summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Sniff it Olivier. lol
Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!
- Thread starter bullybeef
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NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
Disability Living Allowance or Personal independence Payment, are there to enable the person to live their life the way they choose.
The amount of people who won't or very reluctant to claim because they worry how they will be perceived and judged by their community.
Mobility car is the big one, that normally get the tongues wagging and Parler styled postings on Face Book. The amount of people I work with who end up being of risk registers...
Spend them because if you don't it will be taken away elsewhere.
All true and there shouldn't be any stigma for claiming if it's genuine because the state should be there for those who need support.
My point was, from countless professional experiences, the minority who misuse the system do frustrate people and cause the issues that you're highlighting.
My Aunt is disabled (a neurological disease) and claims the highest level of disability allowance and other benefits, with my cousin being her official carer.*
Yet, I see my Aunt freely flying around spending money like it's going out of fashion: £450 food shop before Christmas; lavish goods for her friends etc.
My cousin also has a part-time side job cleaning canal boats. So, when she can afford a brand new £190k house it raises questions in my eyes of need.
I'm not saying neither should have money, but it does raise the question why people do have these stigmas when some are so unnecessarily benefiting from it.
Then, you have people like @COYBL25 and the circumstances he explained, with little support, and I do feel a level of concern.
*She's her carer but lives 30 miles away, aye.
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
PIP and other benefits are not means tested so anyone regardless of wealth can claim. Certainly very open to it all being means tested with some caveats.
There is an attitude, well I've I paid in and want it back, which really is not in the spirit of the welfare state.
Your Auntie and cousin is with respect anecdotal, and without specifics would be silly to comment, however, there are not many people who would not given the chance happily hand back their disability and not have associated benefits.
Yes it is anecdotal to some extent, but ultimately in my professional experience I have and continue to see potentially similar examples on a regular basis.
My point is that it does cause some division when you see countless people struggling financially with genuine needs whereas others are, to an extent, thriving.
jaycee
Player Valuation: £60m
But thats the problem with the whole set up,people punching down instead of up,when this is a lot clearer where are the 1st and biggest cuts going to be made? The people at the bottom,the way out of all the mess is investment,be that building,job creating,training, a BUI,you have to build ftom the bottom up,instead it will be those worse off who take the brunt of it
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
Very interesting Study on how Covid may become endemic in the years ahead and be no more worrisome for the next generation then the common cold.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/01/11/science.abe6522
Little bit of deconstructing here:
As millions are inoculated against coronavirus, and the pandemic’s end finally seems to glimmer into view, scientists are envisioning what a postvaccine world might look like – and what they see is comforting.
Coronavirus is here to stay, but once most adults are immune – following natural infection or vaccination – the virus will be no more of a threat than the common cold, according to a study published in the journal Science this week. The virus is a grim menace now because it is an unfamiliar pathogen that can overwhelm the adult immune system, which has not been trained to fight it. That will no longer be the case once everyone has been exposed to either the virus or the vaccine.
Children, on the other hand, are constantly challenged by pathogens that are new to their bodies, and that is one reason they are more adept than adults at fending off coronavirus. Eventually, the study suggests, the virus will be of concern only in children younger than five, subjecting even them to mere sniffles – or no symptoms at all.
Lavine and her colleagues looked to the six other human coronaviruses – four that cause the common cold, plus the Sars and Mers viruses – for clues to the fate of the new pathogen. The four common-cold coronaviruses are endemic, and produce only mild symptoms. Severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome, which surfaced in 2003 and 2012, respectively, made people severely ill, but they did not spread widely.
Although all of these coronaviruses produce a similar immune response, the new virus is most similar to the endemic common-cold coronaviruses, Lavine and her colleagues hypothesise. Reanalysing data from a previous study, they found that the first infection with common-cold coronaviruses occurs on average at three to five years of age. After that age, people may become infected again and again, boosting their immunity and keeping the viruses circulating. But they don’t become ill.
The researchers foresee a similar future for Covid-19 virus. Depending on how fast the virus spreads, and on the strength and longevity of the immune response, it would take a few years to decades of natural infections for this coronavirus to become endemic, Lavine says.
Without a vaccine, the fastest path to endemic status is also the worst. The price for population immunity would be widespread illness and death along the way. Vaccines completely alter that calculus. The faster people can be immunized, the better. An efficient vaccination rollout could shorten the timeline to a year, or even just six months, for the Covid-19 virus to become an endemic infection. Still, the vaccines are unlikely to eradicate it, Lavine predicts. The virus will become a permanent, albeit more benign, inhabitant in our environment.
Other experts say this scenario is not just plausible but likely. “The overall intellectual construct of the paper I fully agree with,” says Shane Crotty, a virus expert at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, in San Diego. If the vaccines prevent people from transmitting the virus, “then it becomes a lot more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everybody, including kids, and you really don’t see the virus infecting people any more,” Crotty says.
It is more plausible that the vaccines will prevent illness – but not necessarily infection and transmission, he adds. And that means the Covid-19 virus will continue to circulate. “It’s unlikely that the vaccines we have right now are going to provide sterilising immunity,” the kind needed to prevent infection, says Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto.
Natural infection with coronavirus produces a strong immune response in the nose and throat. But with the current vaccines, Gommerman says, “you’re not getting a natural immune response in the actual upper respiratory tract, you’re getting an injection in the arm.” That raises the likelihood that infections will still occur, even after vaccination.
Ultimately, Lavine’s model rests on the assumption that the new coronavirus is similar to the common-cold coronaviruses. But that assumption may not hold up, cautions Marc Lipsitch, a public-health researcher at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, in Boston.
“Their prediction of it’s becoming like common-cold coronaviruses is where I’d put a lot of my money,” Lipsitch says. “But I don’t think it’s absolutely guaranteed.”
When and how the common-cold coronaviruses first appeared is a mystery, but since the emergence of the new coronavirus, some scientists have revisited a theory that a pandemic in 1890, which killed about a million people worldwide, may have been caused by OC-43, one of the four common-cold coronaviruses.
“People have suggested that the human population developed a low-grade, broad immunity to OC-43 that terminated the pandemic,” says Andre Veillette, an immunologist at Montreal Clinical Research Institute, in Canada. “This coronavirus currently broadly circulates in the community in a rather peaceful way.” – New York Times
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/01/11/science.abe6522
Little bit of deconstructing here:
As millions are inoculated against coronavirus, and the pandemic’s end finally seems to glimmer into view, scientists are envisioning what a postvaccine world might look like – and what they see is comforting.
Coronavirus is here to stay, but once most adults are immune – following natural infection or vaccination – the virus will be no more of a threat than the common cold, according to a study published in the journal Science this week. The virus is a grim menace now because it is an unfamiliar pathogen that can overwhelm the adult immune system, which has not been trained to fight it. That will no longer be the case once everyone has been exposed to either the virus or the vaccine.
Children, on the other hand, are constantly challenged by pathogens that are new to their bodies, and that is one reason they are more adept than adults at fending off coronavirus. Eventually, the study suggests, the virus will be of concern only in children younger than five, subjecting even them to mere sniffles – or no symptoms at all.
In other words, coronavirus will become “endemic”, a pathogen that circulates at low levels and only rarely causes serious illness. “The timing of how long it takes to get to this sort of endemic state depends on how quickly the disease is spreading, and how quickly vaccination is rolled out,” says Jennie Lavine, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University, in Atlanta, who led the study. “So, really, the name of the game is getting everyone exposed for the first time to the vaccine as quickly as possible.”
Lavine and her colleagues looked to the six other human coronaviruses – four that cause the common cold, plus the Sars and Mers viruses – for clues to the fate of the new pathogen. The four common-cold coronaviruses are endemic, and produce only mild symptoms. Severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome, which surfaced in 2003 and 2012, respectively, made people severely ill, but they did not spread widely.
Although all of these coronaviruses produce a similar immune response, the new virus is most similar to the endemic common-cold coronaviruses, Lavine and her colleagues hypothesise. Reanalysing data from a previous study, they found that the first infection with common-cold coronaviruses occurs on average at three to five years of age. After that age, people may become infected again and again, boosting their immunity and keeping the viruses circulating. But they don’t become ill.
The researchers foresee a similar future for Covid-19 virus. Depending on how fast the virus spreads, and on the strength and longevity of the immune response, it would take a few years to decades of natural infections for this coronavirus to become endemic, Lavine says.
Without a vaccine, the fastest path to endemic status is also the worst. The price for population immunity would be widespread illness and death along the way. Vaccines completely alter that calculus. The faster people can be immunized, the better. An efficient vaccination rollout could shorten the timeline to a year, or even just six months, for the Covid-19 virus to become an endemic infection. Still, the vaccines are unlikely to eradicate it, Lavine predicts. The virus will become a permanent, albeit more benign, inhabitant in our environment.
Other experts say this scenario is not just plausible but likely. “The overall intellectual construct of the paper I fully agree with,” says Shane Crotty, a virus expert at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, in San Diego. If the vaccines prevent people from transmitting the virus, “then it becomes a lot more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everybody, including kids, and you really don’t see the virus infecting people any more,” Crotty says.
It is more plausible that the vaccines will prevent illness – but not necessarily infection and transmission, he adds. And that means the Covid-19 virus will continue to circulate. “It’s unlikely that the vaccines we have right now are going to provide sterilising immunity,” the kind needed to prevent infection, says Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto.
Natural infection with coronavirus produces a strong immune response in the nose and throat. But with the current vaccines, Gommerman says, “you’re not getting a natural immune response in the actual upper respiratory tract, you’re getting an injection in the arm.” That raises the likelihood that infections will still occur, even after vaccination.
Ultimately, Lavine’s model rests on the assumption that the new coronavirus is similar to the common-cold coronaviruses. But that assumption may not hold up, cautions Marc Lipsitch, a public-health researcher at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, in Boston.
“Other coronavirus infections may or may not be applicable, because we haven’t seen what those coronaviruses can do to an older, naive person,” Lipsitch says. (Naive refers to an adult whose immune system has not been exposed to the virus.) Another plausible scenario, he says, is that the virus may come to resemble the seasonal flu, which is mild some years and more lethal in others. New variants of the Covid-19 virus that evade the immune response may also complicate the picture.
“Their prediction of it’s becoming like common-cold coronaviruses is where I’d put a lot of my money,” Lipsitch says. “But I don’t think it’s absolutely guaranteed.”
When and how the common-cold coronaviruses first appeared is a mystery, but since the emergence of the new coronavirus, some scientists have revisited a theory that a pandemic in 1890, which killed about a million people worldwide, may have been caused by OC-43, one of the four common-cold coronaviruses.
“People have suggested that the human population developed a low-grade, broad immunity to OC-43 that terminated the pandemic,” says Andre Veillette, an immunologist at Montreal Clinical Research Institute, in Canada. “This coronavirus currently broadly circulates in the community in a rather peaceful way.” – New York Times
Vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible and get back to normal (as normal as normal can be - would still expect masks etc to be common in shops and on public transport for a while yet)
4737carlin
Player Valuation: £90m
This annoys me, its getting hard to carry on blaming the government when people are still acting like this
news.sky.com
COVID-19: Partygoers claimed they had not heard of the pandemic - as police reveal breaches over the weekend
Police have branded some of the rule breaches "selfish" and "irresponsible" while the UK is in lockdown.
news.sky.com
4737carlin
Player Valuation: £90m
Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak and Chinese government censorship attempts.
aje.io
New videos show Wuhan during earliest days of COVID outbreak
Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak and Chinese government censorship attempts.
And only 4,500 deaths. "I'm a real boy!"Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak and Chinese government censorship attempts.
New videos show Wuhan during earliest days of COVID outbreak
Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak and Chinese government censorship attempts.
Tbf hospital transmission has always been an issue with everything. It’s just exacerbated by something that’s highly contagious.
If you read further you got this
co-authored by Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine and economics who has been a vocal opponent of coronavirus lockdowns since March.
Bhattacharya was also among a group of scientists who wrote The Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial statement that encouraged governments to lift lockdown restrictions to achieve herd immunity among young and healthy people, while focusing protections on the elderly
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