Sorcery wrote:vagrantbrain wrote:Mike4 wrote:
Probably too high to dare to publish it nowadays.
Well it was certainly on the BBC news last night - estimated to be 1.0-1.1 this week, up from 0.9-1.0 last week.
On a slightly better note, UK new cases seem to have gone down compared with what the BBC reported the other day of 50+k, at least according to Worldometer.
For today they are showing approximately 40k. It's almost as if whenever a call to shut down, or wear masks gets touted by the media, the numbers go down. One hypothesis is god is a mischievous one. Another is there are people using Covid as an excuse to bunk off and once high numbers gets broadacast the slackers feel guilty. As they should be.
Another explanation is the variation is just a random walk, it's just when the random walk steps upwards, some portions of the public and media go into hysterics, yet have a blindspot to when the random walk steps the opposite direction.
Just as an aside, I couldn't help notice on the government dashboard map of cases...
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... -map/cases ... if you look at cities that have previously been associated with high rates of infection, like London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bolton and so on... curiously these now seem to be islands of blue in a sea of surrounding red.
These islands of blue are typically the areas of higher population density, and as mentioned, earlier in the pandemic these were the areas that were previously islands of red in a sea of blue.
Furthermore, in Manchester my experience is that very few are wearing face masks in the supermarkets, however, when I visited relations in another part of the country a few days ago, in a more rural area but that was showing a high number of cases, more people than not were wearing face masks in the supermarkets.
To me, this is potentially indicating that those areas of previously high infection - the cities - are perhaps now reaching some degree of perhaps not herd immunity (scientists don't think that will be reached), but perhaps now a kind of equilibrium of just a.n.other infection.
I've read before in the main stream media, that the WHO consider proven recovery from covid infection as being equivalent to vaccination when it comes to vaccine passports (though I've not managed to find a direct reference on from the WHO themselves), and this article here seems to indicate the science is backing that up...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -infection That's reporting that infection from covid does provide a similar degree of protection against subsequent infection as the vaccine.
So all those 'irresponsible' youngster catching covid in the manchester halls of residence (and as far as I know, none of them died from it) have probably given themselves a good degree of protection by it. Which is probably now helping limit the rate of spread, helping keep the manchester region in blue rather than red.
So to me, it's looking like the virus transmission in cities is perhaps already peaking out / levelling, as the protection from prior infections is perhaps giving populations in the cities that little bit extra protection that's keeping a lid on the transmission compared to the surrounding areas.
So I think the government are playing it right by not re-introducing restrictions again at this point. I think Keir Starmer, The Guardian and the scientists like these ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tion-masks ... just need to chill out a bit, and just wait and see a little longer.
As someone with a health condition you might also want to think about extra things you can do to keep yourself and others safe. This could include: