Just a slight clarification here. There may be two similar but subtly different claims being made.
I was pushing back against the claim that most people died as a result of the actions of others who “rejected the measures”.
I’m not sure how such a claim could be substantiated. You would have to trace where and how each dead person caught it and the status/beliefs/behaviours of those sources.
There is a difference between that and saying that most people are dying as a result of they themselves rejecting the measures and, say, not being vaccinated.
That I would definitely agree with, the figures are pretty solid on that.
It was completely expected. The thinking is that even with far. far higher case numbers seen over December and January the health service was nowhere near being overwhelmed.
Those that want to be vaccinated and boosted can be and will be protected. The general opinion in the UK is just to get on with it.
Our friend and neighbour is a nurse who has been in the dedicated ICU Covid ward since March 2020 and she informs us that no-one in her unit over the winter was fully vaccinated. It really does now seem to be a serious illness only for the unvaccinated.
And those with health conditions that make them more vulnerable. Anti-vaxxers live or die as a consequence of their choice, but those with auto-immune diseases, for example, not so much.
My mom had three doses and died of covid. Admittedly, we knew it was hopeless and put her in home hospice, not the ICU. But it’s not just dangerous to the unvaccinated.
Your chances are considerably better if you’re vaccinated. But even three shots aren’t a guarantee, even against dying; let alone against getting a “mild” case that leaves you with heart and/or brain damage.
Aaannnnnndddddd the wife has Covid. Caught it in Bangkok from her niece, who is a pastry chef at a Holiday Inn there. Seems to have been a lot of staff there coming down with Covid. The wife and the niece are in quarantine together. Some cousins just happen to own a vacant house in Bangkok, and they’re staying there. The wife is fully vaccinated and boosted, all Pfizer, and to all appearances just has a bad cold. The niece is actually sicker despite being 30 years younger, because she was vaccinated with the crappy Chinese vaccines on offer in Thailand. They’ll be in quarantine until this coming Thursday. She was supposed to fly home next weekend, but now she won’t have enough time to get clearance for the airline, so she’s had to extend her trip by a week.
Currently, everyone travelling to the UK must complete a passenger locator form before they arrive.
Travellers who are not fully vaccinated have to take a Covid test before departure, fill in the form, and book and pay for a PCR test after arriving.
Grant Shapps confirmed in a tweet that these rules will end at 04:00 on Friday.
My bold. If I might be permitted to editorialize…
The worst form and website that I have ever had the misfortune to need to use will shortly be no more. Thank God.
The UK Passenger Locator Form was completed online. This form was necessary to return to the UK after travelling abroad.
The instructions for completion were awful. We (Mrs T and I) both had our main email addresses voided by the form and had to use back-ups.
You could enter your personal details at any time but the form could not be completed (ie, was locked) until 48 hours before your return.
Therefore you did not know how to complete the form when you left the country. Nor did you know exactly what would be required to complete the form. There was no practice facility to familiarise yourself with the process before you left the country.
We correctly guessed that a hard copy vaccination certificate would be needed, to be scanned into the form by your phone camera; but that didn’t work – for either of us. The website rejected all attempts to scan the certificates.
The last step was for the website to email us a copy of the (part) completed form. Needless to say, it didn’t.
But hey, why would you believe me. Here’s The Times’ travel correspondent.
We’re going to France in May. I just breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Meanwhile parts of China are going back to full lockdown due to Omicron B.A.2 (the so-called stealth variant).
That said, the surges are small relative to elsewhere, and could just be because China hadn’t really been hit hard with Omicron yet. Some places play up that this strain may be more infectious than omicron, but most say it is unlikely to matter elsewhere, due to vaccines being just as effective as on “original” Omicron and immunity from one being immunity from all.
The issue more are concerned about is that the shutdown in these larger cities will likely cause supply chain impacts, especially in the tech sector, and may halt or even reverse the tech recovery. And this is at a time when the war is already screwing up economic pandemic recovery, with the Russian sanctions disrupting the international economy and not just Russia’s.
Massachusetts revised its criteria for counting covid-19 deaths [can’t find a link that isn’t firewalled] and the changes have been retroactively applied to the Worldometer data, explaining the decrease in cumulative US deaths reported.
I read this last night about an hour after you posted it. In the moment, I thought to myself “Wait a few hours … they might just be a little late updating today. They’re not always on the dot updating every 24 hours.”
So I went over and looked at Worldometers real quick just to see. It showed 991,038 US COVID deaths.
Worldometers is still showing 991,038 US COVID deaths right now. So probably tonight all the figures will be caught up.
…
Eric_C’s point about retroactive updates is also valid. Worldometers does that frequently – if you check the graphs (not the raw numbers) regularly, you’ll see that past numbers are frequently adjusted up or down a small amount.
