what i really dont like about this, is under the covid regulations we are not allowed to protest, this is as bad as east germany in the 70's

Edited by thegreatlardino (28 Nov 2020 6.15pm)

Sometimes I set out for Ludlow
Sometimes I end up in Chepstow

I wonder, how many of you are actually directly financially affected by the restrictions, both now and next week?

Making sure that the people, and businesses, that are impacted are compensated is very important. Are you? Shops will reopen, lots are working at home, construction is busy. Are you?

To describe what has happened/will happen as a lockdown seems inaccurate to me when what we really have are restrictions on what we can do, with the promise of them being eased back if we all co-operate and eliminated as a vaccination programme gets established.

Moaning about the accuracy of testing, or the only partial success of track and trace, doesn't change or help, anyone or anything.

The whole point of doing this is to try and ensure we modify our behaviour so as to limit the spread of a highly infectious and dangerous virus before a vaccine becomes available. Not just to prevent deaths, important though that is, but to ensure that our health services remain able to treat all the other things we rely on it for at the time of year when it is normally busiest. Overload the NHS with C19 cases and there would be severe consequences. There have already been some, but it would likely be much worse. Many NHS staff are already suffering from burnout.

Some believe that the cure is worse than the disease but I don't believe that's true. It's easy to claim because it hasn't been seen and the grass is always greener on the other side. The economic impacts will be significant but they can be handled and recovered from, as we have always recovered in the past.

So after comparing the balance of expert opinion with the amateurs pontificating here I think we all ought to follow the advice and just get on with it. I am.

I am lucky. We are in Tier 1 from the start. Get it right and others can be too quite soon.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

I do believe that was the main aim all along to be fair (NHS). So...

I still find it bizarre that people are expecting things to be normal, then surprised when they aren’t

Providing these vaccines are up to the job, as I said months ago, looking at it realistically it will be spring/summer of 2022 before things really start to feel normal again. But I can see winters remaining dicey for a few years - and people certainly won’t be letting go of the paranoia of contact for a long time. That will be hard to shift - vaccines don’t mean this thing goes away. It just becomes yet another flu virus, albeit a far more infectious one that will remain in circulation ad infinitum

As with all things we’ll eventually get used to it and learn to live with it, understand it and become complacent about it all again. But that doesn’t take months, it takes years

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

Not everyone though has followed the advice, have they? Some resisted from the start whilst others have become disaffected as time passed. It's tough, but it's necessary. I know some folk who could be spending Christmas with their family but won't, because they remain fearful. The mental health issues are very real, but if we overload the NHS wards will need to be reallocated and even less treatment available. There are no easy answers. Nothing solves the problems and difficult choices are having to be made which will always find those who disagree.

The important thing surely is that whether we agree or not we all just do it. We must support each other.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

Unfortunately your argument falls flat at the point when you mislabel the debate as expert opinion vs amateur pontification. There are actually 'experts' arguing both sides so really it's a question of whose experts are correct.

I have decided I no longer have faith in the expertise of Boris Johnson who has leapt from one incoherent strategy to the next on an almost weekly basis whilst helping us over the £2 trillion national debt threshold. Nor do I have any particular trust in SAGE, whose deputy chair has revealed that their shambolic early modelling used data taken from Wikipedia. And let's not get started on Whitty and Vallance whose doomsday prediction of 4000 deaths per day throughout the autumn was repeated by the Prime Minister in the Commons days after it was debunked as utter nonsense.

The question marks over the accuracy of the testing aren't really question marks, it is known unequivocally that they are inaccurate to a certain degree and, as I posted a couple of pages ago, the Portuguese courts have officially labelled them as being unreliable. Really the only question is how badly wrong they are but it is expected that a sizeable percentage of the cases are false.

You might not think questioning that accuracy benefits anyone but I'd suggest that the hundreds of thousands of staff in the hospitality industry facing a loss of their livelihoods, the cancer and heart patients who are missing being diagnosed and treated, the mentally vulnerable who are stuck in isolation due to restrictions on household mixing and so on might feel differently if there was a legitimate, strong argument that these draconian measures are all in vain.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold...

Get them to vote it through and then hope they all forget when you don't end it in nine weeks.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold...