England’s reopening: ‘The world is looking at us with disbelief’
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So far as I can tell, it has only been broken for the fully vaccinated, but for those not yet vaccinated, or not fully vaccinated, the delta variant is more dangerous than all the variants which came before and the link has not been broken for those people.
Even with the UK's good vaccination program, most people are not fully vaccinated yet, and won't be for months because of the time delays between vaccination for best effect, as well as the waiting time after the second one before it reaches maximal protection.
There are also people who would like to get their first vaccination, but are currently ill with something else and so rationally have to avoid the first vaccine for a while.
So although the overall statistics look better than previous waves, that should not be any comfort to those who are now going to be exposed to greater risk than in previous waves.
I would like to see more emphasis on statistics showing the risks to people who are still at risk, not the current presentations which imply a substantial minority of people's lives don't really matter because the overall numbers are down.
I worry mostly for the people who are still at risk (though hidden by the aggregate statistics), who will be forced to go back to work in unsafe environments, now that the law will no longer support them working from home, no longer requires others at work to wear masks or keep a distance, and no longer requires adequate ventilation.
As for public transport. Let me put it this way. 19th July is the day when I would recommend to stop using public transportation (tube, buses, taxis, trains), because it's the day the air will immediately become more dangerous in enclosed spaces.
Death rates have fallen from a peak of around 1000 deaths per day in feb - with comparable infection rates, to 6 deaths per day. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
i think most people would consider that to be having broken the link, between infection and death.
The link has definitely been weakened, but it's still there
there will always be a death a rate. im not sure what you were expecting ?
[1] https://deutscher-psychosomatik-kongress.de/wp-content/uploa...
Psychosomatic is what doctors call illnesses when they can't find a physical cause, especially if it "looks like stress".
I don't wish to discount genuine psychosomatic illnesses. However a psychsomatic diagnosis is often found to be wrong in the end, i.e. a physical cause is found after all. This causes no end of trouble for patients, who are effectively told it's all in their heads when it isn't.
I want to add that a direct colleague of mine still hasn't regained his smell which he lost three years ago due to a serious flu.
There is so much we don't know about long covid. Some people seem to think it always happens after virus infections, but only now shows up on our radar due to media attention.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.21257255v...
As explained in the comment you're replying to, the aggregate statistics are very different from the per-cohort statistics, which are unfortunately not prominently displayed.
And you also have not taken into account exponential growth and time lag. Predictions are that infections are to rise significantly to perhaps more than 100,000 per day. It hasn't occurred yet, and it's inevitable that it will accelerate if there's an abrupt change of behaviour.
It will be several weeks later that this will translate to whatever turns out to be the exponential rise in severe disease statistics, just as the current reported death rate is time-lagged from infection rates several weeks ago.
And not mentioned here is the non-death severe consequences: Long Covid mainly, which young people get. And all those people with cancer who can't get treatement while the hospitals are full of Covid patients, and for that matter, daren't risk going to hospital anyway because of the immunosuppressants they are on.
For those in the wrong cohorts, the link is not broken, and the death risk to them is about to go up as they are forced back onto public transport and back to workplaces with protections removed.
They are by no means all "laggards" with regard to vaccination, as though that's a personal choice.
I personally am eager to be vaccinated but won't be fully vaccinated with the appropriate post-second-shot delay until beginning of October. I'm in a slightly at risk group, and my family is significantly at risk. So there's no way I'm risking going to any shops or anything like that between now and October :/
That's why I feel for those who don't have work at home jobs. I do, and I'm eager to keep it that way.
If you're one of those people who likes to say "who cares if 10% of our users can't read our website", perhaps you also are the type to think "who cares if the death link isn't broken for 33% of the population, it's broken for the other 67% so that's fine!".
I think the government's conclusion is that this is keeping deaths and hospitalisation rates low enough, and that now is a better time for infections to spike than later when winter arrives. School summer holidays are also starting.
They can obviously reinstate restrictions later if needed.
Or perhaps more likely, they're not thinking very much and if it turns out to be a small but motivating spike, the Britons are lucky.
I'd wait until a few weeks after the second injection before considering a person to be in the reasonably safe zone from death, if they were not young enough to be in the reasonably safe zone already.
I agree that the government is taking the view that the rates are low enough in aggregate. The messaging always focuses on the aggregate number as though that's all that matters.
However when seen from the point of view of an individual who is in the wrong cohort, the rates are not low enough unfortunately. And such people are directly affected by how everyone else behaves.
A large, planned rise in infectious other people, misleading impressions due to exponential curves and time lags, elimination of safety measures at work and the right to avoid the workplace, and elimination of safety measures on public transport, are not good for people in the wrong cohort.
It might be ok if those still at significant risk could stay at home. But they are also losing the right to insist on working at home when possible.
I think Israel with a high vaccination quota released numbers that showed an effectiveness of 70% without differentiating the variant, but don't quote me on this.
It would be very unwise for England or any other nation to follow in the Dutch footsteps.
The same applies to getting people to sign in at restaurants etc. And to social distancing and testing and vaccination programs. I've had younger friends tell me they don't want the vaccine ("I don't know what's in it" says the guy famous for snorting other people's Coke). I had to convince my dad to get the jab.
Britian is culturally and politically incapable of anything but the worst possible outcome here. Parts of the US seem to be in the same position.
Furthermore, designing an RCT for mask use might not really be doable in a fashion we’re used to from drug interventions. And should the vast amount of other non-RCT evidence that does exist and that shows a protective effect of masks as well as the precautionary principle not lead us all to mask up in the face of a new disease that is proven to cause serious harm, short and long term?
For anybody interested in the topic, this thread by an Oxford professor and co-author of the recent Lancet letter advising against the plans of the British government might be worthwhile reading: https://twitter.com/trishgreenhalgh/status/14142940034790891...
Edit: Typo.
Personal responsibility does mean you get to decide when to put others at risk, for example by going near them without a mask. Now, we might argue that there is a trade-off between respecting individual sovereignty on the one hand and lowering the friction of society on the other, but to frame this as a "personal responsibility" move is absurd. The Conservatives should read their intellectual heroes more carefully. Last I checked, Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle.
But I'd like to point out that the Conservatives in the UK are nothing like Libertarians. There are a few perhaps, like the MP in the article, who would like to think of themselves that way. But the Conservatives as a whole are Authoritarian bordering on Totalitarian, and they are the most Authoritarian of all the big parties (more than the left).
You just have to look at their "hostile environment" policies to see the difference: It is the law that all landlords (even for someone staying in a spare bedroom of someone's home), banks and health services must verify a person's documented right to rent, open a bank account or have healthcare.
Every major party is against those policies except the Conservatives.
As many people in the UK lack or can't obtain documentation even when they do in fact have legal rights (the Home Office in charge of such things routinely breaks the law and is ruled against by the courts), and many don't find out about their restricted status until they turn 18 years old then find out they aren't allowed to go to university after all, and some lose status without knowing because we have a rather opaque system which does that to people for capricious and secretive reasons, we have rather a lot of people affected by those laws, who were either born in the UK or entered legally at the time they entered. This is why the Windrush abuse by government was so damaging, as many elderly people who had been in the country for some 50 years were suddenly affected by the hostile environment policy and had their lives ruined.
No true libertarian would condone those policies, as they are directly opposed to personal freedom between individuals to make small, private transactions. Renting is a private transaction between one individual and another, yet it is illegal under these policies. And preventing the doctor from providing services so that people die when the doctor is perfectly willing to help is also rather unlibertarian.
I agree, however the media insists on talking about Johnson's "Libertarian instincts" and the "Libertarian wing of the party". I don't see them as very Libertarian at all! See also drug policy, protest bill, internet surveillance, housing market interventions...
Requiring someone to prove their status for a private, low value transaction between individuals is a strongly authoritarian state. Requiring ordinary people to act as police for the state is also strongly authoritarian.
I don't believe that is a hyperbolic view.
And "requiring someone to prove status" means a lot of different things. If the issuing of status is itself done abusively, and without regard for the law (the Home Office routinely breaks the law and is routinely found to have behaved abusively), that phrase sounds much more reasonable than it is.
You would not think this unless you have witnessed the distressing multi-year effects on people of ambiguous status who are still trying to get a straight and justifiable answer out of the system designed with rejection quotas in mind, irrational decisions at times, and horrible consequences for some individuals. (Note I said "ambiguous", not "without". There are so many cases which ultimately end up resolved as "ok you're fine" after a few years fighting unlawful judgements).
The result is obvious: There are people sleeping rough because it is, essentially, the law that they must be kept homeless until their status is resolved. There are many more currently sleeping in dangerous accomodation, and in abusive relationships they cannot leave. And there are people living with life-threatening, curable diseases, where there is nothing they can do but slowly die.
I also think requiring people to earn significantly above the median wage before they can live with their own spouse is also, in my view, authoritarian. To be honest I was shocked when I discovered that. I always assumed any decent state would at least allow genuinely married couples to be together.
And in fact, EU law does allow that - it's considered a fundamental human right (the right to a family life). But it's not a human right in the UK.
This statement is false. People have died as a result of withheld life-critical treatment under the hostile environment, and not by mistake.
One immediately comes to mind who was in the middle of life-critical cancer treatment, when it was abruptly suspended by a hostile environment requirement, and then some months later they died as everyone knew they would.
What you are thinking of is emergency treatement, which is not the same as life threatening.
Unfortunately I also know of people who have avoided going to A&E despite facing a life-threatening emergency, preferring to cross their fingers than to risk being placed in prison ("detention centres") and later deported, when they turn up at A&E. After all, even if you get emergency treatement, enforcement sometimes turns up to take you away after the treatment before you leave hospital.
Whether that fear is justified or not, it is a fact that some people believe that it is dangerous to go to hospital, due to the messages put out by the "Conservative" government and the "embedded" immigration staff at hospitals. There are also pregnant women who ought to attend hospital for the safety of their child, but again, are too afraid to attend hospital due to justified fear of the consequences.
Another fine example: The Home Office sentenced a woman to death while she was still in a coma, saying she could recieve "palliative" care in the destination country instead of life saving treatment she was in the middle of receiving in the UK. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-immigrati...
In my view, it's not hyperbolic to describe those decisions as authoritarian bordering on totalitarian for those people.
But it's because it only affects a subset of people that most other people don't think it's a problem.
Those are completely different conditions to those faced by "any tourist". A tourist would receive life saving treatment in the above example.
The screwup with documentation was negligence. It's incompetence if it's just a screwup. It's negligence when it can be foreseen to cause material harm, which it clearly could by those working in the same office as sets the enforcement policies.
Policies intended to cause immediate harm to whoever's documentation happens to be screwed up - which is inevitable (known to be inevitable from appeal court statistics) - instead of treating people reasonably while sorting out the documentation. That part is malice.
The Home Office policy of "deport first, appeal later" is not designed to allow errors to be sorted out while treating people in a civil manner. (It often prevents people from accessing their own belongings and paperwork.) It's designed to prevent people from sorting things out unless they have someone still in the UK to do it on their behalf. That boosts the deportation quotas and keeps the appeal rate unjustly low.