UK Lockdown

[DB9]

I see what you're saying RP. Maybe i have over reacted (again ). However i do think it might have been a courteous thing to do for the school to explain the rationale behind why they have reached the decisions they have so parents can see where they are coming from.

I've just been told that Year 7 pupils have to go back last and yet i have only my own speculation as to why this is the case. Yes i could just accept it as how it is but that is difficult for me to do when i am struggling to see the logic behind it. Which is where a brief clarification from the school explaining why they have reached this decision would have helped.

Like DB9 has done with a previous post about another delicate subject, he's explained clearly the reasoning why he thinks one thing is right and i now can understand this and it's easier to accept.

Likewise if the school came out and said Year 7's are going back last because of X, Y and Z, then i could understand and be more settled about it. Not sure if this makes sense? Often it is the lack of communication that is the issue.

The whole exam thing has been all over the media today and i'd hate to think how those in charge at schools are reacting, They are now being told they are the exam marker and giver of grades and already some have said teachers might "Over grade" pupils when there is no evidence of that at all, So with the schools welcoming back pupils and having to grade exams it must be a nightmare for those in charge and i reckon getting those that have exams this year in first to give those pupils an extra week or so to put their course work in order, Maybe have a school exam thats used in their final grades.

My good lady is going back to work for one day on Monday to find out how the process is for her school the following Monday, Not much time at all, She has no idea how it will work until she sees her line managers and when the head has worked it out.

 

[RedPaul]

I see what you're saying RP. Maybe i have over reacted (again ). However i do think it might have been a courteous thing to do for the school to explain the rationale behind why they have reached the decisions they have so parents can see where they are coming from.

I've just been told that Year 7 pupils have to go back last and yet i have only my own speculation as to why this is the case. Yes i could just accept it as how it is but that is difficult for me to do when i am struggling to see the logic behind it. Which is where a brief clarification from the school explaining why they have reached this decision would have helped.

Like DB9 has done with a previous post about another delicate subject, he's explained clearly the reasoning why he thinks one thing is right and i now can understand this and it's easier to accept.

Likewise if the school came out and said Year 7's are going back last because of X, Y and Z, then i could understand and be more settled about it. Not sure if this makes sense? Often it is the lack of communication that is the issue.

Agreed, communication is good although you can overdo it. There is truth in the old adage that 'you can't please all the people all the time..' There will be many parents and kids very nervous about going back and needing extra support. For the sake of a few days here and there, it is better to get it right.

The school my kids are at still haven't communicated what they are doing! It doesn't affect us too much although don't really want to leave our y7 at home all day on his own if the Y10 goes back first and both my wife and I will have to be in our schools.

 

[Legohead]

Wishing anyone harm or death is not nice, I don't think I've ever said that about someone, I have never said i needed time off etc because a relative is ill or something, Just I'd feel awful if they became ill, Even chatting with mates. Disliking someone, Especially a politician is perfectly natural and during these trying times even more, Especially if you think a policy is affecting you personally.

Whether in real life or on SM or here, Wishing ill will of someone is just not the right thing IMHO.

So perhaps i have an anger issue that needs some help maybe? That anger and frustration has turned into hatred i guess. Which is why it is important to be able to talk about things so we can see where the faults are and how we can get better. Personally i feel the constant frustration with a variety of life events has led to me not being able to cope with things very well and now, every small thing that happens becomes a huge issue. The tipping point is easily reached if you like.

The inability to process anger and deal appropriately with constant frustration i guess can cause people to lose their sense of decency maybe sometimes and they just don't care anymore about what people think. I am fully aware that not being bothered if somebody dies is not a nice thing to be thinking but i think maybe it's a coping mechanism to divert hate and anger onto someone else, someone else who we perhaps blame for the difficulties we feel we have been forced to deal with.

I've read many stories during this pandemic about people who have suffered far greater adversity than myself and mostly from decisions made by the Government / NHS and yet they have the strength to remain calm and plough on. I have thought to myself how and why can they put up with this and if it were me i'd be frothing at the mouth.

I guess we all have various capacities to cope with things and my bucket has been full for quite some time. I did have depression before Covid and was just starting to claw my way back by doing lots of volunteering and helping people with things and meeting new people and it's all been taken away and i've not been able to readjust yet and find alternatives to help.

However, i am mindful that there are millions of people out there struggling with various things and it's horrendous for us all at the moment.

I know that i am a decent person. I just think it's a succession of adverse life events and insufficient coping mechanisms that has made me bitter towards a lot of things and i really don't want to live my life like this. Hopefully we can get back to seeing Exeter again very soon because i miss the routine of attending football and planning for the day / weekend out. It was a key driver in my life and was really helping and obviously it got taken away for all of us. For nearly a year now.

 

[DB9]

So perhaps i have an anger issue that needs some help maybe? That anger and frustration has turned into hatred i guess. Which is why it is important to be able to talk about things so we can see where the faults are and how we can get better. Personally i feel the constant frustration with a variety of life events has led to me not being able to cope with things very well and now, every small thing that happens becomes a huge issue. The tipping point is easily reached if you like.

The inability to process anger and deal appropriately with constant frustration i guess can cause people to lose their sense of decency maybe sometimes and they just don't care anymore about what people think. I am fully aware that not being bothered if somebody dies is not a nice thing to be thinking but i think maybe it's a coping mechanism to divert hate and anger onto someone else, someone else who we perhaps blame for the difficulties we feel we have been forced to deal with.

I've read many stories during this pandemic about people who have suffered far greater adversity than myself and mostly from decisions made by the Government / NHS and yet they have the strength to remain calm and plough on. I have thought to myself how and why can they put up with this and if it were me i'd be frothing at the mouth.

I guess we all have various capacities to cope with things and my bucket has been full for quite some time. I did have depression before Covid and was just starting to claw my way back by doing lots of volunteering and helping people with things and meeting new people and it's all been taken away and i've not been able to readjust yet and find alternatives to help.

However, i am mindful that there are millions of people out there struggling with various things and it's horrendous for us all at the moment.

I know that i am a decent person. I just think it's a succession of adverse life events and insufficient coping mechanisms that has made me bitter towards a lot of things and i really don't want to live my life like this. Hopefully we can get back to seeing Exeter again very soon because i miss the routine of attending football and planning for the day / weekend out. It was a key driver in my life and was really helping and obviously it got taken away for all of us. For nearly a year now.

We all have struggled one way or another, Its just that we do it in different ways. We are now hopefully seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel and we just need to hold out for a bit longer.

 

[Legohead]

We all have struggled one way or another, Its just that we do it in different ways. We are now hopefully seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel and we just need to hold out for a bit longer.

Indeed DB9. Hopefully i have done enough to explain how my 'different ways' of coping with the struggle might come across as unpleasant but are simply a way of trying to wrestle back some small aspects of control over recent life events that we seem to have had no control over. This includes both the virus and the response to the virus.

 

[Legohead]

Perhaps there could be a mental health thread put up on here? If any exewebbers are brave enough to openly talk about their personal experiences? Would this be a good idea or a bad one?

 

[elginCity]

Good idea Lego, make it so !

Poland going into another Lockdown, new cases similar levels to the UK right now, tho 30m fewer people.

 

[RedPaul]

This is a fascinating article in today's Times. Whilst ostensibly it has a Scottish bias, it is well worth a read and as it is behind a paywall, took the liberty of posting in full.

It addresses many issues pertinent to the entire UK including the effectiveness of lockdowns, attaining 'zero covid' and debunks some of the myths about closing borders last March. It is also very interesting on the origin of the Kent variant that has caused such problems over this winter. I had never seen this set out before and backs up what I felt at the time that something seriously spooked the Gov in December. This is no quack, he is on the Scottish version of SAGE and and a Professor in Epidemiology. Of course the fact that he drives a coach and horses through Sturgeon's drivel about blaming the English for "bringing Covid back into Scotland" is also welcome!

START

An adviser to Nicola Sturgeon has challenged the first minister’s claim that coronavirus was “reseeded” into Scotland from other parts of the UK and claimed her “elimination” strategy was unattainable. The first minister has claimed that coronavirus was “almost eliminated” in Scotland last summer but was brought back into the country from travellers coming in from outside. Mark Woolhouse, the Edinburgh University epidemiologist who sits on Sturgeon’s Covid-19 advisory group, challenged these claims at the Scottish parliament’s Covid-19 committee.

Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, claimed that “following the first lockdown the majority of the Covid virus strains that had been circulating in the population were eliminated”.

Woolhouse said: “Scotland was not close to elimination at any stage during this epidemic. We had low numbers of reported cases during the summer, but . . . the estimates were that we never fell below 500 cases in Scotland. “The majority of those cases were not reported because the virus was circulating at that stage among young adults who do not show many symptoms.
“As soon as testing increased in August there was a dramatic increase in the number of cases we were detecting in those groups.” Woolhouse said “genome sequencing work . . . showed quite clearly that the lineages that were present in the first wave in Scotland were still present in the second wave . . . so we were not close to elimination in Scotland”. He said future elimination “will not be practical” in the short term and will only be achieved in future if vaccine cuts transmission, which remains inconclusive.

Scottish ministers point to New Zealand, which has managed to keep coronavirus at minimal levels, but Woolhouse said it was nowhere near as cosmopolitan and connected as the UK. He said: “If the UK had put border controls in place in mid-March, as the home secretary has suggested in the past, it would have been far too late. “The UK’s epidemic was seeded in mid-February, around about half term, by thousands of cases being brought in from France, Italy and Spain. “Even if we put our border control measures in place when New Zealand did it would have had very little effect. New Zealand went into lockdown on March 25, after the UK on March 23.”

He added: “I heard a lot of voices over last summer saying ‘all these tourists from England were a potential epidemiological threat’ for the Highlands. “I didn’t think they would be — and it turned out they weren’t . . . there were no outbreaks of any significance linked to tourists . . . there were a small number of lineages of the virus that could be linked to England — not necessarily linked to tourists, but it could have been tourists at 6 per cent of the total, but it wasn’t where Scotland’s viruses were coming from.” He added: “No country with an epidemic the size of Scotland has managed to have a smaller second wave than the first . . . no country with one tenth of the epidemic size of Scotland has avoided a bigger second wave. “There appears to be no route that any country in the world has found to get to where Scotland is now to where New Zealand is now.

“We missed our chance to be like New Zealand in February 2020 and by March it was already too late for us, and now it is far too late because there is no way back . . . we have had two full lockdowns in Scotland and those have not managed to achieve elimination . . . to get to where we are now to elimination via lockdown would require a very strict lockdown for many, many months.
“You can’t have an elimination strategy and also be relaxing measures — those are contradictory aims.” Woolhouse said the death rate in Scotland was so high “because we have concentrated so much on lockdown and otherwise trying to suppress the virus”. He said: “Between half and three quarters of all the people who died during the first lockdown got coronavirus after lockdown began . . . which tells me that we didn’t pay nearly enough attention to doing things beyond lockdown to protect the vulnerable in care homes and the wider community — all we had was shielding, which wasn’t particularly effective and a bit of extra advice for the over 70s. “We could have put so much more effort into protecting the people that needed protected. . . lockdowns did not save those people and that is something we need to reflect on very hard.”

Woolhouse also challenged claims by Leitch that “the best way for the virus to mutate is high numbers” of people infected. Woolhouse said: “It goes without saying that if you have more cases there are more opportunities for evolution to happen, but that is not quite how it works. “Our best understanding is the new Kent variant arose in a single patient that was infected with coronavirus, was immunocompromised and was being treated with an antibody therapy — a very special case — and a large number of mutations was able to happen in that one patient. “That is not just a typical case, that is a particular combination of circumstances which we can learn about and understand to take more targeted measures to monitor patients . . . particularly with vaccine failures. “The final point of interest about the evolution of the Kent variant is it happened in September, but we didn’t even see it as a problem until December . . . so we won’t even recognise them as a problem until they are already well established, so we do have to find a sustainable way to deal with that reality.”

END

 

[Hants_red]

It could be true

A new study out of India found people who wear glasses are three times less likely to get the virus.


Researchers suggest that's because they're less likely to touch their eyes-- which can be a significant route of infection.

 

[Legohead]

It could be true

If i get the uncontrollable urge to touch / rub my eyes when i'm out, i mostly use the inside of my t-shirt to do it or i use my knuckles as a last resort. Not my fingertips.