SAGE says ministers should be more precise about what could trigger ‘Plan B’ restrictions this winter and believes that telling the public to work from home again is one of the most effective measures it should prepare to reintroduce. The Times has the story.
SAGE noted that only about half the workforce had the option to stay at home but urged ministers to prepare for the “rapid deployment” of new measures if infections continue to surge.
Facemask mandates and vaccination passports are also options but are considered to be less effective.
The advisers have also urged Boris Johnson to decide what circumstances would trigger his ‘Plan B’. “Identifying early warning metrics and triggers for intervening is key to responding rapidly,” they said. …
New modelling from SAGE suggests that hospital admissions are unlikely to hit the peaks seen in January, when 4,000 people a day were admitted. But there are concerns that Covid cases could combine with a nasty flu season to drive hospitals closer to the edge.
“Even if peak [Covid] admission levels remain well below those of January 2021, this could still put health and care settings under significant pressure, particularly if this coincides with high numbers of patients with other respiratory infections,” SAGE advisers have told ministers in the past week.
It echoes past comments made by Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, who has said that the Prime Minister must “go hard and go early” with winter restrictions if there is a surge in cases. …
The SAGE documents also include the suggestion that a campaign, coupled with practical and financial support, may be needed to encourage people to stay home if they have cold or flu symptoms, even if they have a negative PCR test for the coronavirus.
The experts are concerned that the pandemic has entered a highly unpredictable phase where small changes in public behaviour, or the effectiveness of vaccines, could have a large impact.
Worth reading in full.
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Well, judging by the comments here, the government can certainly push our buttons and trigger our limbic systems! I’m starting to wonder if it might be best to ignore what they say completely and withdraw our attention and energy from them?
Even if I wanted to work from home (which I don’t) I couldn’t, given how intermittent my internet has been in recent weeks. It goes off for hours at totally random times of the day and night. Apparently lots of other people having the same problem locally, and situation getting worse not better. If I had to work from home and my job depended on me having consistent internet, I’d be screwed. I was wondering if anyone else has noticed anything strange going on with internet access lately?
I was watching Toby Young on Talk Radio. He made the point that lockdown sceptics had been largelly kept off the air because OFCOM would not allow views on the MSM that contradicted the official Government line. However the same rule does not appear to apply to the zero covid zealots who are regularly given a platform to contradict Government policy ( i.e we must learn to live with the virus), lobby for Plan B and further lockdowns. Isn’t it about time OFCOM revisited its guidance?
They won’t. OFCOM was instructed to do that – part of the pandemic/lockdowns narrative.
The Covid passport was always the end objective
Could SAGE finally be gaining a sense of self-awareness, of just how disconnected from reality they’ve been?
Yes sage, by all means, let’s now destroy the rest of the economy that hasn’t been destroyed yet. I guess that is the sage/wise advice.
I have no idea whether it’s true that the old Kung Flu or the pseudo-vaccines can cause low sperm counts – but lap-dancing a laptop, as the clown in the photo is doing, almost certainly will.
Times muppets. Put Oliver Wright on the story (if he hasn’t been bought off).
https://twitter.com/Noconsent12/status/1451217352184549379
But this is definitely not coercion to get a medical treatment. Absolutely, definitely not…
“small changes in public behaviour, or the effectiveness of vaccines, could have a large impact.”
How convenient if your plan is to decimate the West and hand remaining resources to the CCP. Also proves there was zero point to the vaccines but people continue to take them. Have a listen to that lovely, benign CCP.
https://youtu.be/biNxl7tiVSY
Whats with the SAGE tells government, aren’t they advisors and the government tells them if they will implement their dodgy models or not?
We’ve seen this since the beginning – if the government doesn’t do what SAGE wants they start shit-stirring in the media until the government gives in and implements whatever restrictions SAGE are demanding.
Then again, the government must be happy with this – otherwise they would stick ‘no talking direct to the media’ clauses in the contracts.
Off topic but relevant generally I hope.
Anyone noticed how the BBC doesn’t have its daily evening covid update when cases are falling? I know cases are irrelevant but when they rise they plaster the figures all over the place!
I bet they are gutted they’re falling. No doubt testing ramped up next week or cycles for the PCR turned up a bit to get a few more false positives.
What the Beeb loves is death. Corpses. Stiffs. Sadlidieds. No corpses, no fun.
And they never have actual debate about covid restrictions, or vaccine efficacy.
I think SAGE should fuck the fuck right off.
I’ll raise you a fuck the fuck right off!
50% of the workforce can work from home – bullshit. Maybe if most of them are furloughed again.
Yes, quite – either furloughed or supposedly working but unable to actually do their jobs effectively or at all (see DVLA for an extreme example).
Really – retail, food, manufacturing, trades, drivers, care, hospitality, sport, front-line health, front-line security. In fact almost all people who do useful jobs.
Where I am, they had a pop up tent in the high street today for passers-by to get their jabs/s; about two feet from where drug deals are done, where pretend ‘homeless’ demand cash with menaces, and where I’ve even seen a skank give a knee-trembler to some poor drunk sod. That corner is covered with p1ss and sh1t, and not just from dogs. Strangely enough, there was no-one to be seen availing themselves of the great offer.
Our local council’s weekly email newsletter has also promised door-knockers coming round to ‘low [jab] uptake areas’ (my ward is second lowest in the area: yay!), so the mister and I spent a few minutes this morning refreshing ourselves with the local stats to argue the toss with them. Disappointingly, so far the only knockers today have been the Amazon guy and the postie.
In a city near me (which I try to avoid going to unless there’s a good reason, because it’s a depressing dump), there was a flu jab tent in the main shopping area a few weeks ago. Never seen that before (or in any other city centre).
I know, right? There’ll soon be maternity tents in Sainsbury carparks, and brain surgery tents on station platforms.
In fact Amazon intends to be our health service. Subscription model a bit like Prime. They already have all of our medical records..
With kids being off school next week you’d expect a dip in ‘cases’ no?
I’m not convinced that it actually makes any difference whether or not kids are at school – more a case that during term time they are forever being tested!
Keep an eye on Leicester and Leicestershire as the schools were on half term this last week.
There will be working from home, but it will be from homes in China and India
I’d like to see a list of SAGE members who have herpes. It is a contagious disease and I think we should be aware of who they are, and they should be isolated forever.
It won’t make any difference.
When you’ve made a career out of providing totally barmy advice, why would you change and admit that you’re wrong?
The redundant SAGE just needs to be made redundant.
I am trying to pushback as much as possible but this merry go round is starting to make me despair. Definitely more maskies in the supermarket today. I’m teetering on the edge of exploding in rage at them. Wake the f**k up!
People are not going to ‘wake up’. You can’t pour a quart into a pint pot. A great percentage of people are very thick. Some of them like to wear black masks, they think it makes them look mysterious and menacing, ninja warriors against Covid!
As they are so fond of encouraging people to ‘stay safe’ will the Church of England be using the churches as vaccination centres this Christmas? Midnight Mass Jabbing?
Yes, the increase in face nappies in shops has been really noticeable this week – many of which are worn below the nose, on the chin, etc! It’s all thoroughly depressing.
I can report the same in my middle class northern town. Including the ridiculous chin mask wearing, as a nod towards a half-baked sense of rising anxiety about something. People really make me sick sometimes!
Here in mask-mandated Wales I’ve just come back from an afternoon of Pumpkin picking. Massive field, packed with happy families (at least a crowd of a hundred when I went, and more coming as I left). No social distancing. Not a mask in sight. My daughter and I got lost for an hour in the Maize Maze, where we were brushing up against others, squeezing through the corn past total strangers. Again not a mask in sight within the maze, and nobody bothering to avoid anyone else. The people in these parts are simply no longer frightened.
I’m beginning to wonder whether the Welsh government retained the mask mandate because they knew that if they didn’t absolutely no-one here would wear a mask.
Today was an oasis of normality. Lovely.
Love stories like this. Does give you hope that not everyone has lost their minds.
That’s why I post them when I experience them. Sending out the positive energy. Dissipating the shadows.
Could just be the case that the bedwetters would never go somewhere like that as it’s “far too dangerous” and are hiding away at home!
That thought crossed my mind. But even if that’s so, it means there’s still a sizeable crowd of non-bedwetters – at least in my area.
Another positive story – last week I went to Chester. Not as crowded as it was on a Saturday in Days of Yore (i.e. pre 2020), but still busy. Unmasked folk outnumbered masks on the street. A few more mask in shops (mainly elderly and young women – a pattern I’ve seen since the start of the Madness).
Now I saw a sight I had not seen for two years – a busker juggling atop a precarious unicycle. The beautiful thing was – he was surrounded by a tightly packed, semi-circle of onlookers, maybe 30 or 40 in size, all unmasked and cheering him on. Again – people unafraid. And this time in the city centre.
I think I see the spell wearing off…and the Powers don’t notice it.
Also, what do we make of this article? – A Lockdown Sceptic, the former director of communicable diseases for Public Health Wales no less, featured on the BBC of all places!
“Speaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast, Dr Salmon said he was “certainly concerned about the pressure on the NHS” with staff shortages, high bed occupancy and Covid.
“However, one of my abiding hopes is that this doesn’t lead to a re-imposition of wider social restrictions,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem to me that they actually worked the first time, or at best marginally in the short term.”
He argued that such restrictions “cost a lot”, not only financially but in terms of mental illness, domestic abuse, addiction, and delays to health treatment. “I feel that there have to be other approaches to this,” he added.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-59007171
Sounds great. We went to a local non league semi pro football game today. No masks, no intrusive questions, nothing.
Just people watching football, chatting, having a beer/tea/ hot dog. It was lovely.
Went to our local amateur art exhibition today. Lots of old people with masks, freezing cold inside because all the doors and windows were open, no public to handle the milk jug (staff with gloves and visors only). Preposterous.
Same here with the masks. A couple of weeks back it was close to 50/50 in supermarket, yesterday back to 80% masked.
Son has been in Somerset for the term and he says masks are everywhere, everyone wears them in all indoor settings. On the train back to Kent there was a visible reduction in compliance the further East he traveled and the tube was only 10% masked.
I will not be pushed back into the nonsense of masks or any other nonsense that I have any control over. It’s over.
Can one still get extra help from the tax office to pay for the extra bill as they are now at home all day?
I do not understand why these people need the money, they are not spending it on the commute or sandwiches and coffees for lunch!
Yeah, but I wasn’t paying for those things previously (unless you could shoe leather), if I have to work from home I’m providing my own heat, wear and tear, furniture, water etc. Plus the added benefit of paying for physio after becoming so immobile during the first 3 lockdowns 🙁
I’d rather be in the office or the field, but the company have to do what the Bozo at the top says, it’s not worth their risk to do otherwise.
I see some professor is advocating everyone avoids using public transport, to keep infection down. Well, that’ll thrill the train and bus companies. Where I live, the buses are already mostly empty as they go by; although ironically I was in a large-ish city yesterday and the buses were running with unmasked passengers (despite the wear a mask signs plastered all over the windows).
Gotta get rid of these damn things, they invoke fear and terror, the mental state of this nation has been damaged now for years on end. People will wake up one day and find all the transport companies gone bust, the wailing will be biblical.
I the Midlands, rush hour trains are packed again (partly because they are still running a reduced timetable and sending extra-short trains). However, even when there is standing room only, masks are on fewer than half of passengers. It may be different in the more affluent areas as the middle-class woke virtue-signallers are the ones still shitting the bed.
Northern Rail have automated passive-aggressive muzzle announcements on some of their trains, which play after every station. On the commuter lines with lots of stops it’s nearly non-stop at some stages. Gets very annoying very quickly!
How about complaining? Or asking the driver to turn the announcement machine off?
Tried! Doesn’t work – same as with other announcements they cite the usual bollocks about safety, etc, etc.
I expect China is subsidising the public transport companies. One day you will go outside and see all the buses and trains filled with Chinese people.
If you mean international transport companies, I believe that is a part of the great plan.
Same old, same old. These guys don’t give up do they? It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas so SAGE should get stuffed.
They are trying to achieve lockdown by stealth it seems. One little step at a time.
It’s all part of setting the scene by getting a sufficient proportion of the public into a state where they are permanently shitting themselves. Note that the government has avoided setting thresholds, which makes it much more difficult for anyone to challenge / campaign against ‘Plan B’, and also allows them to impose it at 11pm via Twatter, to come into force at midnight (which they will quite likely do at some point).
I’d like to hope that the public are wise to the tactics now given how many times it’s been played out, but unfortunately I very much doubt if most of them have even noticed.
“The experts are concerned that the pandemic has entered a highly unpredictable phase where small changes in public behaviour, or the effectiveness of vaccines, could have a large impact.”
Roughly translated means… The ‘experts’ are concerned the populace has entered a highly unpredictable phase and we need to get them back under control quickly.
Do not comply. Withdraw your consent to be governed. Throw sand in their gears.
Remember what they have done to you, your family, your neighbours and your countrymen. They told you they needed a few weeks to flatten the curve; they told you they needed you to wear useless masks (which they knew was a pointless exercise); they vigorously promoted asymptomatic transmission (another lie); they told you to stay at home to save lives (a claim utterly absurd on its face); through their propaganda they effectively accused you of murdering others if you did not comply; they made you and your friends and relatives go without contact; they made your elderly parents and grandparents suffer and die alone; they made your children and grandchildren suffer from isolation, depression, and more; they made your children and grandchildren wear masks and subject themselves to daily testing, and kept them in constant fear; they blackmailed you into taking a novel and experimental injection in order for you to participate fully in society…
And now, in October 2021, we are back to March 2020. The same dance between ‘advisors’ and politicians is taking place; the same gullible/corrupt media is dutifully playing its part in reporting the manufactured drama; and the same muddled masses appear to be none the… Read more »
And they set out to deliberately cause confrontations in society, and encouraged the public to bully anyone who didn’t appear to be ‘following the rules’.
“Asked about Johnson’s explanation that he was acting out of loyalty to an old friend, Collier said: “He might have gone to Eton with Guppy, but loyalty shouldn’t really extend to plotting to have a journalist beaten up. I’m just amazed that he acted in this way, that he didn’t have the gumption not to get involved with someone like Guppy.
“He went quite a way along the line of plotting to get me beat up. He didn’t dismiss it from what I gather … From reading the transcript, he was well prepared to help Guppy find my address and for Guppy to then get me assaulted.””
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/14/black-eyes-boris-johnson-plot-attack-reporter-darius-guppy
Anyone want to start another pointless on-line petition?
Or how about another e-mail to your local MP?
We all know the 4th and 5th jabs are coming for next year, and that the Covid ‘marshalls’ contracts go up to 2023.
I have recently contacted my MP to raise the issue of the way in which the government has stirred up hatred against the unmasked and unvaccinated, and asked for his views on this. Unsurprisingly, his response completely avoided the question.
Unless you are one of the few people with non-Covidian MPs it’s hopeless expecting them to do anything or answer difficult questions, but there’s no harm in letting them know that you are not happy about it – if enough people do that then it might eventually start to register with them. Likewise online petitions – if you expect those to achieve the stated aim you will be disappointed, but there is no harm in letting the government know that a large number of people are not happy about whatever it is.
Like you, MR, I can and will never forget; I am deeply entrenched in history, particularly but not exclusively the 20th Century. I do not view “Albion” through rose tinted spectacles, but the more I read hear and see of experiences from those I would describe as “extraordinarily ordinary people” as I get older and understand what my parents did in 1939-45, I get angrier and angrier; I am only now beginning to grasp what Solzhenitsyn wrote about in “The Gulag…” and his seething anger which to me leaps off the pages. Not attempting to compare the devastation of Russia from 1900 onwards with the UK 2019 onwards, but what those people must have felt after many many decades to being powerless I am starting to believe I understand; and it is not difficult to foresee massive upheaval in the UK in the medium term the longer this scam is allowed to go on….
Absolutely right, my friend.
Well, what a surprise! More scarmongering from SAGE, who are determined to hold onto their influence and won’t just fuck off and leave us alone.
The core message of course is that society should (no matter what the social and econmic cost) ‘Protect the NHS’. This is bollocks – the NHS is there to serve society, not the other way round, and this point needs to be reiterated every time the scaremongering starts.
Lockdown: where middle class people stay at home and working class people bring them things (while miraculously avoiding death from a deadly virus)
And the elderly and vulnerable cease to be an expensive burden to society due to a combination of insufficient heating/food, mental health issues, and/or lack of medical care (supposed to have been provided by the sacred cow NHS).
.
So… how does this fit in with the “no lockdowns this winter” scenario?
And, as if on cue:
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/warning-issued-over-christmas-lockdown-21950460
It’s so predictable you could set your watch by it.
We did, in August
Got to get COP26 out of the way first.