[Zer0]

Not a Subject Matter Expert...Still!
✌️

Excessive use of medications & steroids are already causing complications such as mucormycosis.
Black fungus, White fungus, shot up diabetes, increased heart attacks, brain fog etc etc.
👎

Lockdowns & Quarantines bring about a painful financial crunch, Not to mention increased Depression & mental illnesses.
Less money, less purchasing power to buy medicines, & stress levels paramount.
👎

Third World Countries might Not be capable of manufacturing or even buying Vaxx.
Even if billions of Vaxx are Donated, orthodox, religious extremists, illeterate, nincompoop populations Might Deny getting Vaxx.
👎

Do Not have a clue, as to how long Antibodies are present & sustained within.
Have heard of folks getting infected Thrice.
Even Two dosed Vaxx are susceptible to a mild infection.
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The more it Spreads, the More chances of Mutations & Variants.
Cannot say if a New strain might emerge that renders Vaccines Ineffective.
👎
Do Not know if this can combine with Ebola, Rabies or HIV and become a Double Whammy.
No Clue on how it might be brought under control after other species start getting infected.




P.S. - Pandora's Jar!
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[evan_au]

the survivor population as a herd of immunes, i.e. a subspecies with inherent and hertiable immunity or tolerance

When smallpox was introduced to the (previously unexposed) Australian Aborigines, the death rate was reportedly around 90%. The succeeding generations were apparently better able to survive this pathogen.
- That is a high price to pay for a tolerant community
- But it won't work for COVID-19, since most of the fatalities are past childbearing age

The problem is that a human generation is 25-30 years
- while a COVID-19 generation is 1 week, with new mutations spawned every 2 weeks.
- So the virus can always adapt faster than we can

Vaccination is a way to achieve community protection, but without the heavy death toll.

[alancalverd]

What would you have done?
Would you have acted like Boris and been a dictator leading the population down a path which you knew was the wrong one, or asked if they were sure?

Obviously I would have had a referendum every six months to see if they still felt the same way as last time. Isn't that what the SNP wants to do? And it is consistent with the European Union's insistence that the Irish should continue to vote until they came up with the right answer.

However, reading your reference,  I infer that you would prefer not to actually ask everyone's opinion in a full referendum but to impose the majority will of the 1000 people you selected, on everyone else. Clearly an admirer of the classics, including the Greek definition of democracy.

[alancalverd]

The question of whether more lives would've been saved by letting the Covid virus run its natural course, instead of desperately trying to fend it off by inventing vaccines and locking down entire countries, will only be answered in the future.

No, we can answer it now.

We know that
COVID kills about 4% of all those it infects
homo sapiens has no inherent immunity
there is no external vector
so eventually everyone will be infected if it "runs its natural course".

Therefore if we did nothing, of the 67,000,000 UK citizens alive in 2020 about 2,700,000 would eventually die from an entirely preventable disease, and if nobody can be reinfected, a further 10,000 would die similarly in every subsequent year.  However it seems that reinfection is possible so the more likely number is at least 100,000 per year for ever.

Thanks to governmental incompetence, about 128,000 have died, and thanks to lockdowns and vaccination, the number is unlikely to exceed 150,000 by the end of 2021 with an ongoing toll of about 100 per year.

Had the government acted as sensibly as that of New Zealand the total would have been about 350 deaths to date with no significant ongoing burden of disease in future. That's what a socialist government can do if it stops playing internal politics and gets on with the job.

[alancalverd]

Excessive use of medications & steroids are already causing complications such as mucormycosis.
Black fungus, White fungus, shot up diabetes, increased heart attacks, brain fog etc etc.
👎

And an increase of life expectancy of 85 days per year since 1930, leading to an increase in the diseases of old age such as those you have listed.

[Bored chemist]

Obviously I would have had a referendum every six months to see if they still felt the same way as last time.

That's a fine idea, and then, when you find that the outcome has settled down to a consensus of sorts, you can use that as the basis for action rather than pretending that an advisory referendum was legally binding like the Tories did.

You might even avoid driving a coach and horses through the fundamental point of democracy.

  I infer that you would prefer not to actually ask everyone's opinion in a full referendum but to impose the majority will of the 1000 people you selected, on everyone else.

I say that having a full referendum would be a good thing, and you infer from that that I don't want the decision made by referendum.

Had you been drinking or something?

[alancalverd]

That's a fine idea, and then, when you find that the outcome has settled down to a consensus of sorts,

And how would you define a consensus, other than 51% agreeing with you? I'd rather be drunk than talk like a politician!

I looked at the opinion polls you referred to. The sample size was between 1000 and 2500 with one outlier at 10,000. I would have thought that a 72% sample of a 30,000 000 electorate would be a better indication of consensus.

The 1975 "stay" referendum

expressed significant support for EC membership, with 67% in favour on a national turnout of 64%. The referendum result was not legally binding....

So support for the status quo (which is all the 1975 referendum was about - the UK had entered the EEC two years earlier) had steadily fallen to the point of "leave" as the trade deficit grew,  there was no indication of any improvement on the terms that Cameron had negotiated, and the initial referendum wasn't binding anyway.

The engine is on fire, you have failed to put it out, you were not legally bound to fly it anyway, and the plane is spinning towards the sea. When  do you eject? 

[Bored chemist]

And how would you define a consensus, other than 51% agreeing with you? I'd rather be drunk than talk like a politician!

So , you wanted to announce that you don't understand what "settled down" meant.
OK that's fine.

I would have thought that a 72% sample of a 30,000 000 electorate would be a better indication of consensus.

Yes, statistically better.
But you seem to be refusing to consider the obvious.
People have hanged their minds since they discovered that the brexit dividend was a lie.
As accurate a poll as you could do ten years ago would tell you next to nothing about today's view on something.

The fact remains that the opinion of the people, at the time the UK left the EU was that leaving was a mistake.
Nothing which has happened since then will have altered that view.

The engine is on fire

No it isn't.
A man who is trying to sell you a fire extinguisher (at a huge price) is telling you that the engine is on fire, but in reality it is working fine. (Also, the fire extinguisher doesn't actually work).

Don't you think you should ask the passengers to look out of the window to check, before you give the order to ditch?

[alancalverd]

The fact remains that the opinion of the people, at the time the UK left the EU was that leaving was a mistake.

Not according to your source, which shows that the opinion of 1 - 2000 people swung on various dates between plus 8 and minus 10 percent lead, with a consistent 12 - 13% "don't know". If you take the known phenomenon of "buyer's regret" into consideration, the result is at best meaningless and at worst demonstrates the government's incompetence at negotiating with a bunch of leeches - something you should never do!

The steady increase in trade deficit with the rest of the EU had been charted by the government's official statisticians for 50 years, regardless of the color of government or the will of the people. Only a fool listens to politicians: a wise man reads the company accounts.

If the UK was a net beneficiary of the EU, why did they make it so difficult for us to leave?

[CliffordK]

If the herd isolated at home for 3 weeks at at time, it would be immune.

Isolation would interrupt transmission, but wouldn't provide immunity.  So re-infect, and the infection can go wild.

That is one of the reasons I believe my state has been struggling.  It has had some of the lowest case numbers throughout he first year, but that left a lot of people still vulnerable coming into the second year.

[Bored chemist]

why did they make it so difficult for us to leave?

In what way did they do so?

Not according to your source, which shows that the opinion of 1 - 2000 people swung on various dates between plus 8 and minus 10 percent lead,

There's about 70 polls on the right hand half of side of that graph.

If the UK was uncertain about it then, half the time, the red dot would be on top, and had the time the green dot would be on top.

What you are saying is that they tossed a coin 70 times and got 69 heads- but you still think the coin is unbiassed.
That's something like a 1 in 10^19 chance.
Feel free to cling to it, but don't expect many followers.

BTW, if a passing mod would like to take this  and dump it somewhere less off topic, that would probably be good.

[Bored chemist]

and the infection can go wild.

No it can't- because everyone is isolating.

[alancalverd]

If the UK was uncertain

What statistical test suggests that 1000 people is an efficient sample of 30,000,000?

If you are trying to discriminate a 2% difference with P = 0.05 you need about 20,000 samples.

But to return to Clifford's statement: no, if everyone isolates for 3 weeks nobody will be immune but the disease will die out in that group. Elimination is a 3-stage process: immediate quarantine minimises the number of incoming carriers, rigid isolation prevents the disease from spreading among your population, then you vaccinate them to prevent it entering from outside when you lift the quarantine. Any other approach just destroys the economy and kills people.

[Bored chemist]

What statistical test suggests that 1000 people is an efficient sample of 30,000,000?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll#Margin_of_error_due_to_sampling

But you still have to explain your view that in 69 out of 70 polls, most people didn't say it was the right choice, but that doesn't mean that most people don't think it was the right choice.

If you are trying to discriminate a 2% difference

We aren't.
The margin is bigger than that.
And, that means that a smaller number of people will suffice.

If you really cared, you would have clicked on the link to the poll and found this

"All polls are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical
record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a
party’s support lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this poll, and a 2 in 3 chance
that they lie within 2 points"


But the fact remains that when 69 out of 70 say the same thing, either you need to show serious bias or you accept the answer.
Or, if you are a brexit supporter you stick your fingers in your ears and say "La la la; I;m not listening"
This technique also allows you to say that a 23% fall in trade isn't a problem.

[alancalverd]

If you are losing money in your trading, a 23% fall in trade is a very good thing.

If we play poker twice week and you lose very time, would you prefer to play three times a week or once? OK, you are a gambling addict, but what does your bank manager think?

Anyway, to return to the subject, thanks to the sustained commercial brilliance of the European Union in negotiating vaccine contracts, our neighbors will probably be going for the herd immunity option, so let's wait and see.

[Bored chemist]

A friend of mine at uni used to play poker and lose heavily.
He knew this and kept on playing.His parents were rich so the losses were inconsequential to him, but he made sure his mates had enough beer money.
And that meant that he had someone to have a beer with- which was valuable to him. The thing about trade is  that the items have different values to the person buying and the person selling.

If you look at the "balance of payments" and nothing else you get the wrong impression.

You already lost this argument when I pointed out that I give the supermarket much more money that it gives me.
(At the time, I think the example I used was the pub, so it must have been over a year ago that I explained why you are wrong to only look at one side of the equation).

My employers "balance of payments" looks even worse. They give money to lots of people.

[alancalverd]

My employers "balance of payments" looks even worse. They give money to lots of people.

...and never invoice anyone? Even if you work in a benefits office, somewhere there is a tax collector or charity chugger bringing in the cash, and if you spend more than you collect, the office will close.

Just to recap a simple argument. UK-EU trade consists of two elements: import and export.  Most businesses do one or the other, and make a profit by doing it. Clearly if you do more business of either sort, you make more profit. So removing trade tariffs is good for business. But if the net imports to a country exceeds the net exports, the country is exporting money, and in the case of the EU, the taxpayer was paying a membership fee for the privilege of doing so. Good for business, bad for Britain.

If you consider yourself as the poker player, I'm glad I'm not your parent. Friends that you have to buy (or rent - beer doesn't last long) are not good friends.

Old adage: if you do business with friends, you will end up with no friends or no business. By all means establish a federal Europe with one langhuage, a single system of statute law and citizenship, but a bent trade agreement, an incompetent and unaccountable bureaucracy, and a parliament with no power, is not worth my tax money.

[Bored chemist]

...and never invoice anyone?

The point is that they don't invoice me; they pay me.

Friends that you have to buy

It's interesting that you have assumed he "had to" do this, rather than chose to.

Good for business, bad for Britain.

Where does Britain get it's wealth from?

[vhfpmr (OP)]

Are the vaccines going to be good enough?

From Wiki, covid R₀ is 2.4 - 3.4, so if the Δ variant is reportedly 64% more infectious
R_0Δ = 3.9 - 5.6,
and the herd threshold 1-1/R = 75% - 82%

If Pfizer is 87% efficient against Δ then we need 86% - 94% vaccinated, but
OAZ is reportedly 60% efficient against Δ, so we would need more than 125% of the population vaccinated.

And that's without excluding children and refuseniks.

A year ago John Edmunds said that all epidemics end with herd immunity (natural or vaccine), but what happens with flu? That fizzles out each year without seemingly getting anywhere near herd immunity.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective-against-b-1-617-2-variant-after-2-doses

[Bored chemist]

what happens with flu?

It changes every year.
So we do achieve herd immunity to one year's version, but it's not much use next year.