Is the 2020/2021 a non starter?

A snowHead

So yeah, skiing there next winter could be good, so long as you're not bothered by insurance, which I'm not.

A snowHead

@skimastaaah, last message as I don’t want to turn this into a Coronavirus thread, but the other Nordic countries will catch up as they unlock. At no point was the Swedish healthcare system overrun, so no one died unnecessarily. Apart from the people in old people’s homes, but that’s happened in the other Nordic countries too - Finland’s numbers just got added in. So unless there is a vaccine soon, we will all end at the same place when everyone reaches herd immunity. The spread has probably been too slow in the other Nordic counties, so they just prolonged the pain.

I intended the post to be positive, hoping that we will get some skiing done next winter! It will be possible in Sweden anyway, and pretty sure the border will be open to Norway too.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

I may be completely wrong/clutching at straws but I think there will be calls to allow the UK to travel within EU

Mainly as we do spend a lot in tourist areas

Maybe not this year but I don’t think large parts of France will willingly lose a large percentage of tourists

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Austria

Austria is looking to let Germans in for Summer Holidays as Germany has good control over the virus.. Germans are there most important customers €€€€€€ However this i still not definite yet decided .

https://rp-online.de/panorama/coronavirus/sommerurlaub-oesterreich-gespraechsbereit-bei-oeffnung-der-grenze-fuer-deutsche_aid-50133831
ne the Schengen Zone who do not have a good control over CV19..

Also folks will have to consider possible quarantines periods on entry & return to the home countries.

Traditional Apres Ski/Nightlife may also be a NON Starter/Banned .....

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Depending on who you ask, the NHS is planning for the 2nd peak in November.
That would be annoying timing, if everything's locked down.

Still "threading the needle" may be fun, trying to get some snow in between world-wide lock downs. I heard NZ has zero cases, and I guess they're heading for winter...

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If we lift lockdown by June 1stvat the latest and I think it will be at least two weeks earlier then a second peak would be far earlier than november and if NZ allow people in they will have to go into quarantine for at least two weeks

After all it is free

Summer Holidays outside of the UK for are definitely a Non Starter...could it extend into the Winter ?

It seems like the British Government are scrambling around like headless chickens making CV19 policy up as they go along
reactive rather than proactive.

** Admitting 15000 people a day to fly into the UK with unchecked health status since lockdown
** Constructing several "white elephant" Hospitals with no patients
** Dismissing facemasks while the rest of Europe is buying them all up and already using them in Public.

They were warned by China & Italy and chose to ignore and even let major (gatherings) events go ahead while hundreds were dying in Italy ...

Airline Sector are not Happy and pointing the finger the Blond Hair man in charge of the UK..

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/632320-14-day-quarantine.html

Oh dear the troll has woken up

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stanton errrrrr .......... so???

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@stanton, If the UK Gov is doing so badly, then surely building hospitals in advance is good planning? And if they don't get used then things aren't as bad as you think?

@stanton,

We are not using face masks in France Puzzled

You know it makes sense.

This summarises it all quite nicely:

https://appeasement.org/?fbclid=IwAR0OV0_qT1i6J2OmldKeDCbJFVcwE-bcW-Sf5iEMvvNwowY_UKCWYMoI8tU

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

A snowHead

I'll come back to this in a few months' time but sod it I'll risk looking a fool:

- This is a disease with a death rate of 1% that affects mostly the elderly who have had virtually all of their life: if this was killing children it would be far worse. There was a 'flu season a few years ago that killed 24k.

- The reaction has been hysterical and when the public finally wake up to this there will be a terrific reckoning. There's a solid chance Boris will go before or lose the next election.

- Starmer and Labour have exhausted themselves arguing about trannies in toilets and microaggressions so were utterly unable to oppose the govt's panicked law-making.

- Like every other pandemic in history it will end when C19 runs out of people it can kill. When enough are dead or far enough apart it will end. It has a death rate of <1%. At the time of writing fewer than 400 under forty-fives have been killed by the virus. Remember this is in a population of 67 million.

- The economic damage that most countries will have from the various quarantines will become apparent around October even to the stupidest member of the public. When the furlough scheme ends all this b ollocks about standing 6'6" apart will be binned in the desperation to get people back working.

- Most countries will keep some sort of cosmetic, ineffectual prohibition in place such as temperature-taking at airports or mask-wearing about the place. This will be similar to the checks at airports which are mostly pointless and are there to make people feel better. This will also cover the government's blushes that in reality there was precious little they could do. The first rule of medicine is "primum non nocere": "first, do no harm". Most of the quarantines will be seen as worse than the disease was. Remember, the NHS exists to protect US no the other way around. When the taxes dry up avoidable deaths will climb. Found a lump lately? Your chances of living have been reduced to save a demented 90yo in a care home. This is best explained through QALY, which is how NICE allocate funds.

- When the unemployment rate goes through the roof and the boy they have as Chancellor panics no-one will give two s hits about the actual number of dead from the virus, they will just want to be working again.

- Travel? Depends how paranoid. Already borders are opening and some EE states are talking about mini-Schengens between each other. Some countries will be desperate for visitors.

- The EU's death has been accelerated: they've been even more useless now than during the migrant crisis.

A snowHead

P.S. "Second waves" will only happen where there has been a strict quarantine. Look at Sweden: over the peak and numbers dropping. I'll bet good money huge quantities of the pop in Europe have already had it. There has been a single +ve test from a Parisian hospital in Dec. Could this be due to lab contamination? Dunno. But they'll be testing old samples pronto if they have any sense.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Finally, a genuine question: how does testing stop the spread of C19? If Mr. Wing-Wong of Wing-Wong's Bat Emporium flies into the UK and later tests +ve for C19 so what? He'll have gone through Heathrow and taken the tube to central London. Even China's surveillance can't possibly trace all those people. I don't believe South Korea's tracing programme could possibly have worked in a megacity like Seoul.

I have another theory: obesity rate in SK? 3%. Sweden? 10%. UK? 25%!!!

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@justabod, Good post (s)

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

@Philip1972, thanks. Not the usual reaction when I have a big old huff and puff on here.

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And another question about testing:

If you only test those with obvious symptoms what about the significant number of asymptomatic people?

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After all it is free

@justabod, good posts yes. But it's a little more complicated because many under 60s fo get very sick and need ICU care, and once in hospital are infection risk to staff and other patients. This creates extremely complicated status in hospitals which have to simultaneously divert huge resources to ICU and defer or cancel most non-emergency non-covid work, including cancer surgery.

Maybe some might consider 30,000, or 100,000, mostly elderly deaths to be acceptable collateral damage to get economy going. What about the 150 NHS healthcare workers so far dead? Unfortunately HCWs unlikely to view their deaths as acceptable collateral

Healthcare crisis would have been a lot worse without lockdown, and then you will see more young people dying as quality will plummet in overstretched system. If crisis spirals out of control, it's a true disaster, and a prolonged one. Governments have no choice but to impose lockdown

@peanuthead

- How many under 60s? As I said <400 under 45s dead so infs likely milder. Deaths take off after seventy yo or so. Why do routine cancer treatments need to be binned? Separate those areas within the hosp: not difficult.

- I would've taken the 550k dead that Ferguson (inaccurately) predicted. The cost of crashing the economy will be dire and long-lasting. Some companies will disappear and it will take a while for them to be replaced. As I've already said the economy pays for the NHS: it doesn't run on virtue it needs hard cash. The gov't doesn't consider individual HCWs and ask them all what they think: they are running a country, a country of tens of millions. If you have a tick bite on your ear would you amputate your head? If two hundred nurses would die do you simply send them all home to protect them? No. In previous wars and indeed in daily life someone in an office puts a line through a column and those people die. It is as simple as that. Children with rare disease die so that children with more common, treatable diseases can live. This is a philosophically easy thing to understand although the choices are painful and even brutal. We have become a country of soft, spoiled cowards who overfeed themselves then when the consequences of their gluttony kill them (as is likely the case) they bawl for the gov't to fix their problems and run to hide indoors. All life ends. That is it. Previous generations had the bottom to face this, aided by the twin comforts of religion and ritual. Now we have neither of those things.

- How do you know it would've been worse? There is no control. Taiwan, SK and Sweden are doing very well. Italy and Belgium badly and they had very tight quarantines. Clearly, there was a choice.

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@blacksheep, as I said <400 under-45s have died of C19. Quarantine the sick and weak, not the healthy who power the society that protects them.

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@skitrack, quite. The Icelanders tested a random sample (10%) of their pop to try and establish the infection rates and combine them with death rates. They came back with an asymptomatic figure of 50%. I think the US suggested 20%. This is confounded by C19 tests not being desperately accurate either.

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@peanuthead

- How many under 60s? As I said <400 under 45s dead so infs likely milder. Deaths take off after seventy yo or so. Why do routine cancer treatments need to be binned? Separate those areas within the hosp: not difficult.

Not too difficult if covid mostly under control but impossible if hospital overwhelmed. Plus the high infectiousness and possible transmission among asymptomatic staff to each other and thence non covid elective patients brought into hospital. Plus the limited PPE and ICU (required in elective operations have complications) which won't suffice for both covid and elective, if covid is rampant

Rest of what you day is opinion. SHs can make from it what they want

You know it makes sense.

The problem with this is that we're falling for the old politician's False Alternative argument when we accept the erroneous 'either/or model'. In this case, it's either lots of useless old people die a bit early or everyone else loses their jobs. Which it isn't. The False Alternative is posited when politicians haven't got a clue what to do, and/or know what to do but don't act in time. It's also great in pitching interest groups against each other (in this case, elderly vs young), so that you can then quietly walk away from the hard questions in all the noise.

The reality is that after 10 years of Austerity we've shrunk public services so much we can't react to a health crisis effectively, and after privatising elderly care and then cutting its funding 40%+ it is particularly vulnerable. On top of that, the 2016 Cygnus Exercise showed that a regional epidemic or global Pandemic was one of the top 5 risks to the UK, but the recommended countermeasures were consciously not taken by a Government and civil service that was - and is still - designed for and focused on only one purpose: to exit the EU.

Whatever action we might have taken, this pandemic was always going to have a massive negative economic impact. Elderly deaths were never a sort of currency with which we could 'buy' economic prosperity and jobs. Doing nothing, or lifting too early, would have had just as massive an economic knock-on effect, albeit that its shape and duration would have been different.

Of course, we need to be discussing what is the best Exit Strategy - one that minimises both the health and economic impact, and gets the country back on its feet again. We also need to learn the lessons of why the Government was so conspicuously unprepared for dealing with it, and why their response was so poor. The premis that this is a simplistic 'jobs vs lives' issue is inaccurate, but it is politically useful - and a diversion tactic to which we should not subscribe.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

@LaForet, good post

A snowHead

From my perspective, one of the things that is missing with much of the conversations around Covid is a societal balance of effects.  Every reaction to the virus has broad reaching effects, positive and negative, on our social fabric.  There are health AND economic effects on all sides of the virus effects and our responses.  An ethical response to this challenge would attempt to balance these effects to minimise the total negative effects to our society.  How do we make a balanced response?  To make that calculation requires us to go deep into System 2 thinking based on as-accurate-as-possible data and as-rational-as-possible statistical calculation.  Empathy does not live in System 2, story does not live there and news coverage/opinion pieces do not live there.  They all live in System 1 thinking.  Most of what we are exposed to is System 1 thinking not System 2 thinking and I think that tends to imbalance our understanding.

I’ve heard Henry Schniewind talk of this is his avalanche talks as well. System 2 very much needed in route analysis etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

We need System 1 thinking to get us emotionally attached to this problem, but we need System 2 thinking to actually come up with the socially-least-damaging solution.  Unfortunately, when you argue System 2, you are arguing, by necessity, a not-empathetic argument.  Much of the opinions that appear to be at cross purposes are System 1 and System 2 argument passing each other in the night.  We need both.  But…we need to make sure we’re standing close enough together in our discussion that we’re talking about the same thing.

I owe much of my personal understanding of this to exposure to very clever people over the last ten years in aspects of cog sci. It seems like his mission is to get us to appreciate that this is System 2 stuff and we’d better pay attention to that (“do your homework!”).  At the same time, I appreciate other efforts to expand our vision into a broader System 1 response.   I would argue we need both types of thinking and to understand that we need both.

As an illustration of the point; I have a close friend who is a retired journalist that I am comfortable having deep conversations with.  I was talking to him recently about the need to open up our society at this time and he commented that would probably increase death in elderly people.  I admitted that might happen to some degree.  His response was, “…well that’s just immoral!”  What we had there was a System 1 reaction to a System 2 discussion.  So, what is the “moral” solution to the quagmire we are in?

Maybe this could be the way forwards?  “Protect the vulnerable while you open up society for the rest of the people”.  Seems reasonable.  I just wish I saw more of that reasonableness in our media and “leaders”.  To not understand this and not be reasonable leads to the illogical conclusion of anarchy.

A snowHead

Good points Justabod. World population 7.8 billion . World Covid deaths 280 k. UK pop 67m . UK covid deaths 30k. Annual UK deaths 600k
The flu pandemic of 1968 took out 80k in the UK without lockdowns, masks , social distancing. All seems a big overreaction.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

To go back and then off topic again - a few non-scientific ramblings...

My views on 2020/21 change on an almost daily basis. There is little doubt that at the moment the whole of Europe is on top of the disease although you might think we are not but I am sure we are when you look at the really important data - the number of intensive care beds in use for covid 19. I am not going to discuss government's responses or otherwise.

So the key issue will be have we got some degree of herd immunity by the winter - there is little doubt that the winter is when this disease will reappear. Why, many theories - transmissability in colder drier temperatures and, my pet favourite and i believe we will be seeing a lot more about this over the next few weeks, Vitamin D3. Also in terms of disease progression obesity seems to be coming out as a major factor. Vitamin D3 it appears can be taken as a supplement or is naturally generated by the body from sunlight. As winter draws in Vitamin D production naturally reduces. I have ordered for the first time ever Vitamin D pills for the winter. The other thing about Vitamin D is that there is something genetic that mean that BAME people have less in their bodies.

Why do I speculate on the dreaded herd immunity - London - and the data that shows London was hit harder and earlier than other parts of the country but that the number of people in intensive care beds turned fown much sharper and faster there than elsewhere.

...and what level of travel insurance may be available?

So, I probably think 2020/21 will depend on what happens here and around Europe in November, whether there is any political will for another lockdown, whether there is a permitted travel area which may well change as/when infections pop up, a vaccine, unlikely I fear, and what measures ski resorts take to avoid people being sardine canned. There is little doubt that the real source of UK infection was ski resorts and not people returning from China or cruise ships. I fear a week will be different but there will be a ski season for those willing, able and still financially sound enough to take off for a month or two or a season and to quarantine on return.

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@endoman, excellent post

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@countryman, it's impossible to predict next Winter now. Re "herd immunity", by then I expect widespread and reliable antibody tests will be able to quantify that.

Will there be ongoing social distancing and compliance with same, ongoing ban on large gatherings, modifications to schools, universities etc, which will minimize second wave? How much impact will this have?

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Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

Well in answer to the original question - I guess it all depends on how serious the second wave is, which one would assume will come with the bad weather and people moving indoors around Oct/Nov.

For me, I don't consider a ski holiday per se high risk, as I drive to Andorra in my own car, stay in my rented apartment at night (as I can't afford a hotel), have no nightlife (2 young children), and go up on chairlifts every day. I think my only problem would be lunch on the mountain which is usually in a cosy restaurant for an hour. Oh, and perhaps the indoor coffee break. Wonder if I could mitigate the lunch stop by carrying a flask of soup around.

It would probably depend on the weather - with good weather I could stay outside and avoid the risky coffee breaks also.

The question appears to be academic as I'm paying for house rebuilding right now... but that's my answer.

After all it is free

@endoman, enjoyed your analysis.

Sometimes the two modes of thinking reach the same conclusion. I am sure that when deaths were 800 a day and rising the need for action was both emotionally and analytically agreed.

But when it is (say) 100 deaths a day and falling there will be divergence, the empathic response will be that each of that 100 are somebody's grandad but analytically there is more to be gained from minimising the collateral damage to jobs, education, business, etc.

One thing though humans are not that good at is deciding on the crossover point. Should the changes come at 200 deaths and falling? Or 300, or 400, or 500 (where we are now)?

@T Bar, fair point I was vague and as usual rather polemical in what I was saying.

HIV, polio etc are of course pandemics but they are what I would call 'chronic'. They lasted for many years and were not a threat to civilisation. There were not bans on sex during its spread as mitigation was relatively simply, e.g. condoms for HIV and gays were (and probably still are) very good on sexual health measures.

Quarantine helps but it is not the solution and it was local areas that isolated themselves from the next area and the sick that were quarantined not the healthy as well. We know fine well who is most at risk or at least had a punt on it: letters were sent out (in Johnson's name, the pompous tosser) advising people to stay in.

My point in essence is that with a mildly infectious, very slightly lethal pandemic like this we ought not to be making the problem worse through our own cowardice and poor choice of leaders.

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@peanuthead, keep staff groups separate. Death is far more certain from many cancers than from C19. Many elderly stay in a lot of the time anyway, and why should they not be entitled to take the risk? They have little life left and take a risk when they go out every 'flu season yet they still do it. 14/15 'flu season killed 24k and that was WITH a vaccine. We don't turn off the economy each winter.

Besides, how do you know the hospitals would be overwhelmed? Large quantities of deaths are happening in care and nursing homes, most of those I see there already have DNARs and advanced directives which specifically state "not for hospital". They were going to die in the NH anyway. Again, I refer to the basic concept of triage: ITU overwhelmed means a smaller number die than those who would from elective and even emergency surgery. This is type II thinking that is necessary to run a health system or country. I'm not some great strategist but I have at least the ability to look at it coldly.

Help!!

Is the 2020/2021 a non starter?

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