Well, the numbers are going stratospheric
but apart from a lot of people not coming to work because their nose is running, very little is actually happening
The hospital wards are mostly anti-vaccers now, but it’s a different virus – much like the common cold. Hopefully this is approaching the end of it.
Peter. That is simply untrue about the hospital wards being full of anti-vaxxers. There has been lots of misleading information as the Government was claiming that people without the booster were “not vaxxed”. The BBC pushed this massively too.
I haven’t got the data in front of me but it was something like 28% (approx) who had never had a vaxx in hospital. There are only about 68% of the UK population fully vaxxed (but they keep changing the definition of fully vaxxed so it’s difficult to tell.
The narrative in the media is if you are not vaxxed you are a thicko tin foil hat type and the NHS is stuffed with the unvaxxed and this is causing the problem.
It is more nuanced than that. As one will need 4-5 boosters each year to stay protected the vaxx rate will most likely decline steadily now
Why 4 or 5 boosters per yr?
Here are some figures for France for the 2nd half of december(taken from the Tous Covid app):-
89.7% of the population 12+ vaccinated with all tequired doses.
41.8% of over 12years old fully vacced and boostered
New cases last 24hours 225,104
ICU occupancy 71%
1127 pos tests per 100,000 20yrs old and over
Of which:-
102 per 100,000 were vacced plus booster
426 per 100,000 less than 6 months vacced without booster
437 per 100,000 vacced more than 6 months without booster
182.07 per million over 20 yrs old entered into intensive care per week
4.82 per million of these were vacced with booster
10.42 per million vacced less than 6months without booster
22.64 per million vacced more than 6 months without booster.
By my reckoning that leaves the largest portion of people in intensive care being unvacced.
YMMV
Thank you Gallois. It is impossible to know what to believe. There are about 5.5 Million people who live in Scotland – see below:-
So is it worth shutting down the economy for this?
Yes, omicron is putting only very small numbers in the ICUs, or worse.
A lot of people are getting ill and staying at home, and some are going to hospital but not for long.
The emphasis is now shifting to public sector staff shortages due to people calling in “off sick”, with claims of 25% coming. But this is not happening either; the BBC yesterday showed 60000 NHS workers off sick, while failing to say this is just 4.2% (because BBC viewers are assumed to not know what “percent” is).
No, not worth shutting anything down for this. Especially not skiing 
Peter wrote:
A lot of people are getting ill and staying at home
I think you can replace that with “a lot of people are getting a positive test and staying at home”. Most are not “ill”, at least not in the sense that, if Covid were not a thing, they would stay at home. In normal times we go about our daily lives while feeling a bit crap – this ‘isolate until better’ idea is totally new and totally Covid-specific.
That’s true
A small list of Macron’s last achievements :
Nous mettons une pression sur les non-vaccinés en limitant pour eux, autant que possible, l’accès aux activités de la vie sociale. […] Moi, je ne suis pas pour emmerder les Français. Je peste toute la journée contre l’administration quand elle les bloque. Eh bien là, les non-vaccinés, j’ai très envie de les emmerder. Et donc on va continuer de le faire, jusqu’au bout
Reverso translation :
We put pressure on the non-vaccinated by limiting, as far as possible, access to activities of social life. […] I am not here to piss off the French. I plague the administration all day long when it blocks them. Well, now, the unjabbed, I really want to f-ck with them. And so we will continue to do it, until the end
Then he mentions them as “no longer citizens” etc…
WTF ??
Is there any reason a President should say so about millions of law-abiding people ? Do we say so about terrorists ?
Election is in April. Is that a new political strategy ? Let’s hope this is the end he is talking about
What’s the next stop ? Intern people in camps ?
He didn’t quite say what is in that translation, after all he said it on television, but the sentiment is correct. He’s pissed off with people refusing to get vaccinated when the hospitals are filling up with them and blocking others also in need of urgent treatment.
Of course he still has to get his latest plans through the legislature.
Mind if many doctors had their way the new measures would be far more draconian.
They are angry at having to turn non Covid patients away when they too are in need of urgent treatment when some anti vaxxer has got a bad case of Covid and is taking up all of their time and all the facilities.
Some doctors are now calling for the unvaccinated to pay for their treatment if they are taking up ICU space with Covid.
This could certainly turn ugly
Nice analysis of this on the this morning’s Guardian. Predictably every opposition politician, of every type, is “outraged” that he would use such language and that he would dare say anything against the oppressed anti-vaxx morons^H^H^H^H^H^H freedom seekers.
But – practically none of them were going to vote for him in the first place. And the 90%+ who are vaxxed are very happy that in France you can pretty much lead a normal life, and have no issue at all with showing their passes sanitaires when asked. And I’d guess that most of those people – who are likely to vote for him – agree 100% with what he says.
