Anybody booking for 2021 yet?

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

Confession, I remember now, I bought a polo shirt in San Diego last year on my way to the lounge. Had spilled ice cream down the shirt I had on and didn't want to look a mess on the plane!

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I tentatively moved my Easter shuttle booking to Christmas/New Year + Sunweb credit voucher is sitting ready for to be redeemed.

Not keeping my hopes too high, but I think chances are good for the season to open. If they don't, then the skiing industry (or most of it) is dead.

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Having done our first Bash to Alleghe last year, we were tossing up for our usual boys week of 3rd Jan between Birthday Bash and DIY trip.

I think we've plumped for DIY, Eurotunnel and drive down to quieter area in France, probably Samoens Grand Massif. We could be booked for under £100 a head risk for the four of us, with a decision needing to be made at the end of November, so the feeling is we will go for it. The Eurotunnel element of that (£45) would be transferable anyway.

I think the Eurotunnel prices are already higher than they would normally be this far out and I suspect they will only go one way, especially as we hit autumn and people realise driving is the best way to go. I do have a voucher from our cancelled Easter trip but may save that for the family.

It will be a different trip, with little Apres and restaurants but it would be great just to be skiing, but if it happens it should still come in at around £500pp on the slopes (travel, accomodation and lift passes) so still good value!!

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Having booked easyjet for next Jan, at £27 quid a pop and £1 baggage, it would now appear that might not be such a good idea after this data breach !

Consdiering BA got fined 183 Million for losing 500,000 customer records, this could be curtains for Easyjet. I know it was a gamble to book through them for next year, but it might well not payoff now Sad

After all it is free

I've booked flights to Japan in January. My reasoning was that Japan still has the 2020 Olympics to run regardless and they will have to open the country back up somehow. No-one will come if there is a two-week quarantine period on arriving there. They will need the tourism money anyway, plus at some point this ludicrous situation has to end. Part of it is just me hoping against hope as well.

I'll be booking a UCPA again but given the communal nature of the place I'm less hopeful. If prices double so that rooms can be half-occupied then their customer base will disappear, on the other hand.

My prediction is that all this 'social-distancing' crap will slowly fall away. One thing I've learned from a brief spell in management that the best way to kill off bad ideas and save face is simply allow enforcement of said bad idea to fall away and like water let your staff find their own level, so to speak. Queuing outside shops in the UK is going to stop the second the rain starts in September/October as someone will eventually go "sod it" and just march into the shop. We're all breaching quarantine at the moment, just lying about it on Facebook et al.

There's a famous passage in Catch 22 where everyone eating in the canteen has to profess more and more elaborate articles of faith to the USA, democracy etc otherwise they won't be fed. This continues until a tough, crusty Sgt Maj comes in and demands food. The chefs are too frightened to say no and the spell breaks.

@justabod, it's not quarantine, and actually we are not "all" lying about it.

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@holidayloverxx, it's not "lockdown" either as we're not criminals in an American prison. How about 'conditional house arrest' or 'confinement'. If anyone is following the rules to a T they're a fool. The total number of under-45s who've died of C19 is about 300. Suicide kills around 100 per month so C19 isn't much deadlier for this group.

The "lockdown" is a colossal mistake borne of hysteria. The gov't said it was only until we were past the peak and we have been for some time. There will not be some desperately lethal "second wave". All the 6'6"-gap nonsense is just that. It is there to make people feel better and get them out and working. I've been doing 180+ hours a month when there are others working in a second job after being furloughed from the first or are sitting on their fat a rses at home being paid for a nice holiday. These will be the people demanding gov't bail-outs when the redundancies come. Rolls-Royce laid off 9k today. BA have already binned 12k. Are people blind? Do they really think that the 80% will keep going?

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@justabod, i don't disagree with some of what you say, but don't project your lies on others

@holidayloverxx, that's a bit bold: you're accusing me of intentionally saying something I know to be untrue. What have I said that is deliberately untrue?

You know it makes sense.

@justabod, you said "We're all breaching quarantine at the moment, just lying about it on Facebook et al."

"All" includes you. (One of the few persons for whom you have first-hand evidence.)

So the logical conclusion is that you're also breaching quarantine and lying about it.

That's what @holidayloverxx was referring to when she said you're projecting your lies on others.

More generally, I think you're just as extreme in your views as a friend of mine who thinks the government should pay for pretty much everyone to continue staying home until a vaccine is found, and get the money from tax havens. You both have made up your minds long ago and you're ignoring evidence to the contrary.

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

@horizon, thanks - exactly so

A snowHead

@horizon, you're taking me hyperbolising and speak generally as literal fact that every single person in the UK is doing it. I think social distancing and quarantine are ludicrous so ignore them, except where those who are genuinely at risk are involved. However these people are at home so my contact with them is minimal. I'm not lying about it as I don't care what others think and find the mass panic obscene: the data are there to be looked at and the solid evidence does not justify the hysteria. A few points:

- Iceland have tested more citizens per million than any other country. 50% were asymptomatic and very few had even had the disease, suggesting it's hard to catch.

- The death rate for under-24s is lower than the chance of being struck by lightning. Even for 75-90s the risk is 1 in 225 i.e. 0.44%. The first incidence of stroke for that age group is 1.75%. I don't know what the death rate is but stroke at that age will almost certainly be significantly and permanently disabling, unlike C19.

Your friend is insisting the gov't pays for everyone to stay at home sheltering from a disease which has killed 300k globally, compared to the deaths from TB (1.5 mil EVERY year), with money it doesn't have. There have been other, more lethal pandemics in the last century which did not stop the world from turning. Before you mentioned Spanish 'flu, this killed the young and healthy as opposed to the elderly: death, believe it or not is ageist and many dead from C19 will have died from bog-standard respiratory illness this winter anyway, or had one of the aforementioned strokes.

Put it this way: tens and indeed hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost. How many do you think will die of various causes due to the reduced NHS funding as a result of decreased tax receipts?

Or another: there are around 6k killed on the roads every year but car travel is an essential part of modern life. Mingling with other human beings is an even more important part of life and is how countless illness spread and kill thousands every year (24k in 14/15 'flu season) yet we do not stop this.

Finally, does everyone you know have a 'flu vaccine every year? Do they visit or come near the elderly? I doubt they have and even then the vaccine's efficiency is middling-to-low double figures. Yet we all continue to do this despite the fact that this undoubtedly causes tens of thousands of 'flu deaths every year.

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

@justabod, You have no idea who is at risk so you should be social distancing. You cannot tell by looking at some one whether they have asthma or are diabetic or whether they have household members who are at risk.

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I wonder how the world would have reacted without the media both news and social whipping covid panic to levels never before seen,

I'm not saying that people arent dying but the news media are driving some to serious mental issues, I saw a picture yesterday in which there was a reporter in full PPE including, gloves mask and suit, yet the camera man was wearing nothing at all, people need to start thinkng for themselves

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@snowymum, if that's the case then why are they out in public? The elderly who need to stay at home have been supported thus far, have you seen any reports of those staying indoors starving?

Why do we need to stand 6'6" apart? Why not half that like everyone else in Europe? That distance is impossible to maintain in most shops' aisles anyway. How do gloves help unless you have open wounds on your hands? Where is the evidence masks work? When breathing air comes in at the sides. If people were so convinced of their efficacy then everyone would wear them yet despite the general panic the press photos rarely show crowds with many people using masks.

@Scooter in Seattle, have you read my post? The main question isn't whether these measures prevent C19 transmission and therefore deaths (probably in minute quantities) but why NOW? There are so many other diseases spread by basic human contact yet we this is the first time we've reacted like this: quarantining the healthy and resistant who power the protections for the weak and clinically vulnerable.

EDIT TO ADD: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public. The WHO are recommending 1m. I'm not sure that their reputation is wonderful at the moment but it's a piece of straight-forward scientific advice, although they still don't state the evidence behind a 1m gap.

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@justabod, There are lots of people with asthma who did not receive a letter from the government. People who are isolating should still be allowed out for exercise. The over 70s are still allowed out to shop. etc etc.

Our lockdown was less severe than most of those in Europe. We were allowed to exercise outdoors and our children weren't shut inside. Masks are not compulsory in uk on public transport and in supermarkets and they are in other countries. It is not hard to behave considerately in supermarkets. Fewer people are allowed in at a time so one can find a quiet aisle if you see that there are already 5 people in the fruit and vege for eg. I have only used gloves to open a gate on a country walk. At the supermarket I use hand sanitiser and use plenty of soap when I get home.

However like you I am concerned about the economic impact. I think that more businesses could have safely remained open throughout and that people should now be allowed to go on self catering holidays in the UK. The government should now be saying that holidays in Europe will be allowed from July (if the countries will have us).

After all it is free

@justabod, thanks for the arguments, I've sent them to my friend.

On another thread you said "I would've taken the 550k dead that Ferguson (inaccurately) predicted. The cost of crashing the economy will be dire and long-lasting."

I think first of all that this is where there's a huge difference. Some people think that 550k excess deaths in the UK (so almost 1% of the population) is huge and would be impardonable, you seem to find it less worrying than the economic slowdown. (I personally think it's ludicrous to think that even a deep recession would have anything like that effect on life, or for that matter on QALYs for the entire population.).

Of course, as you said in another post on that thread, the data is still pretty poor. Which is why I still think that the quarantine was a good idea when it happened, when no one knew how bad Covid-19 was, and that a gradual relaxation is a good idea now.

Why gradual? Because we're far from having good enough data on what would happen if we go back to normal life for everyone under 70something. (Though I do agree that it doesn't seem like we would get anything like 1% mortality in the population as a whole).

(Since you like analogies, terrorism has killed FAR fewer people in the UK / Europe /US, and it's NOT spreading exponentially, yet we have changed our lives in significant ways to avoid that risk.)

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Ignore the troll, they usually go away. Never heard such utter tosh. rolling eyes

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If lockdown is what is working right now, why was the death peak on or around 7th April, two weeks after lockdown was initiated-deaths typically occur about three weeks after infection?
I am a scientist and I think the way statistics have been used (or not used) in this crisis is appalling.
In general, I think justabod is about right. Not nice when it is someone's granny (and I have both parents in their 80s), but when you are dealing with society as a whole, it needs to be done dispassionately. We have shut down our economy and society (to an extent orders of magnitude beyond to our response to terrorism) for a virus where 80% of people with it don't even know they've got it. We now know where is a particular section of the population-despite the lack of clear statistics from HMG, I know what that section is) who are genuinely vulnerable (but even for them, their chances of recovery are still excellent)-but we nevertheless chose to prevent tens of millions of young healthy people from earning a living. With the inevitable social and economic consequences. God knows what we will do when something seriously fatal like antibiotic resistant bacteria really appear.
NICE generally allow around £30,000 per quality extra year before permitting a treatment. Taking a £500 billion cost, to save that maximum 500,000 predicted (but not peer reviewed) deaths, gives £1 million per person. Ignoring the fact, many were old and ill anyway. Average age 80, let's say another 5 years of life gives £200,000 per quality year. That even ignores whether those last five years have the same quality as someone in their 20's. Are we going to do this every year for 25,000 flu deaths? 6000 road deaths? 1.2 million TB deaths? The 700,000 deaths which typically happen every year?
I did agree with the lockdown when it started because we did not know enough about CV to make a judgement call. Now we do and we are wrecking our economy because HMG, having scared people witless and made early mistakes, don't have the political balls to make tough decisions. The issue has always been not the number of deaths-but the fact they were all happening at once and the awful optics of it. We started by trying to save the NHS, now it is about saving ALL lives at ANY cost to save the Government's reputation, which is not something we do in any other area of life.
Sorry-rant over.

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Please don't blame the oldies for government incompetence. It's just playing into their hands as a convenient wedge issue when people posit the whole thing is just the slightly early death of a few old people versus the jobs of the virile young and trashing of the economy. The young end up demonising the elderly and the elderly end up, well, doing the same to the young. In the noise of the debate, the politicians quietly slink away. The damage is done, and done by our government deciding consciously and explicitly to do nothing early on. We had systems in place, and the scenarios and response actions had been worked out. It's just that the government decided that the cost - of stopping arrivals from abroad, of implementing screening of arrivals, of shutting down businesses, of sending out stocks of PPE to care homes etc. etc. - wasn't worth the risk. They gambled and lost the bet. And lost a hundred-times more in jobs and national income as a result. The rest is just catch-up and mopping-up the fallout. Sadly, the younger generation will be paying off the credit note from this lost bet for years to come.

So how was stopping people coming here going to stop the virus ? It was here before anyone knew what it was. There is no other choice but to let the majority catch it. Many will die which is awful for their families but that is a fact of life, call it callous or whatever but there is no choice

You know it makes sense.

Just a little point. Until we have a test for antibodies that is 99.9% reliable and available in large enough numbers, we will have absolutely NO idea how many people have had the virus and were asymptomatic.

Has any Government (especially those that did major contact tracing and testing) issued any statistics indicating the percentage of people who tested positive, but remained completely asymptomatic for the entire period? I haven't seen any!

Just for the record, I don't trust any of the statistics coming out of China

It could be 5% or 75%, or anywhere in between.

It is therefore pointless using any estimate of it as a statistic in any argument, and extremely dangerous to use it in decision making about reducing restrictions.

We keep seeing criticism of the UK Government over their actions. I accept they made mistakes. Which Government didn't? However, as the decision to lockdown to different degrees was taken by practically every other Government in the world, how can you single them out as incompetent?

Yes there will be an economic impact, but at least the UK has tried to provide some safeguard for it's population. Very few have done this.

What you are also ignoring is that there would have been a very serious economic impact, and a large number of businesses failures as a result of a large % of the workforce going off sick at the same time, and production being decimated due to supply chain problems?
Would you expect the taxpayer to "bail you out" then?

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

Even before the lockdown there were major problems with people "self isolating" because they had come into contact with someone who might have had symptoms.

Many of these were just using the situation as an excuse for time off with pay. (the same ones who, always seem to have the exact number of sick days that they can be paid for without a doctor's note?)

Before the schools were closed, a large number were sending pupils home anyway because they did not have the staff to ensure their safety. I saw one report where over 40% (out of 120 staff) were off for this reason. Why were they more prone to it than the rest of the country?

It will probably be the same ones who are now "reluctant" to reopen schools as they are enjoying a nice long rest on full pay. (When they could have been providing an online service. For the children who do not have sufficient internet access, there is still that little known facility of The Royal Mail! I am pretty certain that just about every school would be able to find a sponsor to cover the costs)

Schools have been open for the children of key workers. These are the people most at risk of contracting the Virus, passing it on to their kids, who then pass it on at school. This would then put teachers in the same category.

I would be very interested in statistics showing the number of teachers believed to have contracted the virus in this manner.

If the number is high, then I would accept the argument over safety. If, as I suspect, it is extremely low, or non existent then Schools should be re opened in an orderly manner as soon as possible.

The loss of education time can be made up by cancelling part of the summer holidays. Maybe the teachers who have not been at work recently could make their time up. (They will be paid in full anyway. Might as well get something for our money). Toofy Grin

A snowHead

@brianatab, There's a lot of research on proportion of asymptomatic and presymptomatic people, transmission rates etc. That's not to say the answers are all the same, the science is still developing, the tests are very variable, and the variables are not controlled between studies. However, if you want to do actual research on it, I can recommend:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/8/20-1274_article

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.12.2000256

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7078829/

https://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2020/05/07/JCM.00941-20

The outcome is that between 5% and 50% of infected people appear to be asymptomatic, but asymptomatic may also mean presymptomatic, which the first paper does a very good job of digging into, and concludes that most people display symptoms at some point.

The last paper suggests that, at least in Boise Idaho, as of around the end of March, most (>98%) people had not been infected.

There was also some research done in Germany, which I fear gets overused (not saying it's wrong, but it certainly supports the "anti lockdown thesis" so gets used a lot by those who are anti-lockdown!), suggesting that at Gangelt, following a carnival, 15% of people were infected but most were fine, thus the disease is less dangerous than thought. However, the antibody test used in this study has subsequently been shown to have poor specificity and may have led to a lot of false positives.

As I've said on another thread, the problem with the whole "lock down the vulnerable, free the rest" argument is that you can't do that without leaving them all to die - care workers, cleaners, doctors and nurses don't live on-site and end up exposed to the rest of the population.

A snowHead

The very simple truth is that we don't know yet what would be the overall mortality rate (by reference to the entire population) if it was left unchecked.

My friend who argues for continued lockdown (or limited relaxation with stringent rules) thinks it would be 2.5% - 5% of the population. He references the Spanish flu and about a thousand links.

I think most people on this thread would agree that, if that was indeed the expected mortality rate, we should continue with strict measures (most, maybe not all...)

I think it would probably be something around 0.5% - 1%. Hence continuing to be circumspect makes sense but we can't keep everything shut down because of that.

@justabod probably thinks it would be much lower.

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

@horizon, There's reasonable evidence so far that IFR is 1-2%. Diamond Princess was about 700 infected, 350 symptomatic, 14 deaths. Relatively clear closed ecosystem.

Many optimists like to forget about those still on long-term ventilation and assume they'll make it. Sadly they may not.

The most optimistic study I've seen (the Gangelt study I referenced above, about which I have some reservations) suggests about 0.4% IFR (infection fatality rate). That's at the "best case scenario" end for me, given the debatable accuracy of the relevant antibody test.

A recent study being undertaken in Spain has, according to media reports, shown 5% of the population have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. I haven't got seen a preprint for this yet, but it's a reputable group doing the study, and it's been reported very widely.

If we assume it's the same in the UK (i.e. c. 3.5m people have been infected) and we use the excess deaths figure to date of about 60k, that suggests just under 2% IFR. The relative time for the antibody tests to work (they typically show positive if you were infected 2-3 weeks ago, not if you are a recent case) means they should tally fairly closely with the death stats, both take time to happen after initial infection.

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@snowdave, It's the range of estimates I was referring to. I am not surprised by the estimate that 98% of any single population have been unaffected. Obviously this would depend on where they were in the Virus cycle.

The UK has had just over 250,000 confirmed cases. Even if 50% were asymptomatic, it would only translate to 500,000 cases, or 8%. Obviously, 5% would be less than 1% of the population.

The suggested figure, used on a number of threads here, that half the UK population have had the Virus, therefore it would be safe to end lockdown is Bs.

The symptoms of this virus are so varied that many people think because they had an "off day", they might have had a mild dose of it. Very dangerous if too many people assume they are immune to it. Guaranteed to cause a massive 2nd wave, and the economic fallout.

I don't know how long the Gangelt Carnival lasts, but it would take a lot of infected people attending to infect 15% in a short time. was that 15% of the attendees, or local population. It would be very difficult to get accurate figures for attendees after they have returned home. Maybe there was a local hot spot before the event?

We will never know how many infected people attended the Liverpool/Valencia match, but there was a definite hot spot in the area shortly afterwards, but nowhere near 15%.

In reality, an infected person can only spread it to people in their immediate vicinity. (Probably no more that 20 in an all seater stadium like Anfield. Due to the segregation, these would have been fellow Valencia supporters. The Virus must have been passed on in the area around the Stadium, Pubs/Hotels etc. Again, the actual number of close contacts would be limited, but these could have taken it to any part of the Northwest, where it was passed on. Whilst relatively high in numbers, it would have been a tiny % of the local population.

Fortunately, the National lockdown shortly after the game might have helped slow the spread in that area, and saved a lot of lives.

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@snowdave, Just looked up the Gangelt details. Patient zero was a local, who reported to the Hospital on the night of the Carnival,(14/15 Feb). 300 participants quarantined. By 31st March, 1200 infections, from 250,000 inhabitants. 31 deaths. No latest info. Many of these would have been infected prior to the Carnival, but spread it unknowingly at the event.

If might have been helpful if the article said where he had been in the previous 3 weeks, but 14/15 Feb is very early for a European infection. First case in Italy (2 Chinese) was only 31st Jan. He might have been infected before anyone realised it had arrived in Europe.

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@brianatab, I was partly responding to your suggestion that we have no idea how many people have had it, or the percentage who were asymptomatic, to show that there’s actually quite a lot of data on this, albeit not entirely conclusive.

If you read the papers I’ve posted, particularly the Korean one, you’ll see some good data on how transmission has occurred so far. There is a lot of research on these topics, but snowheads probably isn’t the best place to find it Very Happy

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