Get the water cannons out, lock them up till day after boxing day I reckon with no masks on from the protesters raise the Tier to curfew inside m25
yep--apparently the ferries were packed full. the DFL brigade try to avoid treading on us locals--they dont want to walk the mess onto their carpets.
The new South African strain which has just arrived in the UK could see a full lockdown extended for much longer, April or June maybe. Why is South Africa's new variant so scary? UK bans travel to SA | Daily Mail Online The more people who get infected the greater the opportunity for mutation of this virus, any strain that spreads faster will likely become the dominant strain in any community, this is why trying to protect just one segment of the community is madness, the idea that you let it burn assumes that it won't take the opportunity of so many new hosts to generate a variant better optimised for its survival, note that I say 'its' survival that's how evolution works nothing in this cares about the hosts it is all about replication and survival of the little bit of code that is the virus. So if this thing is causing more severe disease in the young as per the South African report, well there goes their happy fantasy of it's only the old that die. We need to lockdown like China did and we need to do it now while there is still a chance to exterminate this South African variant, that would be 16 weeks with all borders closed, and South Africa should be trying to do the same.
As you know I haven’t thought of the earlier strain as being age specific. I would be surprised if the other strains are too. However hopefully records will be kept both here and abroad of relevant statistics to establish a pattern. It does seem a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire...
Yeah I know John, you see it as a metabolic illness I understand that, and that would tend to lean naturally towards older people. I see it more as an opportunist that has no idea what its own chemistry actually does to the host, the thing that was always surprising about it was how damaging it appeared to be in this host (humans) the level of damage would have seen it die out quickly had it not been able to hide in cells for a week before most patients became symptomatic it did that because it was able to suppress the natural human immune response and delay that immune response. Its other effects are just part of its replication process, the virus has no idea of what it is doing, its replication strategy is the result of The Blind Watchmaker, basically it changed over time lots of it died out and some versions kept replicating, something that allows it to infect a larger population and do more damage could actually be bad for its lifecycle, killing hosts is not in its interest reaching hosts is. The virus is, like all other viruses, exploring the mathematical surface that represents its opportunity, it happens randomly but the more chances it gets the more capable it is in exploring that mathematical surface and that to me is the real danger. Ultimately the best thing for SARS-CoV-2 is for it to find a niche that results in a cold but it does not know that, right now if we can vaccinate enough people SARS-CoV-2 could be an evolutionary dead end, we did that to smallpox, we've almost done it to polio, we need to do it to this thing.
