘Business in Scotland’ statistics suggest that 20,000 Scottish businesses failed during the first 12 months of the pandemic, to March 2021. I wonder what that figure is now? I imagine the Scottish government will be dreading the release of the updated figures.

So, spare me your trite, Ill-informed nonsense about how Scotland’s regime of restrictions has varied little from England’s, because as someone who is very familiar with the minutiae of the restrictions and regulations to date, it’s patent nonsense. Scottish businesses have since virtually Day 1 one of the pandemic been subject to significantly tighter restrictions than their English counterparts (with these regulations often being arbitrary, counter-productive, inconsistent and self-contradictory), and with generally less government support to boot.

I sat in on a Zoom meeting on Tuesday with representatives of live music venues from throughout the U.K. (as I have often done over the last couple of years) and the general reaction from our English counterparts when discussing the consistently more onerous Scottish (and Welsh and Northern Irish for that matter) restrictions is a mixture of sympathy and incredulity. We have rarely if ever been on the same page as our English counterparts.

Telt! Well done sir.

[jimbaxters]

4 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Frankie's input is of course, also entirely reliant on his own experience of it.

I largely accept what he's saying though.  The night time sectors did have more  different approaches than I'd appreciated.  I had already conceded that our Festive picture was quite different though, so that part was unnecessary.

On who's experience should he base it? That's an insight into a sector which, presumably, you see as a consumer. Straight from the horse's mouth and you "largely accept" it? That's quite staggering tbh.

[Monkey Tennis]

1 minute ago, jimbaxters said:

On who's experience should he base it? 

His own.

I was responding to the charge that I'd done similar.

[RAITHROVERS84]

5 hours ago, beardy said:

 

 

 

The 'lesbo krankie', see whether you agree or not with the SNP this type of rhetoric just marks you out as an absolute w****r.

 

 

Ok fair enough..I’ll admit an unnecessary comment at my end. 
 

Will not detract my opinion however that she’s an utterly appealing politician and Scotland is in a worst state with her as FM

[Dons_1988]

Just now, RAITHROVERS84 said:

she’s an utterly appealing politician

 

33 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Frankie's input is of course, also entirely reliant on his own experience of it.

I largely accept what he's saying though.  The night time sectors did have more  different approaches than I'd appreciated.  I had already conceded that our Festive picture was quite different though, so that part was unnecessary.

good that you acknowledge that but your original ‘cosmetic’ comment was both idiotic and crass. 

[Monkey Tennis]

3 minutes ago, Dons_1988 said:

good that you acknowledge that but your original ‘cosmetic’ comment was both idiotic and crass. 

Perhaps.

It was said in reference to VT's much less detailed post, which relied mainly on differences in directives on masks and social distancing though.

If you look back, I did actually ask a couple of times about what the differences were, first of all to you actually, then VT.  That Frankie took the trouble to post at such length is therefore welcome.

As you know, my contributions on here are characterised by a winning humility.  It's therefore always good to be put right if labouring under any misapprehensions.