For context – Iceland had a total of 30 Covid deaths (pop. 350,000). At their typical suicide rate, they probably had around 40-50 suicides in the same period. Clearly they overdid it with the restrictions – people were less at risk from Covid than they were at risk from themselves.
Biden is now saying the epidemic is an “epidemic of the unvaccinated”, which is more or less what we see here. I wish that could be said here in Europe, without the politicians getting slaughtered.
You know, I’m getting pretty tired of seeing my posts deleted. Sure they’re not 100% on topic, but nor are most.
Of course this will be deleted.
I’m getting pretty tired of seeing my posts deleted
I’ve just checked your profile and it shows just 1 post deleted and that was 8 months ago. Have you got your forums mixed up? This is EuroGA.org 
Hardly anything gets deleted – apart from deliberate and targeted personal attacks, posted mostly by people who know in advance that their post will be deleted.
Food related posts here were moved to the food thread.
On the main topic, this is interesting. For all the suggestions abroad of the UK being “reckless” etc etc, the numbers are heading back down
It will be interesting if this continues. If it does, it suggests that the near-total removal of restrictions on close-up social contact (night clubs etc) is having hardly any effect since they all infected each other really fast
Greece is also levelling off, which is curious since I would expect Greek waiters to be getting herd immunity mainly from English girls from “up north”, but there aren’t so many travelling to Greece right now
IO390 wrote:
I know it’s popular amongst older generations to bash young people, as they always have done , but a cursory look at UK vaccination data shows that the vaccination rates for UK 18-24 year olds are currently only 5% below the national average of 70%.
Agreed!
It’s also worth noting that the 18-24 year olds have had much less time to get vaccinated – the older generation have had months to get theirs. Comparing the 18-24 rate to the general population is Apples and Oranges
Tim Spector from the Zoe App has pointed out the slowing of infection rates in the UK for over 10 days. He might have called the peak about 4 days too early but this is great news if it continues.
Sorry to harp on about this but perhaps it really is the Delta variant causing this in the UK? I am not saying the vaccine is not working and isn’t a significant factor, but I have seen a few sources where they claim that the natural mutation progress of any virus is to get more infectious but have milder effects. Perhaps if this did not happen, then the human race would have been wiped out by an Ebola type plague 10,000 years ago.
For the purposes of debate, let us suppose (just for a minute) that this really was the case. Then the policies by other countries to keep the Delta variant out would have done more harm than good.
We will probably know in about 2 years when the statistics can tease this out. There will be so many PhD’s in this subject over the next 10 years.
And films
I think the numbers are rapidly dropping because
Also inroads have been made into the “ethnic anti-vacc” communities, by showing them stories of people who nearly died, telling them to get on with it.
Ebola doesn’t spread because people feel crap pretty fast and then mostly die. Tom Clancy did a great novel around that, where terrorists spread the stuff around football stadiums. It took a lot of work.
I thought it is interesting to see how similar the two peaks are
The 1st one was thought to be entirely due to the lockdown, and I think that’s probably right. If not, yeah, it’s gonna be quite a story
Archer-181 wrote:
Sorry to harp on about this but perhaps it really is the Delta variant causing this in the UK? I am not saying the vaccine is not working and isn’t a significant factor, but I have seen a few sources where they claim that the natural mutation progress of any virus is to get more infectious but have milder effects.
Apparently there is a lot of differing opinions on this yet. All agree that it is much more infectious. Whether it is a milder variant, opinions vary greatly. Some claim the Delta variant is much more deadly and for heavy illness, others claim the opposite.
Archer-181 wrote:
Then the policies by other countries to keep the Delta variant out would have done more harm than good.
This is a massive problem now for those countries who actually did manage to contain Covid. Basically their only choice now is to vaccinate everyone before they can open up their borders. Before that, strict quarantine and testing of anyone in. Australia, NZ, Taiwan and some others still follow this regime.
Archer-181 wrote:
Perhaps if this did not happen, then the human race would have been wiped out by an Ebola type plague 10,000 years ago.
At its current stage, Ebola is really a jungle disease as it needs humid and high temperatures to propagate. It also has never been proven airborne, even though there is a strain which they claim is (the one Clancy used in “Executive Orders”) but as far as I know it has never been proven so. So Ebola really propagates by very close contact only. Also, Ebola is so violent, that any outbreak will cause massive measures taken and not many will protest or play kindergarten with it. Symptoms are well known to the docs in the area affected so they will know what they have in front of them immediately. Hence, most outbreaks were contained locally.
We should not forget that there have been pandemics before which did wipe out significant parts of the population. The Plague for instance.
Personally I think the policy of basically allowing Delta now to ravage on is dangerous. It will cause a lot of problems, even if it doesn’t kill people, even if hospitalisations are down it can still cause long covid. I know one person who has had almost no effects while sick of it but still has massive long covid effects now. He was in the first wave and still is not able to be back fully to work due to lung and heart issues. Yet, his original symptoms were benign and gone within 2 weeks.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
This is a massive problem now for those countries who actually did manage to contain Covid. Basically their only choice now is to vaccinate everyone before they can open up their borders. Before that, strict quarantine and testing of anyone in. Australia, NZ, Taiwan and some others still follow this regime.
How did these countries plan to end the containment regimes from the beginning? It was already obvious that the disease was not going to go away. Or didn’t they plan that far ahead?
Noting this does anyone know whether the EU vacc passport involves a database lookup?
If so, it may explain why the UK is not recognising it. The EU may have set it up as a scheme for EU member countries only, with adherence to ECHR or whatever. But then the UK govt could just say that, I would think… There must be some reason they are not accepting it but nobody is talking.
Actually I don’t know whether the UK vacc passport involves a database lookup, either. I did a lot of googling and found exactly nothing, but I suspect the UK one does not involve an online check, because it would not be reliable for use in venues if it relies on 100% internet access. They must just be validating the QR code.
Implementations in the former Yugoslavia did/do involve a database lookup.
Remarks here about Ireland indicate that a database is involved.
If you don’t have a database lookup then it has to be presented in conjunction with another ID e.g. a passport whose number is encoded in the QR code.
I think Australia and NZ have painted themselves into a corner.
A certain percentage of the population will be susceptible, vaccine or no vaccine. When it all comes out in the wash, I wonder how many lives they have really saved? There were studies done at the start showing a 6% fall in GDP would kill more people than even a 2% mortality rate. The real mortality rate is much less than this.
When Australia/NZ unlock they will probably have a death rate way above average as frail 98 year olds with comorbidities will have hung on for 1 more year due to the lack of flu etc. Flu and Covid will unfortunately finish them off.
Meanwhile the lockdowns are trashing the education of the young etc. Lockdowns have a massive cost which nobody ever discusses in the media. We need a proper cost/benefit analysis which in 5-10 years we will understand better.
