Silvaire wrote:
It remains fact that nobody I have ever met in my lifetime has had Coronavirus. We’ll see if that remains true forever.
Not everybody is so lucky. My next-door-neighbour had it a few months back.
More accurately, since the UK had stopped testing by then, he had Covid-like symptoms and was told to stay at home to see what happened.
He was ill enough to lose his beer paunch, but recovered. Subjectively, I think he looks noticably “older” than before. His wife had no symptoms.
One case does not illustrate much, although perhaps it does show up the problem with the “number of cases” statistic, in particular its dependence on how many people are being tested :-)
People look older just after they have lost weight, because fat stretches out the wrinkles 
He will live longer and in better health, hopefully.
I still don’t directly know anybody who has had it, and I don’t expect this to change, with the number of currently infected being of the order of 100ppm in this part of the UK (Sussex). Further up north it is very different, in places.
I think Gallois is spot on. A vaccine looks like the only endgame in this. It is so infectious, and so many people think they are invincible, that it isn’t going to go away, and even if it de facto dies out in the countryside there will continue to be communities (dense living, cultural aspects, etc) where it will continue to live and spread. And since most have not been infected, the next ski season will get it going again nicely just like last time.
And GA is a great safe way to travel
@Siveraire
You wrote:
“It remains fact that nobody I have ever met in my lifetime has had Coronavirus. We’ll see if that remains true forever.”
We we don’t know each other but I got it (positive test dating from 31/07). I just get back my first negative test after going through a light case (one unpleasant night with fever and chills followed by 3-4 days of tiredness, sleeping, diarrhoea and being in a fog). I’ve been fine for a week and went for a 5 k run this morning.
I got it dancing with a woman who turned out to be positive (after initial negative tests-I also had negatives). We tested because of contact with someone else who came down with it, but we tested too early). Neither of us had symptoms at first. The truth is, this disease CANNOT BE CONTROLLED except by total lockdown. Why not? Because at the beginning you are contagious but don’t have symptoms. If you test early on, you’re likely to get a false negative. I now know 10 people who have had it (all mild cases). Almost all of them talk about false negatives, followed by stubborn insistence on additional tests (my dance teacher was sure she had it, saying “In my entire life I have never been sick in the summer. I’m sure I have it.” She tested again and it turned out so). It is highly contagious, so it will come to you eventually. You can count on it.
The only realistic way to diminish the disease outside of lockdown is to wear masks. I urge you all to take that seriously.
If you’re health is good, your odds of a light case are quite good. But that still leaves a lot of vulnerable people out there…
According to this (and yeah another trash newspaper but no other paper not behind a paywall carries the more interesting stuff) CV19 has been around for a lot longer.
And getting back to the more usual respectable newspaper 
the world is really coming to an end.
Here in the UK we now have a scandal around exam results, and I wonder how other countries in Europe have dealt with this.
Basically, exams were not held due to CV19. So exam grades were awarded on the basis of teacher assessment. Currently we are talking about the exams at age 18 (“A”-levels here in the UK); the age 16 ones (GCSEs) are not due to be done for some weeks. A-levels are almost entirely used to get into a university.
The “teacher grades” were then adjusted up/down according to a previously known tendency for a discrepancy, for a particular school. At schools in well-off areas, where the kids tend to do better, the teachers were down-marking during the course (in mock exams, etc), to make the kids work harder. At schools in poorer areas, where the kids tend to do worse (lots of reasons e.g. lack of parental interest in their education etc etc) the teachers were up-marking to make the kids feel better. The adjustment to the “teacher grades” was then up, and down, respectively. This caused a predictable explosion, even more predictable in current times (BLM, etc), because the kids from poorer areas (obviously correlating with ethnic minorities etc) got downgraded and in many cases did not reach the desired univ entrance grades. Up- and down-marking is always done, otherwise you would get constant grade inflation, but (a) the system adjusts the grades to achieve an inflation of about 2% a year and (b) the averages used are from the whole country, not on a per-school basis. The dumb govt department doing this should have seen it coming…
There is no obvious solution because if CV19 prevents sitting the exams then “something else” has to be done. It would be wrong to rob the kids of a year of their life, by doing the exams in 2021. Probably the only solution which would prevent a political storm is to give everybody the “nice” grades they want, but the big problem with that is downstream: everybody in recruitment will know that a lot of applicants from 2020 have bogus grades, and will be rejected (by universities, or by companies) against other candidates, according to rather obvious criteria… There is no free lunch.
I wonder how other countries have dealt with this. Has anyone done final exams on Zoom? It may not be possible with schoolchildren due to the volume, but it is done in other areas.
There is an entirely separate debate, on “continuous assessment” versus exams, but the former is shunned by the “educational purists” especially the universities. I did this at college (16-18) and the univs forced a total disregarding of the course marks, on the stupid grounds that people can cheat, but can’t cheat in exams. Actually I have never worked so hard in my life, before or after, as I did on that college course (OND in Technology), cheating was impossible at any useful level, but the % of kids dropping out would make it unviable
I got it dancing with a woman
In that case I will live for ever; can’t dance
Dancing in close embrace with beautiful women adds 50% to your life expectancy…. :). So I will live forever +50%!
Was it worth it @WhiskeyPapa?
I don’t think so, because anything more than dancing would increase proximity and would therefore be a more significant reportable event.
England’s adoption of a 28-day cutoff on counting CV19 deaths (e.g. if you test positive and 30 days later you get run over by a car, does not get you counted as a CV19 death) has reduced the total by 10%. I believe Sweden does the same thing.
@Ibra
This being an anonymous forum, I can answer honestly, without concern for PC and looking responsible: hell yeah, it was worth it.
I understand I can be shamed for that answer, this is a more complex question than the moralising in the press allows us to acknowledge or discuss. I and others were super disciplined for 3 months. There are real costs to this sort of separation—there are people who have no source of livelihood if they strictly follow the rules. What are they to do? There are a whole host of other costs aside from the economic, including psychological and social. It is only fair to consider these costs as well. (For that matter, if we take an honest look solely at the risks, while ignoring the upside, none of us should be flying light planes or even driving for that matter.)
Let me make clear, I have no respect for the anti-mask propaganda on the right in the US. I think that is the best measure we can take while preserving much of the rest of social functioning.
There are people who need to dance and perfectly prepared to take the risk for themselves. The only argument against this choice is that that you might be putting others at risk. I have been extremely careful with friends and relatives who are in high risk categories. So far I don’t know a single person who got sick who couldn’t afford to. In fact, the sentiment is often “thank God, I’m over with it—it wasn’t that bad.”
Thanks for the honnest answer, for what it worth, it deserve most respect than listening to opinions from the “moralising gangs” or the “anti-mask tribes”!
What really unnerves me is that our government allowed churches and cinemas to open wile schools were closed or were at least semi-closed (only open for 2 days per week). And now in the last weeks there was a discussion about opening soccer matches for spectators but schools still aren’t back to 100%. That really shows what rules the country.
BTW: New Zealand has gotten itself some new Covid cases. And that’s one of the remotest places with still a decent size population on earth. And with heavy quarantine rules for everyone who enters the country.
