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wemakeyousoundb
hopefully not gimboid
KFC smuggking attempt in Auckland
Those are weird times.
Those are weird times.
bimble
floofy
Is it just my perception or are we getting almost no news now about how other countries are coping, apart from Canada and America perhaps. It seems that way to me. Just had a call with someone in Guatemala, she was saying every week now someone in her immediate circle family or work dies of covid, curfews still in place schools still shut all year, very very low take up of vaccines. Tourists are back & mostly maskless. She looked so exhausted.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
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Yossarian
⏭️
Yep, there seems to be very little coverage of the course of the pandemic in countries that aren't majority white - there's not much reporting on how Mongolia went from COVID success story to COVID disaster, or on how China is seemingly succeeding with a zero COVID strategy for 1.4 billion people.
Though the latter case is probably because Beijing has expelled a lot of foreign journalists and those that remain probably have as much chance of freely investigating the COVID situation as they do of getting a handjob from Xi Jinping.
bimble
floofy
Some of it (lack of coverage in the news) will just be that it’s not clickworthy, everyone’s bored of covid news. But I wonder if it’s also a concern that if we know too much about the global situation we might not all want our booster jabs, idk. Very strong “sod it we’ve got ours” feel to it all.
Yossarian
⏭️
There's a lot of COVID fatigue, and stories about things like health emergencies in Peru weren't especially big news even in the Before Times.
The only international COVID stories that seem to be getting a lot of attention are ones from Western countries that play into existing stereotypes: New Zealanders being quirky and Trumpy Americans being stupid.
I think news cycles probably have a lot to do with it. Even domestically covid has drifted into teh background because of so many other things going on at the moment. As other mention fatigue will be a big factor , we've been living this for a long time now and a lot of people are just bored with it. This phrase I heard a lot in summer "We just need to get on with it now".
There's always something bad going on somewhere which gets very little coverage so its not that surprising covid coverage of Central America etc is not really happening. I also have a feeling that the official numbers in a lot of countries are being downplayed anyway so its only when speaking with ordinary people who live out there a truer picture appears. Guatemala along with El Salvador are both amber list because apparently its not too bad...
With tourism its always been an incredibly difficult bind. So many economies are so utterly dependent on it, so many livelihoods. I don't know what poorer countries are really supposed to do. Poverty will kill way more this year and is a disease that is passed through generations. I can see why some governments can only live with closed borders for so long.
When I get bored I have a look through the UK government Foreign Office travel advice regarding other countries. Its quite interesting to see the various travel restrictions that are in place and also the various local rules regarding covid. It really shows up the limited tools some governments have for fighting this.
bimble
floofy
Yep I find the whole subject of what different governments are doing really interesting still. It’s rare that one problem (the same disease) is everywhere and the responses are so revealing.
Woman in Guatemala explained for instance that every time you enter the town by road , for months now, government employees in hazmat gear spray you with unknown fumigation stuff from a spray bottle, your face and body, requiring people to get off the bus stand in line for this frightening and utterly pointless theatre. She thinks thats not helped the vaccine refusal rates.
Jamaica is having a terrible time as well, according to recent phonecall, again very very low trust in the vaccine and she said people are being left lying outside the overflowing hospitals. Curfew in some places with children expected to stay at home from Friday night to Monday morning. Cruise ships from the states are welcome.
Woman in Guatemala explained for instance that every time you enter the town by road , for months now, government employees in hazmat gear spray you with unknown fumigation stuff from a spray bottle, your face and body, requiring people to get off the bus stand in line for this frightening and utterly pointless theatre. She thinks thats not helped the vaccine refusal rates.
Jamaica is having a terrible time as well, according to recent phonecall, again very very low trust in the vaccine and she said people are being left lying outside the overflowing hospitals. Curfew in some places with children expected to stay at home from Friday night to Monday morning. Cruise ships from the states are welcome.
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Balbi
Hey, Dean Yager!
Sorry, been away for a bit. Locked down in the Level 3 stage, which is like the tightest one except you can do no-contact pickups from takeaways and stores that are able to do that.
9 cases today, all epidemiologically linked to the outbreak - we've had a rumble of some mystery cases even in lockdown, but our contract tracers are chasing them down.
On our vaccination programme, we didn't try and jump the queue - because we had zero covid for almost a whole year. Other countries needed the vaccine faster and first to try and mitigate the widespread community transmission that was going on. Our Tories are playing hell about that, but nobody's really listening to them. We also went with Pfizer and stuck with it, and it's worked so far - out of 4,000,000+ doses we've had 1 death due to myocardioitis, which is sad.
We've got 75.8% of all eligible people with at least one dose, 41% are fully vaxxed.
The aim is to hit 90%+ and then see what happens after that. 4,210,000 out of 5,000,000 are eligible for the vaccine, which goes down to 12+ now.
9 cases today, all epidemiologically linked to the outbreak - we've had a rumble of some mystery cases even in lockdown, but our contract tracers are chasing them down.
On our vaccination programme, we didn't try and jump the queue - because we had zero covid for almost a whole year. Other countries needed the vaccine faster and first to try and mitigate the widespread community transmission that was going on. Our Tories are playing hell about that, but nobody's really listening to them. We also went with Pfizer and stuck with it, and it's worked so far - out of 4,000,000+ doses we've had 1 death due to myocardioitis, which is sad.
We've got 75.8% of all eligible people with at least one dose, 41% are fully vaxxed.
The aim is to hit 90%+ and then see what happens after that. 4,210,000 out of 5,000,000 are eligible for the vaccine, which goes down to 12+ now.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
It's nuts to think that the UK's best case scenario could have been anything like New Zealand. Maybe the UK could have done as well as somewhere like Denmark. Maybe.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its that sort of cant do mentality that ensured we didnt come within a hundred thousand deaths of finding out just how well we could have done.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I mean there were real differences and challenges, but those became an excuse not to bother trying. And then they still ended up having to abandon a lot of their assumptions about what we could or should do anyway, because we got the hospitalisation sums and the timing all wrong.
I still feel sick when I think about all the things we didnt even bother considering because of bullshit establishment attitudes in regards how the likes of Australia have 'colonial era policing' as opposed to our 'consent based form of policing'.
I still feel sick when I think about all the things we didnt even bother considering because of bullshit establishment attitudes in regards how the likes of Australia have 'colonial era policing' as opposed to our 'consent based form of policing'.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I don't really think it's a can't do mentality to believe we could have had something like a quarter of the deaths we've had - by looking at the best performing out of reasonably comparable countries. I simply think that New Zealand has so many significant differences from the UK, that it's not really useful as a comparison. And factored into my judgement of how much better we could have done, is what I reckon would have been politically acceptable to most people in the UK.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Assumptions about what would have been politically acceptable were a self-fulfilling pandemic prophecy. And they've got very little to do with what the masses would have accepted, and everything to do with what the powerful were prepared to entertain.
Given how much the establishment here ended up having to think the unthinkable anyway, and the large range of possibilities in regards how far we could have gone in a different direction if the framing had been totally different, I keep an open mind about what was actually possible.
All bets are off as far a Im concerned because the original Plan A was built on such shitty foundations and yet when reality bit it still went down the toilet in record time. Establishment attitudes were the primary limiting factor to our ambitions.
Given how much the establishment here ended up having to think the unthinkable anyway, and the large range of possibilities in regards how far we could have gone in a different direction if the framing had been totally different, I keep an open mind about what was actually possible.
All bets are off as far a Im concerned because the original Plan A was built on such shitty foundations and yet when reality bit it still went down the toilet in record time. Establishment attitudes were the primary limiting factor to our ambitions.
Yossarian
⏭️
I think the part with having almost no COVID deaths and a year of no masks, restrictions on gatherings etc. while most other places were in some form of lockdown would have been very politically acceptable.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
What would be acceptable if we saw something similar coming in say 5 years from now might be quite different. But to achieve something comparable to NZ, as far as I can see the UK would have had to completely shut down all its borders including all the massive disruption that would cause to food supplies and so on, and it would have had to do it in something like January 2020.
Totally agree we probably could have gone into lockdown much sooner than we did, and it could potentially have been sold to and accepted by most of the population, but I don't see how that could have achieved a result like NZ's.
Totally agree we probably could have gone into lockdown much sooner than we did, and it could potentially have been sold to and accepted by most of the population, but I don't see how that could have achieved a result like NZ's.
Chz
Stark Raving Sane
Japan would be better, as a densely populated island with close links to its neighbours.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
The UK effectively isn't really an island - it's connected to the continent by multiple short links through which a large amount of accompanied freight travels.
Japan doesn't have close links to its neighbours in the same way at all. Its closest neighbour is South Korea which is a 10-12 hour sea crossing.
Some hasty googling tells me that Japan imports about 10% of its food and presumably only a small fraction of that accompanied.
In contrast the UK imports about 25% of its food from the EU and I would guess quite a large proportion of that is accompanied.
So the consequences of Japan closing its borders to people are very different from the UK doing the same.
Japan doesn't have close links to its neighbours in the same way at all. Its closest neighbour is South Korea which is a 10-12 hour sea crossing.
Some hasty googling tells me that Japan imports about 10% of its food and presumably only a small fraction of that accompanied.
In contrast the UK imports about 25% of its food from the EU and I would guess quite a large proportion of that is accompanied.
So the consequences of Japan closing its borders to people are very different from the UK doing the same.
I think the salient point in the UK is that it would never even try to implement something like that, because the British state just doesn't do that sort of thing. In fact, it has a history of not bothering to play that game - look at the Orissa famine, where the then governor tried to import rice to alleviate the food shortages and was heavily criticized because according to the Economist it might give people "the mistaken impression that it was the government's job to keep them alive'.
Would it have been more difficult that it was in NZ? Maybe, but NZ is not Craggy Island as some people seem to imagine - there are plenty of challenges around for example commercial and recreational boat traffic. Would it have been harder here than in any of the countries that have done better, like Taiwan etc? Probably not, but the point is that no-one made the slightest fucking effort to do anything until the whole place was fucked, you've got 150k dead, maybe a million cases of long covid, a crippled health system, and honestly anyone who thinks it will be better in the next pandemic with these or similar shitheads in charge is dreaming.
Would it have been more difficult that it was in NZ? Maybe, but NZ is not Craggy Island as some people seem to imagine - there are plenty of challenges around for example commercial and recreational boat traffic. Would it have been harder here than in any of the countries that have done better, like Taiwan etc? Probably not, but the point is that no-one made the slightest fucking effort to do anything until the whole place was fucked, you've got 150k dead, maybe a million cases of long covid, a crippled health system, and honestly anyone who thinks it will be better in the next pandemic with these or similar shitheads in charge is dreaming.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Thats also why I have no intention of limiting my sense of what our ambitions could have been to what people think was achievable in various other EU countries, because lots of those other countries tended to have similar establishment attitudes, assumptions and priorities as the UK establishment!
There are huge challenges and some practical limits to what could be achieved whilst still retaining essential imports. But Im not going to use what was actually achieved in other countries as a complete guide as to what was actually possible if the will had been there.
There are huge challenges and some practical limits to what could be achieved whilst still retaining essential imports. But Im not going to use what was actually achieved in other countries as a complete guide as to what was actually possible if the will had been there.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
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Raheem
Well-Known Member
Tfb, single men won't have had the opportunity to give anyone a black eye for eighteen months.
