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The total population - which is the only figure that matters.

The adult population figure is strictly for media consumption.

The total population figure is the only thing that matters for spread.
The adult figure does affect the proportion likely to end up in hospital or dead.
The ROI has a pretty decent adult figure, but they haven't done the teenagers as well as Spain and Portugal, who have fully vaccinated 80%+ of the population.

Everything flows from cases. So you need to be looking at as high a total population vaccine take up as possible.

Now obviously it's essential that your most at risk groups, ie. the elderly, have as close to 100% take up as possible. But if you have an unvaccinated cohort of any age driving spread it will leak into the most at risk groups, and some of them will be unlucky.

It doesn't matter a jot if that driver is the 18-24 year olds or the 5-11 year olds.

Martin Neil Professor at Queen Mary University London

https://twitter.com/MartinNeil9/status/1466814347762671628?t=ReIXOjXKU44AlhuzPiEcvA&s=19

Congratulations on finding an English equivalent of Dolores Cahill.

How are people accepting going back to restrictions when everyman and his dog has been vaccinated? If the shit show of a health service is overrun at this stage it's feck all to do with covid but the government's lack of investment for years.

76% have been vaccinated. Which means 24% haven't. That's 1.25 million people.

Now Omicron changes the game again.

People will accept restrictions because they are necessary.

If Omicron wasn't around, restrictions over Christmas would still be necessary.

With Omicron around, the token restrictions that were announced last night will be like a chocolate fireguard.

The next week will change the game.

Sid is that 76% of the total population, or adult population?

The total population - which is the only figure that matters.

The adult population figure is strictly for media consumption.

How are people accepting going back to restrictions when everyman and his dog has been vaccinated? If the shit show of a health service is overrun at this stage it's feck all to do with covid but the government's lack of investment for years.

76% have been vaccinated. Which means 24% haven't. That's 1.25 million people.

Now Omicron changes the game again.

People will accept restrictions because they are necessary.

If Omicron wasn't around, restrictions over Christmas would still be necessary.

With Omicron around, the token restrictions that were announced last night will be like a chocolate fireguard.

The next week will change the game.

Regardless of which side your on ... I reckon this is worth 30 minutes of anyones time even if its just to test their own current beliefs about this whole hashter (including how they perceive 'the other side')

Paul Kingsnorth sees the vaccine wars as symptomatic of a bigger division between two fundamentally different world views: he calls them "thesis" and "antithesis." When it comes to Covid, "thesis" is the establishment viewpoint: that lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work, vaccines are safe, and people who question them are wrongheaded or worse. When Covid-19 first struck, Kingsnorth took the "thesis" viewpoint.

But over the last few months, his perspective changed. As he  in today's UnHerd, the crystallising moment arrived when he woke up to the news that the Austrian government had 'interned an entire third of the population'. This move, he writes, sent a 'chill down my spine'.

The "antithesis" view can be summed up as: lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.

In a conversation with Freddie Sayers on this week's UnHerdTV, he explains this division and the bigger epistemological divides it reveals. "People are arguing about vaccines," he says, "but they're really under the surface arguing about what kind of person you are if you have taken these things, whether you're a good or a bad person, or clean or unclean one".

In Kingsnorth's view, each of us has a line that cannot be crossed. And his has now been reached.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SEIY0kLpuYK2nziSgLPsI?si=yTAWV8x6QDu6qMtZB7dWvw&utm_source=native-share-menu

Kingsnorth is a nut. He is a former environmental campaigner (he protested against motorway building in England back in the 1990s) now turned evangelical Christian.

In 2009 he wrote with relish of a "cleansing catastrophe" in the earth's climate and eco-systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncivilization_(manifesto)

And he has carried that "thinking" through to Covid, calling the virus a "delicious sign". These are not the words of somebody who values human life or avoiding mass human suffering.

And it is entirely in keeping with the carry on of the rapture fiends which infest evangelical Christianity.

Whatever sort of a world Kingsnorth wants to live in, I don't want to live in.

"Rip it up and start again" might be a good song by Orange Juice but a serious view of the world it is most definitely not. The world doesn't work that way. It is nihilism.

George Monbiot, who is a former friend of his, has been damning about his turn to the nihilist right.

No need to worry about Omicron.

The word from various Republican and Fox News personalities is that its all a hoax, dreamed up by the Democratic party in the US, to aid in their mid-term election campaign, 11+ months from now.

Shure wouldn't ya know it.

Aseem Malhotra is a British cardiologist, and public health campaigner. He is a visiting professor, author of several books and writer of articles in newspapers, who has written scores of editorials and maintains a high profile on social media and television.

When I hear publishing books, tv media, editorials and so on....I smell bullshit, I smell publicity whore

He's a grifter.

Qatar's Lord Haw Haw is none other than Richard Keys.

Quite the reinvention.

That Jorginho with his stupid penalty taking style is only a cod.

Far too smart for his own good.

A variant with the same lethality but 50% more transmissibility than Delta is far worse for the public health situation than a virus with the same transmissibility but 50% increased lethality.

The apparent transmissibility advantage of Omicron is the big worry here.

Would be lovely if it turned out to be less lethal but that's probably a pipe dream.

New variant now in Europe https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/covid-new-south-african-variant-strain-lockdown-restrictions/

Convenient...

For who?

Them

Sceptical that there is another variant? If you are sceptical why are you sceptical? It was always going to happen was it not?

It's always convenient for THEM.

Which I presume means Van Morrison and his old band.

Maybe Morrison is a double agent?

Interesting to hear why Poland and Slovakia appear to have "low" deaths in comparison to the vaccination programme?
Have they a better than normal healthcare system, spread out population etc that limits the effect of the virus?

Poland had 497 Covid deaths yesterday. Population 38 million.

Slovakia had 71 in a population of 5.4 million.

These are not low death figures, Covid is now ravaging both countries.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/new-coronavirus-variant-reason-concern-say-researchers/

A new coronavirus variant found in 22 cases in South Africa is a "reason for concern", according to researchers.
Three cases of the variant - B.1.1.529 - have also been found in Botswana and there has been one case in Hong Kong, in a patient who had recently visited South Africa.


Scientists have flagged the variant's unusually high levels of mutations, particularly in the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect cells.
Professor Tulio De Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), said the variant had a "very unusual constellation of mutations" and was a "reason for concern" in South Africa. 
Unlike other variants, including delta, which is now dominant globally, and beta, which was detected by Prof de Oliveira's team in South Africa earlier this year, the new variant has not yet been officially classified as a variant of concern.
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Prof De Oliveira said the significance of the variant was still unknown, with scientists monitoring it to assess whether the mutations would have an impact on transmissibility or how dangerous it is. Viruses mutate all the time, and only some of the mutations change how the virus behaves.
Another member of the KRISP team, infectious diseases expert Dr Richard Lessels, added: "There is some concern that B.1.1.529 may have enhanced transmissibility and be able to get around parts of the immune system."

Which won't kill you unless some of you are around about the age of 82, obese or have underlying health conditions or a combo.  Take your vaccine if your in that cohort. Project fear has moved from Brexit to covid.

Social distance, wash/sanitise your hands and you'll be grand.

If you don't fear what this variant could do to societies all over the world you are asleep at the wheel.

This pandemic has a long, long time in which to play out yet.

And if this variant is as bad as it looks - and who is to say there wont be further, even worse ones, the consequences for our world are unknowable, but they are likely to be cataclysmic.

We all have a normality bias to one degree or other, it might be time to start removing it. The existential nature of this for societies just ramps ever upwards.

Plenty if medical experts have been policed and shut down.

Anyway, this is incredibly interesting
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/scientists-mystified-wary-as-africa-avoids-covid-19-disaster-1.5673339

Looks like the big one is coming from South Africa.

It has obliterated Delta there in jig time.

Given Austria's position I thought it would be interesting to see how board members would vote here. Thanks
             A mandatory vaccination scheme is where you are required by law to get vaccinated and face punishment if you do not do so. Those refusing vaccines are likely to face administrative fines which can be converted into a prison sentence if the fine is not recovered.

the totalitarians are winning I see , most would call themselves progressive liberals too .

Oh the irony of a massive Trumpbot saying that:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/22/us-list-backsliding-democracies-civil-liberties-international

US added to list of 'backsliding' democracies for first time
'Visible deterioration' in US civil liberties began in at least 2019, says international thinktank