Just say it's a UEFA final or Silverstone. The virus doesn't apply to them.

It's here: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/coro...tests-238.html

Exactly... the longer this continues the better. :) My local has said they'll continue using an app for table service, but will give people the option of going to the bar.

I'm also loving timed entries to places of interest (well to me at least!) such as Bletchley Park, IWM, Cabinet War Rooms, HMS Belfast, etc, so much more civilised. And all the pubs and restaurants that now seem to do takeaway in an "order via the app" fashion. That needs to stay.

Less than 12 hours to go now. :)

The self isolation thing is going to get unsustainable very shortly at this rate of case numbers.
I am thinking that testing positive for the virus should not mean you have to self isolate anymore if you are not symptomatic and have been jabbed, because otherwise everyone will have to should the case numbers pass 100,000 a day.

They need to look at this a different way, the virus is not as dangerous as it used to be now that vulnerable are vaccinated.

The amount of testing is causing this I feel.

Which I guess is an argument against the facile notion of having to live with Covid, current jargon which i reckon translates into letting the virus rip until antibodies conferred by a combination of vaccines and infection deliver herd immunity. That would eventually happen, but surely far better is a programme more strongly geared to deliver community immunity via vaccination rather than infection, by delaying the nonsense of freedom day by a month or so..

Once the infection rate is under control, Covid might well become another background disease. That will be a time we can live with Covid, in the sense that we can return to a life recognisable from pre-covid times.

Both your hostility to fransknorge, and your (deliberate?) misrepresentation of the arguments made by those who have a different view to you, are in bad faith.

Deaths are one metric but they have never been the only metric, even in the UK. Remember the government tagline from last March/April? “Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives”. That middle bit about protecting health system capacity is still absolutely applicable.

The comment “the vaccines are working. End of”, this is a simplistic and misleading account of a complex situation. Yes, they are working, but that is not the “end of” anything. The way you repeatedly grossly misrepresent this suggests you’ve been ignoring the patient explanations of people like corporate-wage-slave for why this is the case.

Despite the positive impact of vaccines, we are at almost 4,000 people in hospital with Covid at present. That impacts on care for lots of other things as well as Covid, and will only get worse as cases rise: at present we still only have ~52% of then population vaccinated.

As I and others have said repeatedly in the last few weeks, a small percentage of a very large number of people is still a large number of people.

I think logically that leads to the question, what is the number of people in hospital with covid that the NHS can cope with and not lead to unacceptable levels of disruption?

Well, as I linked to in one of my other posts already the other days, it is already causing disruption - Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Trust is already cancelling planned surgeries. As usual this becomes visible in specific areas first, and I absolutely concede that there have always been pressures on the NHS. The difference is that we’ve now got 15 months of backlog to be cleared, on top of the usual pressures, on top of the Covid surge itself.

While it is possible to operate significantly above usual intensive care capacity (I’ve seen figures of 200% and more for the January surge) there are inevitable costs associated with that. So it is very far from desirable. It is because of those costs that we really don’t want to be in a situation where we have 39,000 people in hospital with Covid, like we were in January, even if it is technically ‘possible’.

As for what an acceptable level of hospitalisations are before this starts impacting in a way that people care about - good question. I guess it is one of those things that is “out of sight, out of mind” until you’re the one whose appointment or surgery is cancelled.

So I would suggest paying some attention to those in charge of NHS trusts and planning who have professional experience in these matters, who have been warning of the dangers of in constrained Covid spread for some time now. And paying less attention to people online who insist with no evidence that everything will be fine.

So what is the number then at which our hospitals get overwhelmed and disruption is absolute? Did it happen countrywide in the UK when it was running rife with no vaccines? Why have the Nightingale centres mostly been decommissioned? You and others cannot or will not put a number on when you want to remove your tin foil. I am quite happy to accept the risk from looking at the ONS and PHE. All seems reasonable to me at the moment. It's time to get on with life and deal with however that unfolds.

I remember President Trump blaming increased Covid testing for the acceleration in US Covid infection rates.

His solution, maybe tongue in cheek, maybe not, was to cut the testing.

With respect, I think you are only looking at this with a narrow pov rather than trying to take in to account all the other issues around whether to keep restrictions or delay the end of lockdown. If 4000 is too many I would like to understand what the number is as surely that in your mind drives whether we have lifting of restrictions delayed or even new ones imposed. If the number is as low as say 1000 then I think we need to admit that means restrictions for many many years to come - I think you need to be honest if that’s what you are arguing.

what is your exit strategy from the pandemic? The vaccine isn’t 100% so there will always be some hospitalisations whenever you do that. As I quoted from the latest SAGE report a few days ago, delaying another month or two doesn’t necessarily give a big benefit at all in terms of potential hospitalisations and starts pushing the exit wave in to autumn/winter which would lead to more disruption potentially than doing it now.

See my reply to KARFA above. I'm not an expert in this field, but I would suggest paying attention to those who are. You seem to be viewing this as a simple 'black/white' scenario - 'overwhelmed and everything falls apart' or 'everything is absolutely fine'. Much like how vaccinations protect us, this is a simplistic and inaccurate way of understanding a complex problem - it isn't a case of 'they work' or 'they don't work'.

It is that they work to some degree (a very good degree, which is one of the reasons I'm glad to be alive in the 21st century and not the 19th). One hospital cancelling surgery clearly isn't the whole health system falling over. Is 50% of the hospitals in a given trust doing the same? Or all hospitals in a region? There are shades of grey here. If your elective surgery is cancelled and it doesn't have any long term impacts, you could legitimately say "so what". But if your elective surgery being cancelled means that something important is missed and you have a life-threatening result you might well be more miffed. But if it's just you, so what? What if it's 100 people? 1000 people?

I don't have the answers to this question - but my point is that to portray it as a simple binary is massively unhelpful because it is not.

To your specific points: I know enough about health service delivery to know that having a bunch of large well equipped Nightingale hospitals is all very well but if you don't have the highly trained MDTs to operate them, they're not much use.

And finally, rather than addressing the fact that I called you out for ad-hominem attacks on another forum member, you have simply reiterated them by implying I'm a conspiracist.

However this unfolds, I very much hope you are not impacted by pressures on the health service.

The SAGE meeting minutes show the Government doesn't know at what point hospitals are overwhelmed, as it is an action point from the last meeting.

But given the effectiveness of vaccines, all but the most pessimistic models show hospital admissions peaking below January 2021 levels. In terms of NHS waiting lists - the best option from SAGE was to gradually remove restrictions through summer (and not later to avoid pushing cases into winter). The decision to remove all restrictions tomorrow is based on the acceptance that normal NHS services will be impacted, hence Sajid looking to move this part into private sector health care.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collec...ings-july-2021

I disagree - I'm very conscious of the other factors, including the SAGE report you mention - and I don't know what the number is, because this is not my area of expertise. I'm certainly not saying "we must stay locked down forever", but what the "best" way forward is, I don't know.

I am simply pointing out that 1) the current number is already causing some problems (how manageable those are, I don't know); and 2) a scenario of exponential growth that continues on current trends will cause more problems. I suspect that a rate that is increasing is much more of a problem than a constant steady rate of (say) 1000 or 4000 or whatever.

I am putting these points forward simply as a counter to the overly simplistic view being put forward by others which boils down to "cases don't matter, the vaccine works, that's the end of the matter". Because it is pretty obvious that this isn't true.