He said Google would wait until the New Year to figure out when campuses in the US can safely reopen for a mandatory return.

Sorry, how does that work? This virus is here to stay. It will mutate, and there will be variants.

The current plan of "lockdown or impose restrictions whenever there's a variant or spike" isn't really a plan. See also: a vaccine per variant.

The world really needs some clarity on this, and yes, some people dying is actually an option. When we went into the first lockdown there was a dramatic reduction in the number of road accidents - due to the fact people weren't rushing on congested motorways to get to work. There were improvements to the environment for the same reason. These two things alone have effectively "saved" some people's lives.

People show horrific footage of others dying of Covid and struggling to breathe. Why haven't we been showing footage of people trapped under a lorry on the M6 for decades then? That doesn't sound like a pleasant alternative to Covid in my view.

How long are we going to go on with this nonsense of any death from this virus must be prevented? Why this virus specifically, and why not all other things which cause people to die?

It's absolute bullshit. Nobody is leading the way with this, and there is no "safe reopen(ing)" of anything, ever.

Until the virus settles down into a stable variant, we won't have any stability. We won't know if the next variant will require stricter measures or not. The number of people trapped under lorries is pretty stable, luckily not many of them are trapped for decades.

"The number of people trapped under lorries is pretty stable"

To put this into perspective that's just ONE example of how people die. In the UK in 2019 (before Covid was prevalent) there were approx 1800 deaths on UK roads.

The number of deaths "due to Covid" by which we can only realistically count those with no underlying health conditions** in the first lockdown was around 4400.

Now, bear in mind road traffic accidents are just ONE way in which people can die...

... the figures are already a complete joke. It's like suggesting nobody should drive on roads because some people might die. In this case the number of "some people" is significant (1800 / 4400) from ONE type of possible way of dying which is "preventable" (if you stop everyone else driving).

Of course stopping everyone from driving isn't a solution. In the same way locking down, waiting for a vaccine per variant, or permanently work from home until it's "safe" isn't a solution either.

** because they would have died anyway, in much the same way anybody could die "in future" due to a road traffic accident.

The number of deaths "due to Covid" by which we can only realistically count those with no underlying health conditions** in the first lockdown was around 4400

Try telling that to friends and families of the 170k-ish dead in the UK, on indeed those still suffering from "long COVID".

Yes, many were elderly and had health conditions but avoiding dying before it is absolutely necessary is kind of a human goal.

@Paul Crawford you've completely missed the point with this -

Try telling that to friends and families of the 170k-ish dead in the UK, on indeed those still suffering from "long COVID".

The example I used of people who died in road traffic accidents also results in friends/families suffering. It's also "preventable" if you go to some extreme such as banning everyone from driving. There are so many "preventable" ways in which people die. To broaden your mind have a look at how many people in the entire world don't have access to clean running water, and the deaths that causes.

avoiding dying before it is absolutely necessary is kind of a human goal.

The point here being - why are we being so restrictive of what people can/can't do when it comes to this cause of death specifically ?

The number of 170k and indeed the global figures aren't really as significant as they sound when you look beyond your own back yard and have a think about how other people in the world die, or what from. Furthermore these people have done for many many years with no restrictions or real intervention. 1800 people died on UK roads in 2019 but we didn't ban people from driving because the overall impact would be extremely significant and to that extent we're accepting of 1800 people dying from that. See also the approx 25,000 who were seriously injured on roads during that period. We're fine with that. No real restrictions, just keep driving folks. Why's it ok there but not with Covid?

> The point here being - why are we being so restrictive of what people can/can't do when it comes to this cause of death specifically

Because you're so used to the restrictions associated with other causes of death you no longer recognise them as restrictions.

To take your example of being caught under a lorry. The reason that such deaths are so low in number is because: lorries must have regular safety checks (MoTs); lorries must drive on roads (rather than wherever and whenever they like); lorries must be constructed with guard rails to prevent people and vehicles being dragged under; lorry drivers must pass an extra driving test; lorry drivers must pass regular driver assessment tests; lorry drivers over 50 (iirc) must have an annual medical; lorry drivers can only work limited hours to ensure thy aren't tired; etc. I'm sure there are many more that I've missed.

When the first motor vehicle induced accidents started to happen in the UK in the 1860's (by which I mean things like horses being spooked by noisy cars and causing injuries, not the cars directly) the Government responded by introducing legislation that all motor cars had to be led by a man carrying a red flag as a warning. This was soon shown to be impractical and the rule was dropped, in favour of other restrictions on motorists.

And so with Covid - eventually legislation will settle down on an appropriate mix of prevention and legislation, but it's too soon to know what that will be just now.

Fine, use QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years) as almost all public health and public safety initiatives did before covid.

A disease that disproportionately affects the elderly and those with comorbidities will not come out as a major public priority unless you happen to be in government and think that a large headline number of deaths is impolitic, regardless of the actual value of those lives.

This.

Most of the damage dealt by covid was due to our fear-fuelled overreaction to it. A bit like the self-destructive immune response of a patient with Sepsis.

We have saved the care-home residents, who have a few extra years to live. Yay! But at what cost? We have crashed the economy, and at the same time nearly doubled our already-crippling national debt. (Which might have been fine when the interest rates are low, but those are set to rise). And with lower economic output we have multiplied the debt in GDP terms even without the extra borrowing!

So by extending the lives of the elderly and sick, we have doomed the young to a grim future. But those young people don't generally vote tory anyway, so who cares about them, right?

Sadly not entirely true because care homes became early hotspots. Either because of poor policy, like clearing hospital beds back to care homes, or because they're where the most vulnerable are clustered. But 'protecting hospitals' has also had other consequences due to appointments and operations being cancelled. Case in point being delays in diagnosis and treatment for cancers.

By prioritising Covid, non-Covid deaths will have increased. Then again, some measures may have reduced mortality. Last winter didn't seem to have many flu deaths. Could that be down to masking and distancing, or because those deaths were coded as Covid instead? But that's just part of policy. Die for any reason within 28 days of a positive test and you're a Covid death. Or just having Covid mentioned on a death certificate, even without a test or autopsy.

And of course 'breakthrough' infections amongst the fully vaccinated. If we also have more effective treatments, perhaps it's time to focus on that. Some would disagree, like the drug dealers looking forward to 3 month cycles that align nicely with quarterly profits an bonuses.

If I get in my car and drive, fuck up, and end up in an accident that is my fault, I've affected the people with whom I had the accident. I do not affect anyone I happen to drive past on the way to the accident. If I survive, I would know what I had done and would (probably) feel remorse about the whole thing. I might even drive more carefully in the future to ensure I didn't make the same mistake again.

If I have an asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic viral infection and go shopping, for example, I potentially affect everyone I come in close contact with, and anyone who brushes past or touches a surface I touched or breathed on. I might not even realise I was sick, but my actions could ultimately kill people. Sure, you can be an asshole about the whole thing and dismiss those deaths as inevitable but then why should I give a shit about anything I do that might result in people dying. They're all going to die one day anyway, right?

If governments actually wanted to stop this virus they could. Close all borders, require mandatory quarantine and testing for anyone wishing to enter the country, implement mandatory countrywide testing and isolate infected individuals or affected regions, provide real financial aid for those who need it. We'd be done in a few months tops. Just like Wuhan was.

@Def

Close all borders ...

How exactly do you think this would help?! Yes, if you did do that (and all the other things you said) you may well reduce the number of cases significantly. The real problem - YOU CAN'T DO THIS FOREVER.

In the same way if you banned all drivers from driving for 1 month, you can bet that month would have the lowest number of road accidents! See previous point about you can't do that forever.

Given that Covid effectively started with one person passing it to one other person (2 people at that point) and then spread globally, as a result of normal human behavior, good luck if you think you can stop that happening again even after some kind of long global lockdown. Hint: this is why it didn't go away after previous lockdowns! Fucking idiot.

@andy 103

"The real problem - YOU CAN'T DO THIS FOREVER."

This is the problem faced by countries who locked down excessively and thought they had done well. Only to find they are reliant on vaccine to build up immunity but instead of the single variation to protect from there are now many mutations.

While Europe imposed its lockdowns and restricted the infection only to find they now dont have much immunity as another wave sweeps through.

There are a couple of theories why the UK isnt being hit as badly (the AZ vaccine and late lockdown causing infections) but I am interested to see which is true or if we will take a delayed hit.

Previous lockdowns didn't work because 1) there were still cases in country when they were lifted, and 2) borders were still completely open allowing newly infected people to bring the virus back in.

If you want to stop a virus from being transmitted you only have to stop people from spreading it. Which can be done by identifying carriers (through systematic, widespread testing) and then isolate those infected. And before you even start doing that you have to have strict border controls in place to prevent new infections.

It's not rocket science.

If governments had had an iota of competence two years ago to nip this in the bud there wouldn't even have been a pandemic. As soon as the first cases in the EU were identified the entire continent should have been closed. All cases traced and isolated. Two months, we would have been done. But instead we've had two years of this bullshit with still no end in sight.

@Def

"As soon as the first cases in the EU were identified the entire continent should have been closed . All cases traced and isolated. Two months, we would have been done."

This is the most Wetherspoons-like solution to a problem I've read in a while.

Enjoy your 13th pint of Abbot ale, Frank Gallagher. Maybe you should be PM as well then we can simplify everything to a level where everything will be fine forever.

"approx 1800 deaths on UK roads."

"The number of deaths "due to Covid" by which we can only realistically count those with no underlying health conditions** in the first lockdown was around 4400."

So it's (at least) twice as deadly. Probably more as you've discounted all the "with covid" deaths. BUT that's WITH all the restrictions we endure(d). Without those restrictions it would probably have been massively higher.

"Until the virus settles down into a stable variant, we won't have any stability"

Never going to happen. Just like 'normal' influenza, there's going to be at least 1 new strain per year for the foreseeable future, and any vaccine developed will be using an educated guess as a moving target, that more likely than not is going to be rather ineffective.

There's no returning to pre-2019 status. Ever.

The problem is people.

They do not respond to logic and statistics as the "rational actors" that many models would like to assume. Not only is there fear of new risks versus old, but also there is the issue of employer's liability.

Actually, people do respond rather well to their own view of risk. The problem is models which do not include people changing behaviour in the face of apparent risks or even things like school holidays. hence the apocalyptic predictions of at least 100k cases per day and half a million deaths leading to the disastrous policies of lockdowns, vaccine passports, mandatory vaccinations, and internment camps.

Looking at the stats, case numbers were falling before lockdown measures were taken in the UK suggesting the reduction was due to people's behaviour changing and not government rules.

This is the latest UK data:-

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/deaths

The rate of deaths (three quarters of the way down the page, you can find "Deaths by age" to get to it immediately) is statistically pretty much zero until you get to the 25-44 age group which has a low rate of deaths, with the 44-54 age group still being relatively low. The 55-64 age group has ~50% more deaths than both of the previous age groups combined, and the 65 to 74, 75 to 84 and 85+ groups have progressively higher death tolls.

If you look up a bit from that (or find "Pre-existing health conditions") then it appears to suggest that a reasonable policy compromise would appear to be to move to very heavily encouraging work from home for anybody over either 44 or 54 depending on where you draw the line, and also heavily encouraging WFH for anybody under that with any of the pre-existing conditions listed above that age chart, with additional financial support if required for retraining the younger vulnerable types from jobs that can't be done remotely to jobs that can.

I suspect that the major cause of the mortality rate in younger age groups is what is being referred to as "pre-existing conditions" in the older age groups which sounds intuitively right; most of the people I know with those diseases are in the older age groups.

To take your idea to its logical conclusion... we shouldn't bother with life saving surgery or prosecuting murderers because those people could have died in a lorry crash.

I agree, in principle. Eradication is patently unfeasible, so we ought to figure out, as rationally as possible, what balance we want to aim for.

Ideally, we'd impose enough restrictions to ensure that hospitals don't get swamped by covid cases, including treatment of long-covid sufferers, but not much more restrictions than that.

The problem is that nobody really knows how to get to that point and stay there. We don't have truly reliable models of how the pandemic will respond to any given policy. This is nobody's fault, it's just a really bloody hard problem. Anyone who says "just do that, and this will happen" is overstating their confidence.

And if you get a policy wrong, you'll only know after a month, at which point any correction will also take a month before it undoes the damage. Given that, erring on the side of caution makes at least some sense.

The pandemic is also really hard to manage politically, because the exponential nature of the problem is counterintuitive, hard to explain. See https://xkcd.com/2395/ .

Please can you refer to the new Facebook by its official name, TAFKAF.

The Abomination Formerly Known As Facebook?

We were back to most people being in the office, now we are going back to moving many of them into home office again.

IT was on a rota with 2 people in the office, the others at home, so there was someone on site to deal with immediate problems and 2 offsite, if one team came down with the virus, the other was still active. We've now gone back to 1 person in the office, the rest in home office, on a rotating basis. Weighing HGVs in and out at the gate and printing their documentation and handing it over, for example, can't be done 100% remotely, let alone the actual people on the production line.

We are a manufacturing company, so many departments just can't go into home office, or you can't put all of them in home office. We use 1 person per office, where we can, or large offices (6 persons) with 2 persons in the office. Priority for home office is given to the vulnerable - those that can't be vaccinated, E.g. autoimmune diseases, expectant mothers etc.

My shop just couldn't be dealing with it, they'd already begun planning more WFH before COVID hit. COVID came out of nowhere and so we simply accelerated the company plans for more WFH and it took about 3 days to move nearly 800 to WFH. Now we've sold off office space, we now have about 25% the space we had pre-COVID and average of 90% WFH rate on a typical day.

Working from home is not a bad thing in itself (some people like it others dont) but as a means to stop the virus is just stupid. I am amused at how correct the assessment was at the very beginning. That it will burn its way through the population, people wont stand for imposing restrictions for too long, it will keep mutating and so stay with us.

Working from home, and all other lock-down measures were never about STOPPING the virus.

All they do is bring the infection rate down to a point where (a) you can possibly manage hospital admissions and (b) buy time to develop vaccines to reduce the number/impact of infections and/or drug treatments to mitigate the worst impact of the disease.

They are far from ideal due to the other economic and metal health impact they have, but to ignore them and 'go Brazilian' on COVID is not really such a good option either.

Whether COVID ever gets under control is debatable, vaccines slow it down somewhat and more importantsly reduce the number of people then end up in ICU but are by no means the magic bullet that they were hoping for to be able to slow down transmission. We will just have to learn to live with it at some point, and that will inevitable mean people dying, although most of those will either be unvaccinated (Tuff luck if they are choosing not to take the vaccine) or have other underlying conditions.

In regarding WFH, if we are going to meet targets for reducing CO2 and combatting climate change then its a good option for those industries where it can be implemented. For a tech company like Google it reduces 'unnecessary' journeys for someone to sit at a desk answering phones and tapping away at a PC for 8 hours at day in an office when they can do the same thing from home. which has been proved by a mass unplanned roll out of WFH did reduce the amount of traffic on the roads.

"We will just have to learn to live with it at some point"

I suppose it depends on what the "living with it" entails. If it means learning to live with the notion that you might feel a bit ill and a few hours later the last thing you see is someone putting you into a medically induced coma that might not be an acceptable lesson.

If an alternative is that the cities we have developed over the last century and a half or so and particularly over the post WWII period are not a sustainable way of living then it might just have done us a favour.

We should also learn the lesson that this is not the only disease to come out of nowhere, it isn't the first, it won't be the last. We need to learn the lessons of how to minimise the impact of that. How saving face by denying it exists for a few weeks is a bad idea. How disinformation about treatments is a bad idea. How resisting communal action to slow spread is a bad idea. And how jetting around the world so readily is also a bad idea.

"the muscle memory of being in the office"

Do they keep bumping into the walls when they forget? Or just the glass ceilings?

Hmm. Wonder if there a stats for lost profits amongst photocopier and printer renters? Or just coffee pod sales? Fancy offices seemed to have those while my home office made do with 1kg tins of instant.