well?

Very, thanks for asking. Yourself?

(By the way, it's kind of you to ask, but you posted this on an IT news site, rather than Facebook. It's a little off-topic.)

If this was Facebook it would have been posted as a selfie with the OP next to a well, in imminent danger of falling down said well. Cliffs, bridges, high buildings, aircraft are also available.

If you don't know the military acronym, look it up. With "Freedom Day" our venereal leaders are once again trying to force "Herd Immunity". It may even work, but if they've opened up too early, then in 2-3 weeks time the NHS will be swamped. I hope not, but I fear that it's too soon. They seem to listen to the scientific advice when they feel like it, and ignore it when they don't. Well, from what I am seeing on Farcebook they do seem to represent their electoral demographic with their selfish greed and inability to empathise with any other human being. And for the downvoters,... bring it on.

"They seem to listen to the scientific advice when they feel like it, and ignore it when they don't."

That'll be Boris and his 'I'll continue to shake hands' mantra that worked fine until a week after visiting St Thomas's and shaking hands with the covid patients and doctors treating them.

The big problem was setting a date and promising 'no u-turns'... then doing a u-turn back in June and announcing July... then having to ignore the warnings from just about everyone except the airline/holiday industry and Wetherspoons Tim and having to plough ahead regardless because they can't be seen to do another u-turn

At least part of the rush to open up is allowing the NHS to be swamped in Summer rather than Winter when it's likely to be dealing with the usual seasonal flu & other bugs as well. I can see the logic of that, but it's going to be very, very hard for the ICU beds very soon, I fear.

In any case, their wishy-washy advice on masks is going to cause problems. Not only in terms of spreading COVID but also for the poor sods in retail/hospitality/transport who have to try and enforce it in their shops or whatever in the face of those who refuse to wear them.

allowing the NHS to be swamped in Summer rather than Winter

That's partly as a result of a choice not to vaccinate the under-18s and partly as a result of a choice to end all social distancing which will result in more non-Covid respiratory diseases.

There's nothing inevitable about this, but it's being framed as inevitable to avoid any consequent responsibility. I'd have more confidence if there were a grown-up debate, but it's just another battle in the culture war and I'm sick of everything been framed as unicorns v marxists.

A not unreasonable post, until "And for the downvoters,... bring it on. ". Kinda invites, well downvotes, don't you think?

Yesterday I could catch the virus if I went into a shop without a mask, today I won't. (probably) Not sure what has changed overnight, or maybe the politicians are more concerned about finance and votes than medical advice?

Masks were never about protecting the wearer - that's why the concept of leaving such measures (for wearing a mask is not a restriction) to "personal responsibility" doesn't make any sense at all.

It's not a matter of personal responsibility, it's a matter of societal safety.

Just back from the local supermarket - I'd say 99% of shoppers were wearing masks. The only exception I spotted was a MAMIL who'd popped in to buy a sandwich, he was very apologetic.

"he was very apologetic." ... for the lycra.

It does seem like its not be thought through about the consequences of lifting all the legal restrictions when there are 50K new COVID cases a day. As those numbers mean its a greater chance that even if you are vaccinated you could come in close contact with someone who tests positive and the app tells you to isolate. And they aren't proposing that rule is changed until the sometime in August.

Plus there is the risk that the greater number of infected people moving around more freely with no social distancing requirement could mean we end up with yet another mutation and the vaccines might be ineffective against a new strain putting us back into a lockdown.

Not to be a pessimist, but another lockdown would be the best outcome for a new variant that the vaccines are ineffective against.

In other words, irresponsible people will now refuse to wear masks or social distance and not give a toss about catching or passing on Covid to other people, who are perhaps more vulnerable or elderly. It seems utterly stupid to me for the gov't to drop the legal need to wear masks in crowded indoor places, shops and public transport. It doesn't hurt or inconvenience anyone to wear a mask in such places.

The wife and me (both clinically vulnerable despite having both jabs) will be avoiding crowded places more than ever now and when we do go out it will be wearing FFP3 masks to give ourselves a modicum of protection.

It is very clear that responsibility for the spread of the virus is now being pushed entirely onto the public. So when the covid cases soar, the government can wash their hands, and say freedom's what you wanted, that's what we gave you, your responsibility. Utter shit mongers, the lot of them.

Wash their hands, I see what you did there :-)

just as "Freedom Day" in the UK hits the half-day mark

Free Doom Day only applies in England. That's the bit of the UK at right bottom. (very apt really)

The governments of Cymru, Scotland and (amazingly) even NI seem to have a natural aversion to killing their citizens.

Roll on our independence days. Won't be long now.

In all fairness, as a current resident of NI I'm inclined to think that the NI government have a natural aversion to doing anything at all. Stormont was closed for years up to the pandemic. It took a global crisis to get them to get their act together and actually start doing something.

Amazing how we're all experts on this now. Just be sensible - it's not complicated.

You are Boatie McBoatface and I claim my £5

I resent your comment. This is England, we will never be sensible. We elected to fight them on the beaches when clearly staying back would have been the much more sensible tactic. Have you tried running in sand?

I was visiting relative in hospital at the weekend (non COVID related illness) - staff were worried about freedom day as the hospital was already seeing an uptick in COVID admissions & were concerned about potential bed shortages if the trend continued (like previous COVID surges, people still get other illness, but unlike the early days, people less "scared" of hospitals and more likely to present at hospital now as they were seeing non COVID admission numbers far more "normal" than in early stages of the pandemic )

Purely anecdotal, a single hospital and a couple of staff I chatted with on one ward, but as that's one of the 2 main hospitals near where I live, then I was concerned by their concerns.

The question in my mind is that if every year the media whipped up a hysterical frenzy over how many might die from this year's flu variant, whether or not we would see a similar response from the public.

Pre-vaccine, measures to control the spread were absolutely neccessary - lockdown #1 was the right thing to do, albeit too late. The ball was the dropped again later last year, prompting lockdown 2/3 - these should have been avoidable by my reckoning, with alternative measures being put in place to protect the vulnerable, if only to allow vital functions such as kids going to school to continue with minimal interruption.

Now, we have over 85% of the population on at least their first jab - when you take into account those who cannot be vaccinated due to being children or some other medical constraint, or those ignorant enough to refuse the vaccine, then we can pretty much say that all those who can be and are willing to be vaccinated have now had their first dose. Second doses are still in roll-out, but progressing well - pretty much everyone on the "vulnerable list" has ben double-jabbed and then some.

However, this does not stop the media from going into complete headless chicken mode whenever some professor or official makes a comment about the apparent risk of the rising numbers of cases - reports that almost always ignore that the number of hospitalizations ate a couple of orders of magnitude lower than they were last time infections were spreading at this rate. The whole thing is now politicized; collateral damage like the anxiety that this sort of reporting may cause is being completely ignored.

Now, anyone in the IT arena should be all to aware of how readily the general public buy into these sort of messages, especially when they are designed to instill and/or deal with anxiety. Just look at how Chrome has become the #1 browser by Google's splashing great big "download Chrome for faster, safer browsing" all over the tops of their search results page...

So people are now hung up on the hysteria, and any survey or poll is going to reflect that. I recall back in the 80s when the "don't die of ignorance" campaign was in full swing and people were worried you could catch AIDS from a toilet seat...

The biggest problem we now face from COVID is not the virus itself - it's the ongoing point-scoring and backstabbing between the politicians and the media, with the general public getting caught in the crossfire.

Unfortunately, this should be "...over 85% of the ADULT population on at least their first jab..." Under-18s have been left out up to now. This group can catch it, and act as a reservoir where new variants can arise. Simple evolution means that variants which are easier to catch would then spread more easily, and will also select for variants where the vaccines offer less protection.

"reports that almost always ignore that the number of hospitalizations ate a couple of orders of magnitude lower than they were last time infections were spreading at this rate"

except if you go and look at the data yourself that isn't the case. (data for the last three weeks still tweaking by a few instances, last week-ish are not complete datasets)

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

The deaths and hospitalisations peaked initially around 1st April 2020, with cases clearly massively under-reporting, then cases peaked again in wave 2 around 29 December 2020 with hospitalisations peaking around the 12th January 2021, and deaths peaking about a week after that, around the 19th Jan.

Daily cases are rising again, though hospitalisations are running about a quarter of the number they were with the similar case rate in December, which is certainly better, but not a "couple of orders of magnitude lower".

Death rate is currently about 1/10 that compared to the December equivalent, which is certainly a good thing and shows the vaccines appear to be doing a good job, or most of the most vulnerable have already succumbed in the previous 18 months...

Have we seen any official stats yet relating cases to attendance at major sporting events like the euros final given it was a trial event to see if these things could revert to the previous state, or Silverstone (give it a couple of weeks) ?

> The question in my mind is that if every year the media whipped up a hysterical frenzy over how many might die from this year's flu variant, whether or not we would see a similar response from the public.

Perhaps there should be more attention paid to flu deaths - at 25,000 per year (or ~75,000 for respiratory infections in general), they sit just behind heart disease and cancer as the third biggest killer in the UK.

Which puts them way above other causes such as traffic accidents (2,000), despite the fact that there's arguably a much bigger and visible public campaign and policing effort around the latter.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2010

However, it's also worth noting that even with all the efforts put into minimising the impact of Coronavirus, gov.uk puts the total number of Coronavirus deaths in 2020 as being approx. 75,000, while flu-related deaths dropped to around 15,000.

Or to put it another way: it killed roughly five times as many people in 2020 - or roughly three times as many as flu normally does. And perhaps ironically, with the way that anti-C19 measures have effectively dropped flu infections to zero, there's a very real risk that come wintertime, we're going to get an tidal wave of flu deaths atop whatever we get from Coronavirus.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/07/winter-flu-season-could-be-big-experts-warn.html

So yeah. We should be taking flu a lot more seriously. And Coronavirus is by any measure far worse than flu.

> Now, anyone in the IT arena should be all to aware of how readily the general public buy into these sort of messages

Anyone in the IT arena should also have a grasp of how exponential growth works. And how quickly mutations (or in IT speak, computer viruses using a new 0-day exploit) can rip through the population, especially if there's no measures being taken to mitigate the risks.

> The biggest problem we now face from COVID is not the virus itself - it's the ongoing point-scoring and backstabbing between the politicians and the media, with the general public getting caught in the crossfire.

Perhaps. It's a complex balancing act, and I don't envy any of the people trying to decide on the best way of getting us through this.

I just wish I was more confident that the current political incumbents for this country were making their decisions based on purely altruistic principles...

When the first app was introduced into the U.K. it was rightly mocked as being useless. So was Track and Trace.

So the app was changed to the Apple/Google thing and Track and Trace is now working. Better late than never I suppose.

From what I have read it seems some people usually business owners, say that the present app is at fault or maybe it's Track and Trace at fault. No one seems to know but they have got to have someone, anyone to blame.

Or maybe it's just a case of more people ignoring the recommendations and so more being pinged? Pretty much like I have noticed over the last week that fewer people are wearing masks in shops and on trains.

Behave responsibly? Not going to happen

All Fecked Up, as Father Jack would say.

I mean, I can see the logic in going ahead with dropping restrictions; with all adults jabbed (or at least having the option of getting jabbed; I've heard some odd arguments from several people about why they're choosing not to, including one guy who didn't want it because his wife was pregnant), the link between C19 infections and long-covid/deaths is probably as weak as it's going to get.

And the amount of future economic pain and aftershocks being built up in the background is only ever going to get bigger.

However, the key word there is "weakened", not broken. And we're already seeing a significant upturn in infection rates, which to this inexpert eye looks to have gotten a nice speed-boost from all those pubs crowded with people watching the Euro final, last week. Which may well get bigger and nastier if a new variant appears which turns out to be even better at sliding through the gaps in the vaccination-defences.

So, yeah. It feels like a pretty big gamble - as several thousand scientists[*] and a number of prominent international politicans have noted.

Certainly, for the foreseeable future, I think I'll be maintaining my current "facemask when shopping, outdoor tables when socialising" approach...

[*] E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/16/englands-covid-unlocking-a-threat-to-the-world-experts-say

He is caught between the medics on one side and his back benchers + business people on the other. He cannot please everyone and has tried to come out with something that is vague enough to please no matter your opinion -- but he has failed.

Not explaining the reasoning is part of the obfuscation, it just makes things worse.

Boris' ideal role would be father Christmas: a fantasy man of smiles and freebies all round.

Oh: his Sunday shenanigans on trying to evade self-isolation y/day was simply beyond the pail.

I might, I suppose, if he'd called it "Cautious re-Opening day" instead, in an attempt to manage the psychology of the situation.

But calling it "Freedom Day", imo, will just encourage the less-cautious to be even more less-cautious than might be normally be considered ideal, thus unnecessarily increasing the risk of an unfortunate outcome.

The first day people were allowed to stop wearing masks, they did, in unison.

Haven't seen them at all out and about for weeks now.

Is that the same Denmark that's well and truly into it's 3rd wave?