Blah Blah

We do not like in a germ free environment though, and our immune systems are constantly working. We only get ill when the immune system is challenged temporarily. Mostly it catches up and gets us well. Sometimes it does not. I think it is perfectly reasonable to point out that most people refusing to wear masks are being selfish, because they are. They have no genuine reason for not complying and will no doubt be the ones coughing and sneezing all over the place when seasonal colds kick in. They are also causing more fear for those who genuinely do have to shield. We wear the masks to protect others from our own germs if we are carrying the virus. That is an act of consideration. Those who don't wear one, don't care who gets ill, including the genuinely vulnerable.

Why do people pay huge amounts to people traffickers? Because they are desperate to find a better life. If we are talking about economic migrants, often the money is scraped together by an entire family, just to get one person into a country where they can earn money they can send back. Others borrow the money and then end up as economic slaves of the traffickers. All of that is a reflection of the economic failure of the country of origin. Others however, are fleeing torture, persecution, violence, war, genuine threat to life. Personal means are irrelevant in those cases. There are more of us on the planet with diminishing resources. The climate is changing and the ability for people to live in a lot of places is going to change with it. While we have great inequalities between nations, there will continue to be illegal migration.

There are only a tiny amount of people who might find wearing a mask difficult for health reasons. That vast majority of people who are not complying just aren't bothering for their own selfish reasons. Once the seasonal coughs and colds begin to emerge, compliance will have to be enforced.

No Keano, asylum seeker means a person who asks for the right to remain on asylum terms. That is what 'seeker' means. This is very easily measured. Whether or not those asylum applications are successful or not, is a different matter. And since when did a person's means define their need for asylum? A person fleeing torture can be either wealthy or poor. As for the migrants arriving daily, I have no idea if they are genuine refugees or not. Nor do you. So it is best to not pretend to know eh? Leave it to those whose job it actually is to determine who is genuine and who is not. FYI, around half of all applications are successful. On ignorance, there ARE absolutes. The law as it stands is an absolute. Most leave voters do not have the first understanding of any aspect of EU law, hence their inability often to cite a single piece of legislation that negatively impacts them.

To answer your question Keano, asylum seekers settle in many countries and the UK is not as badly affected as many other EU countries either. Some facts on asylum seekers here. https://fullfact.org/immigration/why-do-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-want-come-uk/

TheCat Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Does it comfort you to pretend that 'many' people > who made a different choice to you are truly that > stupid? Not it doesn't comfort me at all. Ignorance always leads to poor choices and poor choices have consequences.

Yes, because they don't understand the difference between international law and EU law.

j.a. is right. Decent scallops cost ?2-?3 each. That is what you will expect to have to pay.

The migrant boat issue highlights perfectly how hard it is to close borders when you are an island. It also illustrates how leaving the EU does not free us from international law and many other things we are signed up to outside of the EU. Many people voted Brexit falsely believing we could ignore all of that after leaving. I even asked one guy yesterday how he proposed we force the French to let us land and unload boats and planes of migrants we are refusing to process after he demanded we force them back to France. It's easy to get angry. Not so easy to find solutions that work.

lol Spartacus! I've already had 'the look' from the wife.

Isn't this a bit like the question 'why is it nearly always the man that drives?' one. I suspect the evolution of BBQ thing comes from men being butchers and preparing all things meat. And we probably have the Victorians to thank for it, as with many things. Nowadays though, I think women are just smart enough to know that if you can get a man to do the donkey work, let them do it ;)

Decent scallops are not cheap and never have been. And the best and freshest scallops are always going to be found in fishmongers who tend to get fish daily from a night before catch. Turning vegetarian saved me a fortune in the end ;)

What has a few people protesting the arrest of a drug dealing boy got to do with the Mayor? People protest in London all the time for all sorts of reasons. Nothing to do with the Mayor whatsoever.

Ahhhh so inverse snobbery is at the root of DBS's trolling then? How original.

Abe_froeman Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Well Rishi Sunak has just made himself the most > profligate chancellor the country has ever seen, > helping many local people survive covid and stay > off the dole. And just you wait to see how he decides to claw the money back afterwards. Then we can talk ;)

I appreciate that Ole, but it is a splitting hairs kind of argument to be fair. Everyone seems to have forgotten why the lock down was necessary, and the death and ICU figures at the peak (which did not include care home deaths at the time), a peak that would have been much higher and prolonged without a lockdown. The virus has not gone away. All it would take to see the exponential growth of infection and death back to those levels (and worse) is for life to go back to the way it was before. People have to understand that there are going to be ongoing compromises in order to keep that infection rate low. As seenbeen's post above illustrates, covid is not just impacting lungs, it is impacting other parts of the body, and there are a range of conditions it can induce. Science and government try to simplify this stuff, but in reality it is always far more complex for those actually treating the various conditions. I also would argue that over time, we will shift from conversations about deaths caused, to ones around recovery from the various induced conditions and lasting impacts and complications that result. This may define public health spending in turn.

Ole and Jimlad, waves of people suddenly presenting at hospitals with severe respiratory illnesses happened. At one point, 900 people were dying EVERY day. No other virus does that. Had we let the virus spread freely, as we do with colds and seasonal flu, how many people do you think would have been flooding hospitals? For every death, there were 4 others needing ICU care to recover! And btw, most of those who die from seasonal flu, do not have the annual vaccine. The use of a vaccine is a fundamental tool of containment. We have no vaccine for covid yet. Understand the difference please. Very good programme on BBC last night, called 'Covid, my Brother and I'. In that you got some essence of the range of complexities around this virus. Data showing for example that the rate of strokes is above average in patients carrying the covid virus. These are patients that had no prior underlying illness. We focus on the respiratory illnesses because that is the primary function of covid, to attack the ACE2 receptors in the respiratory organs, causing severe inflammation. But there is emerging evidence of impacts in other areas of the body that induces conditions in some that they would not be suffering from otherwise. Scale all of that up to half of the nation getting this virus and you get a picture of many hospital departments and resources being challenged potentially. This is NOT flu, and the comparisons to that have to stop.

Uncle, as others have pointed out, the WHO has NO power to tell any government what to do. None whatsoever. Also, by the time they were told about this virus, it had already traveled beyond China's borders. You should understand by now that one of the very tricky things about this virus is that it takes WEEKS to show symptoms, and not all carriers of the virus show the same type or degree of symptoms either. You can't see a virus you know nothing about the existence of until someone presents at a hospital with a severe illness. In reality, the WHO is a body that is reactive, collating data and information and then advising governments on what to to. It has a track record of being slow to declare pandemics, but that is partly because not every new virus that emerges leads to a pandemic, so there is a kind of initial 'wait and see' approach. There is some sense to that or we would be locking down economies every few years. Even though there has long been a 'not if but when' understanding of pandemic threat, it still catches us out when that global pandemic finally arrives. Also, to be fair, the expected pandemic has tended to be a novel avian flu mutation (something we have a much deeper understanding and experience of) over a challenging SARS virus that we are still struggling to fully understand. So for all those reasons, Spartacus is right. The whole world lacked the best outcome response (in spite of everything it knows) when that pandemic finally came. The countries that were best prepared were those with recent experience of dealing with SARS, MERS, EBOLA, who already have their community led track and trace networks in place, tried and tested. But even there, the economic impacts (and knock on public health impacts) can not be avoided. And some of those places are least able to absorb and recover from those. We are where we are. Things are going to be tough for a while. Displays of outrage aren't going to change that. The key is to have a working plan, that we all do out part to enact, and hope that we get to a vaccine or other effective treatment as soon as possible.

Do not feed the troll.

Agreed Spartacus. There are two worlds operating in parallel here. There is the front line, the hospitals and medical and care staff witnessing first hand the deaths and serious illness caused by this virus, and of course, the families and friends of those impacted by that. And then there is the other world that is protected from seeing any that first hand. The world that is ordered to lock down, asked to social distance and wear masks. And it is in that other world, you will find the naysayers, conspiracy theorists, unbelievers of course.

Says the parody account that makes a big deal out of and refuses to wear a face mask! Pot calling kettle black clearly ;)

John L is right. It takes at least two years to assess if a new virus leaves immunity and longer to understand any longer term damage. If we employed no measures to contain the spread, we would literally be playing Russian Roulette. Yes there is a sensible and proportionate balance to be met, and government is still trying to find out where that is. Everything will change when winter comes (sounding like Game of Thrones now!) - when people are coughing and sneezing from seasonal infections. This is where the danger of a second wave lies, and it is a real danger. Covid is not just another bug. Hospitals don't have to expand ICU wards for any other bug. What part of that is so hard to grasp? People have a choice. Be part of trying to hold back a second wave, or go on as before. And when we are still talking about this in December, and if the country is locked down again, because our hospitals are filling with sick covid patients, we'll see what the mask naysayers have to say then.

So you are a bully as well as a troll then dontbesilly? And btw, herd immunity is never achieved without help of a vaccine.

While you are right jimlad, on the incoherent messaging and half-hearted approach to guidelines, you are completely wrong to think covid is only killing people with a few months or years left to live. That too is a failure of government messaging. What overwhelms hospitals more than those who die, are those who don't. Those who eventually recover but need intensive care to do so. Those people are of all adult ages and no-one knows yet, the level of immunity those people have, how long that lasts and if any longer term damage is caused by the illness. Now scale that up to what we would see if we allow the virus to spread freely. All the points you make about the economy are valid. That is why avoiding another spike when cough and colds hit in the winter is really important. Wearing a mask is one small measure that might help to avoid that. Throwing a hissy fit over having to wear one for the few minutes you spend in a shop is the over reaction I think ;)

When cockerals get to sexual maturity, they can and do fight each other yes. But a lot depends on how many hens there are and size of the roaming areas/ pens. Cockerals will be very territorial around 'their' hens. My parents have around 40 hens and three cockerals (the going rule is 10+ hens per cockeral). And they have a lot of space to roam. So if there are enough hens, the cockerals will work it our for themselves. Every now and then, you get a cockeral that is just too aggressive and won't tolerate another one though. So in terms of the person keeping four chickens of which two are hens and potentially two are cockerals, they are more than likely going to have problems once they get to sexual maturity. You can't keep two cockerals with just two hens. If there are no hens however, cockerals can live together just fine most of the time.