Smell memories are the strongest. For sure.
Made me glad my parents quite well before I was born.
They could but I bet they dont.
For smokers, although they can social distance, they’re vectors more so than healthy people, cough, cough, hack, spit…
True, and conga-rats.
But there is little to be done quickly to determine NOT a smoker. So is a jerk claims to be and isn’t, he gets to skip ahead in line.
There are few people more anti-smoking than I am. I live in a non-smoking apartment complex, and I rat out people I see smoking. That’s how nasty I can be on the subject. I voted for a Republican for city council once, because he promised to introduce draconian anti-smoking statures (he won, he did, and they mostly passed).
So if I can see the sense of this, it must be there. Smokers who get COVID will be a bigger drain on resources than non-smokers, and they also will be greater spreaders, not just because their exhaled smoke will carry infectious droplets, that can travel because they are warm, but because, if they are more susceptible, they are more likely to be a spreader in the first place.
I also do not have a problem with giving ex-smokers a line jump if there is evidence that they get sicker then never-smokers, or that they get infected more easily. And anyway, ex-smokers with smoking-caused conditions such as COPD or emphysema, caused by smoking, will get a line jump. I don’t have a problem with that either.
Especially since the J&J vaccine was approved. Younger people in high risk categories are good candidates for the J&J vaccine. People with underlying conditions are the one who are candidates for this vaccine, that seems to be particularly good at preventing hospitalizations in high risk populations, even if it isn’t quite as good at preventing mild infections in lower risk populations, and it’s a single shot, which makes it a good shot for young people, who make up a more mobile population.
Is “smoker” defined anywhere (as far as qualifying for vacc)? Is someone who picked up smoking last week/last year treated the same as someone who has been smoking 2 ppd for 20 yrs?
As with so much of the way this damned pandemic has been handled, there is PLENTY of opportunity for personal interpretation, and great shortcomings in official pronouncements. As such, I am willing to afford individuals considerable leeway in interpreting things in their favor.
Despite the arguments for it, I wouldn’t appreciate “smokers” being put in any priority group. If they’re a smoker who smokes enough for long enough to have a related health condition, then they’re in one of the priority groups already. And that’s what would cause them to be an extra bed in the ICU, not just puffing on the evil weed.
I was called by my GP, but that was almost a month ago.
A couple of weeks ago NHS England changed the rules so that:
You can book your vaccination appointments online if any of the following apply:
- you are aged 60 or over
- you have previously received a letter saying you are at high risk from coronavirus
- you are an eligible frontline health worker
- you are an eligible frontline social care worker
- you get Carer’s Allowance
Carer’s Allowance is for people who look after someone vulnerable, like a 50-year-old looking after their aged parent. Said parent could have health problems that don’t actually make them more likely to get covid badly, but there’s no point trying to finagle this.
You do have to provide a letter or ID of some sort. Frontline social care workers, for example, were all given letters by their employers. I don’t suppose the staff checking could weed out every fraud, but it wouldn’t just be a case of saying “I’m a frontline social care worker” and being let through.
Healthcare workers were handled differently and have almost all been vaccinated already (first dose, anyway). GPs are still calling people too, obviously, and in some boroughs with younger-than-average populations GPs have offered the vaccine to people outside those groups.
There are also big efforts to enabled homeless and transient people - the ones most likely to be without GPs or difficult to contact - to get the vaccine. That’s not because England loves those people, but because they’re a risk to others.
Asthma was initially not included because such a huge number of people have been “diagnosed” with asthma despite only having wheezed once when they were seven - it was restricted to people with really bad asthma, usually meaning that they were on long-term inhaled steroids at the very least. That’s now been expanded, because we’ve got a lot of the other vulnerable people vaccinated. The diabetes classification has also been expanded.
Shockingly, we seem to be doing this really very well.
Wales, NI and Scotland are dealing with it separately - not sure how it’s working there.
Apologies for most of this post being off topic!