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Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

The concept that an individual needs to be protected by removing the rights of all others when 99% of individuals can choose to be vaccinated and made immune anytime they want would be mindless. The latter is the case in this area so we are getting back to normal hereabouts, government is extracting itself from a vast experiment in behavior control on a mass level, where many including me believe it never had either the right or obligation to go.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 09 Jun 14:02

It is a little bit silly that you can’t use the massive overcapacity for testing that must exist now for free.

It definitely exists in Britain, 2 weeks ago a friend ended up in hospital with Covid and we got tested as a precaution at a drive- in site. There were – I am not exaggerating – at least 20 people to direct cars around the site, and there was almost nobody else using the facility. We saw two other cars there, maybe 5 percent of the capacity, or less.

Biggin Hill

Cobalt wrote:

It is a little bit silly that you can’t use the massive overcapacity for testing that must exist now for free.

It would be in opposition, philosophically, to the prevailing political thinking.

That thinking is that taxpayer-funded tests are for those who ‘need’ them from a healthcare perspective. If you do not ‘need’ a test (and nobody ‘needs’ to travel abroad) then you have to pay for it – and of course it’s another great trough for all sorts of profiteering crooks, many with connections to government, to get their snouts into.

There’s nothing quite so good for getting rich as the government basically compelling people to buy a product, preferably one easily bought from China for buttons and sold for a three-figure sum.

The politics of envy are only just below the surface. If you made this testing capacity available to returning holidaymakers and business travellers then the press would be full of stories about how much-needed healthcare resources were being diverted to fund the lifestyle choices of the middle classes. Labour would have a field day.

EGLM & EGTN

Perhaps the government is also engineering a situation where its citizens are more likely to holiday at home instead of going abroad this year?

I suspect, but have no evidence to prove, that people are more likely to book a last minute (or last month or two), holiday to the sun than one to the UK. A UK holiday is probably more centred around sights, which involves a little more planning. So if international travel becomes more available late in the summer, Northern Europe (geographically) is likely to be a net looser to Southern Europe in terms of tourist spend. (People will head south for the sun….anywhere will do….but heading north requires more planning for sights).

So it would be beneficial to the UK tourist and hospitality industries if more people holidayed ‘at home’.
Adding a few hundred to the costs of going on a ‘cheap sun holiday’ might be enough of a tipping points to have more holiday at home this year. Next year hopefully it will be business as normal.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

Very much agree with three posts above.

The vacc centres in Brighton were under-capacity by at least 5x, with a vast number of people making sure you walked in the right place etc. Admittedly, Brighton is full of anti-vaxxers

But the govt (any govt) can’t get this right. If they go under-capacity, they get castigated by the media, so the easy option is to throw money at it. Just read that anything up to 26BN of the 47BN of “bounceback” loans (up to £50k loan) are reckoned to be unrecoverable. Everywhere you look, more or less every self employed trader, more or less every small business, has been playing this game. Easy money! There has also been massive fraud, especially among sole traders, with a lot of the money never having been used for any business purpose.

Just been reading about the track & trace programme. The govt chucked a load of money at it, about 35BN. This went to UK “firms”, mainly operators in the “security” business i.e. natural candidates with the right sort of yellow-jacket types with “compliance capability”, who immediately

  • contracted out phone work to Indian call centres, with huge armies of script monkeys phoning up people like me (I am in quarantine, post- travel abroad, but it is the same thing if somebody you know has tested positive and you have to self isolate)
  • contracted out personal visit work to armies of people, recruiting anybody with a car and a driving license (who must be on an incentive scheme, obviously, otherwise they could just drive around in circles all day, so they will focus on towns, especially the “rougher” areas, rather than the countryside in which you often can’t even find an address)

It is beyond a joke, with the disregard of vacc status, and especially dumb given the very high UK vacc %

Basically, 53.6% of the country is a complete waste of time isolating, quarantining, phoning, visiting, harrassing. Practically none of these will ever get really sick. Those resources could have been deployed elsewhere.

It must be similar in all countries, except that the poorer ones do less business support. In Croatia, there is some business support but much less than in the UK.

It’s unbelievably frustrating, watching this, like watching some slow motion disaster movie. And it is obvious why this is happening.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

dublinpilot wrote:

I suspect, but have no evidence to prove, that people are more likely to book a last minute (or last month or two), holiday to the sun than one to the UK. A UK holiday is probably more centred around sights, which involves a little more planning.

Fully agree. There is a sizeable section of the population (and I was probably part of it in my early twenties) which just walks into a travel agent* and says “two weeks in the sun please, leaving the Saturday after next, don’t care where but the budget is X”.

* of course now it happens online.

EGLM & EGTN

Peter wrote:

Basically, 53.6% of the country is a complete waste of time isolating, quarantining, phoning, visiting, harrassing. Practically none of these will ever get really sick. Those resources could have been deployed elsewhere.

I think that percentage will rise once government stops presenting the illusion that its somehow protecting people who don’t protect themselves. The current percentage is similar here or perhaps a little higher, with anybody having been able to obtain vaccination for many weeks. Its obvious that waiting longer is pointless.

It seems to me that European governments are going to drag out this new role in behavior and border control for as long as it can possibly be justified, whether or not it’s the right thing to do. The politics and popular opinion that as @Graham described might support the chaos are incredible to me. I’m glad I’m not in Europe to see it.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 09 Jun 16:36

Silvaire wrote:

It seems to me that European governments are going to drag out this new role in behavior and border control for as long as it can possibly be justified, whether or not it’s the right thing to do. The politics and popular opinion that as @Graham described might support the chaos are incredible to me. I’m glad I’m not in Europe to see it.

I’m afraid you’re right.

I also think @Graham is right. There is no longer any need to quarantine in the UK. This 4th wave that keeps being mentioned in the UK is a pretty silly one. The UK had 13 COVID related deaths last week. (that is in 1 week). People might be getting a bug but the impact is negligible on the overall health system and the general population is relatively protected from the effects – even of these new strains.

LFHN - Bellegarde - Vouvray France

Silvaire wrote:

The politics and popular opinion that as @Graham described might support the chaos are incredible to me.

Perhaps not actually popular opinion, although certainly the current political narrative.

The loudest voices on this ‘control everything’ idea are opposition politicians and the press who love a sensationalist story. I am quietly confident that the more reasonable/intelligent sectors of British society take a more realistic view.

I worry about the extent to which our politics is driven not by public opinion, but by campaigners, trade unions, journalists and special-interest groups.

EGLM & EGTN

Good points all.

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