Coronavirus

[Jimmy HaveHave]

I have a problem with supermarket staff not wearing a face mask considering how many people they come in contact with and today was no exception in the big Asda and can't understand why It isn't mandatory to those who aren't exempt.

[Legends-Lounge]

I have a problem with supermarket staff not wearing a face mask considering how many people they come in contact with and today was no exception in the big Asda and can't understand why It isn't mandatory to those who aren't exempt.

Possibly if they did, staff could arguably with justification say to the customers you have to also, no exceptions unless medically exempt. You all know and have seen how people can escalate being unreasonable to assault in seconds. Who is going to police it and be responsible. If the government adopted some of the stuff being implemented in Europe can you imagine the uproar, the MSM, the unions, the left wing agitators, uncle aTom Cobbly and all creating fucking Merry hell? Stammer would be down to the local DIY store for a pallet of glee to rub his hands in.

[Jimmy HaveHave]

To be fair most shoppers today were wearing a mask

[Quagmire]

It doesn’t bother me if supermarket staff have masks on or not. They’ve had one on for near on 2 years, fuck that.
 

[4D]

Apparently 15 at the club have coronavirus

[Jimmy HaveHave]

It doesn’t bother me if supermarket staff have masks on or not. They’ve had one on for near on 2 years, fuck that.
 

If they don't bother why should anyone else

[Quagmire]

If they don't bother why should anyone else

100’s of different people are going in their place of work every day, they’re key workers, we should be wearing masks to protect them.

[Jimmy HaveHave]

That's my point, shop workers & till staff in large supermarkets are in contact with hundreds of people each day so by wearing a mask can only enhance extra protection for everyone even though I appreciate it's not ideal for them.

[Samdy Gray]

I really don't understand why someone in such a job would choose not to wear one. Comfort issues aside, they're putting their own health at risk.

[Jimmy HaveHave]

Exactly this

[Bogus Dave]

Interestingly the NFL are changing its testing rules, from weekly testing for all to testing symptomatic cases only (off the back of a week where three games have had to be rescheduled and some teams have over 30 players testing positive)

Marks a pretty big shift to getting on with life / putting fingers in ears (depending on your outlook). Be interesting to see if similar takes off here in the normal football

[swindonmaniac]

I have a problem with supermarket staff not wearing a face mask considering how many people they come in contact with and today was no exception in the big Asda and can't understand why It isn't mandatory to those who aren't exempt.

Exactly the same in our local Morrisons,  doesn’t exactly encourage the shoppers to wear one.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Audrey]

There’s a good article in The Telegraph.

‘The artist Pablo Picasso said “youth has no age” and we baby boomers have always liked the sound of that. We can remain forever young; it’s what we do and feel that’s important - and woe betide anyone who says otherwise.
Trouble is, over the past two years, much of this faux youth and privilege has been lived at the expense of the biologically young. They’ve sacrificed freedoms and learning in the prime of their lives to keep us over 50s safe despite hardly being touched by the virus themselves.
It’s a generational sacrifice on a par with only a few before it, and with omicron it needs to end - for their sake and ultimately the nation’s. It was one thing to ask the young to hunker down when there was no protection, but quite another to do so now.
The difference in mortality risk between old and young is startling and a merciful inversion of what happened in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, when mortality peaked at just 28 years.
With Covid, the mortality charts show a low and relatively flat line all the way up to age 50. Only then does the case fatality rate swing up rapidly, climbing from less than one per cent at age 49 to around 15 percent at 80.
According to the QCovid risk calculator run by the University of Oxford, a male aged 60 with no risk factors has a 2.3 percent chance of dying of Covid following a positive test. For an 80-year-old man, it’s 16 per cent (one in six).
But the odds of falling a cropper to Covid as a youth are miniscule. For a healthy 19-year-old, the risk of dying after a positive test drops to just 0.01 per cent. And the risk of that teenager catching covid in the first or second waves and then dying was literally one in a million, according to QCovid.
A one in a million chance of death is called a “micromort” - a jolly little unit of measurement that is useful for comparing the riskiness of various day-to-day activities.
A trained scuba diver stares down five micromorts with every dive, while a single sky dive will cost you eight micromorts, for example.
On the more mundane side of life, a 230-mile drive equates one micromort. That’s the same tiny risk our 19-year-old runs from Covid. His 80-year-old grandad, on the other hand, runs a Covid risk which is 1,000 times greater.
The 19-year-old would need to drive 230,000 miles - equivalent to lapping the globe nine times - to clock up the same number of micromorts on a road trip.
None of this is to minimise the threat of Covid. The omicron wave, which is rapidly enveloping the country, is deadly serious. Unless this variant turns out to be very considerably less lethal than those before it, it's a good bet that hospitals up and down the country will find themselves overwhelmed in the next three to four weeks.
If the worst transpires, there will no doubt be calls for another lockdown. People will say a developed democracy cannot operate without a functioning health system, and you may agree with them - especially if you think you may have a call to use it.
But we boomers have had almost two years to fix the roof. If Covid overwhelms the NHS this winter it will be because we have not done enough to expand its capacity, control the virus or to make sure all adults (not just some of them) were double jabbed and boosted.
The American physician Dr Anthony Fauci has called the young “vehicles of spread” and they do indeed carry the virus. But can we really close their schools and universities once again in order to protect ourselves given the damage we know that would bring?
I would say not. In the spirit of Picasso, we oldies embraced Freedom Day and, in doing so, opted to live with the virus rather than suppress it.
If that turns out to be more of a base jump (450 micromorts) than a gentle stroll in the park, we’re just going to have to live with it, or not.
 ’

[Samdy Gray]

The article makes a lot of sense comparing the risk of death between the young and old and I completely agree with the sentiment.

But any restrictions that are put in place due to Omicron won't be to stop people dying with COVID necessarily, it's to stop the health service being overwhelmed so that people don't die of other things.

[Nemo]

Yeah it's quite disingenuous to write as if you either die or are totally fine when you get Covid, there's a pretty significant range of outcomes and as Samdy said, the indirect deaths from the NHS not having the capacity to cope also need to be considered. Totally understand that people are weary and that, but the last three days have been the highest Covid level we've ever had - more than before any of the previous lockdowns.