Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Ron Aldo]

Its going to be bare minimum October before everybody is vaccinated.  
One case of Covid in ten steps can lead to 59000 cases. With a death rate of one per thousand that's 59 deaths. In normal times about 150 thousand people go to watch professional football in Scotland every week. We can't have a situation where every round of fixtures causes 150 deaths. Its not acceptable.

Please stop.

[Todd_is_God]

3 minutes ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

A case?  Wow that's horrific. We're having thousands every day. They can track all the contacts of that single case and have them isolate and its nipped in the bud. They've had what three deaths in four months, we had a hundred today.  I can't even get my head around this level of idiocy.

Do they have covid, or not?

I'll help you out. If they have a case from community transmission, then they have it.

[Honest_Man#1]

1 minute ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

Then you can go to jail. That's what other countries are doing and what we should do here.

Jails are going to be bursting. The jail for driving home to see family, good one m8.

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

2 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

They are? JA said as much the other day. Vaccines, according to your queen, are the key to getting covid to an acceptable. manageable level like with flu.

That's accepting it's not going away and they will have to live with it, m9

In miniscule amounts, which requires us to get it to that level first. A single case in a population of 4.4 million is nothing.  That's the level it needs to be at.

[Billy Jean King]

A case?  Wow that's horrific. We're having thousands every day. They can track all the contacts of that single case and have them isolate and its nipped in the bud. They've had what three deaths in four months, we had a hundred today.  I can't even get my head around this level of idiocy.

But why would we need a zero Covid fantasy to get to the numbers we had last summer when we opened back up WITHOUT a vaccine.

Why would we be tracking and tracing when virtually no one will be getting seriously I'll once vaccinated. It will simply be another endemic illness the NHS will be able to cope with due to the mitigation of serious illness by the vaccine. What part of that do you not get ?

[Todd_is_God]

15 minutes ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

How could go to a nightclub if there's only a small chance you could catch your death?

^^^ Never been to The Moon

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

2 minutes ago, Inanimate Carbon Rod said:

Yep, there has to come a point, whereby the cost benefit analysis reaches a tipping point, mental health problems, build up of nhs and criminal justice service backlog, the increase in domestic abuse and violence, the destruction of hospitality and travel industry and many other factors has to be balanced very carefully. I absolutely agree that we are not at the stage where we can lift these restrictions, because the risk still outweighs the benefit of lifting. What we need to do is get on board with these existing and new travel restrictions but we need to know at what point we will lift these restrictions, what the threshold is for lifting. The government at Scottish and UK level has promised an adult conversation but failed to keep to this. 
 

No you don't need to know, nobody knows.  You're making unrealistic demands because of cognitive dissonance. They will be lifted when its safe to do so, not before. This is why we let adults be in charge of stuff.

[Todd_is_God]

1 minute ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

In miniscule amounts, which requires us to get it to that level first. A single case in a population of 4.4 million is nothing.  That's the level it needs to be at.

You're floundering my friend.

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

2 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

Do they have covid, or not?

I'll help you out. If they have a case from community transmission, then they have it.

No they don't. A handful of cases in a population of millions is zero, that's what that means.

[vikingTON]

The restrictions put in place last summer were sold at the time as 'the closest to normality you can expect until there's a treatment'. Barely six months later, we are fucking tripping over stacks of effective vaccines and yet an alarming number of people seem to think that being deigned the privilege of seeing friends/family and going to the pub should be the bounds of expectation for the rest of the year. The treatment is there, once serious cases inevitably drop over the weeks to come then those restrictions must go as well.

Early 2021 has been an alarming demonstration of how 24/7 shrieking about 'mutant variants!!!111!!!' can socially condition people to accept needless infringements on their everyday lives. 

[djchapsticks]

Just now, Todd_is_God said:

^^^ Never been to The Moon

I'm pretty sure catching covid in the The Moon would be the least of your worries.

I'd be more worried about catching hepatitis, scabies or a knife in between my ribs...

[Left Back]

1 minute ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

How's about the British Medical Journal

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/369/bmj.m2609.full.pdf

That's talking about elimination which is something completely different to eradication.  It also doesn't state we eliminated the virus.  It's also not a scientific opinion, it's a news report of what Sturgeon and Sridhar claimed.  While we had significantly reduced transmission due to restrictions we were never close to even eliminating the virus.  As someone said that would have required a protective bubble around Scotland with no-one allowed in until it was confirmed they were virus free.  As those measures were never in place it's asinine to claim we were close to even elimination.

To officially claim elimination status takes approval from the WHO which I believe requires 3 years of zero community transmission.

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

2 minutes ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

Jails are going to be bursting. The jail for driving home to see family, good one m8.

Then so be it. In Australia if you break the two week quarantine its two years in jail. That's how they got back to normality.

[super_carson]

1 minute ago, Todd_is_God said:

Pretty sure they had a case the other day. Community transmission too. Odd that, given "they don't have covid"

While I'm not advocating it as a policy, it doesn't mean literally zero-covid.  It just means getting it down to a minuscule amount that becomes much easier to contain.  I think that's a detail that's missed by a few people on both sides of the argument; you will never completely eradicate it, not after nearly a year of it circulating in the population en mass.  We will never be certain that it has been completely eradicated from the country so at some point restrictions will be lifted withthe potential for someone, somewhere, still has it.  So that means, like it has done in NZ and Aus, cases may pop up from time to time - it would be a case of having it driven down to such a level that it's easier to identify these cases.

But in the case of NZ and Aus, "zero-covid" was always going be easier due their geographic isolation.  Bar some of the small  islands like Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, NZ and Aus are thousands of miles from their nearest neighbours.  That means that there are less imported goods, and therefore movement of people, and it's far easier to control the people coming in and out (and remember, even before covid NZ and Aus had some of the toughest border controls).  They also closed their borders sooner, and that was a massive mistake made in the UK, but meant the virus was at a lower prevalence from the beginning.  

What is often not considered is the fact the UK (and I talk about the UK rather than the SG just because borders aren't a devolved matter) has a land border with a foreign country.  We would either need to agree to the same policy as Ireland, close the border between the Republic and North or isolate the island of Ireland completely.  Two of those three scenarios could have serious political implications that would go far beyond the impact of covid.  

Zero-covid is, as I've said before, an admirable policy in terms of dealing with the virus.  But it only takes covid into account, there is no consideration for the economy, education, mental-health or society in general.  In effect, it is a scorched earth policy that carries significant risks that we may well be too far down the road to justify.  

[Billy Jean King]

Its going to be bare minimum October before everybody is vaccinated.  
One case of Covid in ten steps can lead to 59000 cases. With a death rate of one per thousand that's 59 deaths. In normal times about 150 thousand people go to watch professional football in Scotland every week. We can't have a situation where every round of fixtures causes 150 deaths. Its not acceptable.

Even at current rate of 25k everyone would be vaccinated by mid summer ie before the new season so relax you ain't going to die at the fitba. Here's a simpler solution JUST DON'T GO and leave the football to us more risk aware chaps.

[Todd_is_God]

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

2 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:

But why would we need a zero Covid fantasy to get to the numbers we had last summer when we opened back up WITHOUT a vaccine.

Why would we be tracking and tracing when virtually no one will be getting seriously I'll once vaccinated. It will simply be another endemic illness the NHS will be able to cope with due to the mitigation of serious illness by the vaccine. What part of that do you not get ?

And look what happened.  What part of that don't you get?  This can't ever happen again. We have no idea how effective the vaccine will be long-term and we do know, as the actual experts have told us, the longer it is prevalent in our society the more chance of a vaccine resistant strain developing. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

11 minutes ago, Carnoustie Young Guvnor said:

Its just the way it is mate.

How could go to a nightclub if there's only a small chance you could catch your death?

How can you have sixty thousand people packed into a football stadium? Do you realise what a couple of cases of Covid could do in that environment?  Within a few weeks one football game could cause a hundred thousand cases. 

Its not possible to go back to normal until it is eradicated completely. 

That's not to say some restrictions can't be lifted as cases fall, but for life to go back to normal, which is what everyone wants, it needs to be gone completely.

It absolutely blows my mind that anyone could disagree with that, and is just classic cognitive dissonance.

You don't know what cognitive dissonance means.

"Zero covid" as you seem to be terming it here is not physically possible. How could it be? Let's say everyone in Scotland right now was given enough food, money and guarantees about accommodation to stay inside for a month. Nobody leaves their houses at all. If not a month, long enough to confirm that there are no cases of covid in Scotland at all anymore. What then? How do we ensure it doesn't come into the country after that? I'm not even going to try and list examples because they'd be innumerable, and even this scenario can't exist since Scotland isn't a single thing on its own that could do that.

Zero covid is a nice idea and it would be fantastic if it happened, but it can't. However you attempted to try and do it, maintaining even the standards that we've seen over the past ten months (I'll throw you untested international travel, the airports should have been shut in March) would never properly eradicate it. It's not that people don't want zero covid, it's that the measures that would be necessary to achieve it wouldn't be worth the damage caused in the meantime at a time when vaccination programs are underway.

[peasy23]

[Carnoustie Young Guvnor]

3 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

You're floundering my friend.

You just don't understand what you're talking about.  3 or 4 cases in a population of 4.4 million is zero statistically, that's what that is.