It has been reported that the Government will not impose any attendance limit on weddings and funerals if a series of new restrictions is brought in. The reason for this is that it ministers believe attendance caps on these events during the previous three lockdowns caused unnecessary distress to those involved. MailOnline has more.
The exemptions for life events are part of all scenarios that have been drawn up by the Government to deal with the threat of Omicron.
It comes ahead of crunch talks between Boris Johnson and Government scientists today to discuss Covid restrictions for the New Year.
Downing Street is understood to be leaning towards new guidance urging people in England to be careful and limit contacts – rather than imposing new legally binding restrictions.
But this could change if data on hospitalisations suggests the NHS could be overwhelmed by a wave of Covid infections.
Possible restrictions considered by the Prime Minister over the past few days include closing pubs and restaurants indoors, bringing back the rule of six or restricting the number of households meeting indoors, and limiting capacity at mass events.
But ministers are said to be against disrupting significant life events with the restrictions, even if they opt to bring back the rule of six in indoor settings, the Times reported.
Among the proposals are plans to prevent hospitals forcing women to attend scans and check ups – as well as give birth – without their partners.
And ministers are “increasingly optimistic but very cautiously optimistic” they will avoid re-imposing draconian lockdown rules in England before the new year.
“It’s not just that there’s a clear gap between cases and hospitalisations, but also that when people are going into hospital they tend to be there for less time,” a Government source told the Times.
It is a stark difference from previous restrictions, under which the number of people allowed at weddings and funerals was capped – and saw the Queen attend Prince Philip’s funeral alone in April.
So far Mr Johnson has resisted calls to go as far as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in introducing curbs on social mixing. Similar restrictions have also been imposed in many European countries – but not yet in England.
This morning the Prime Minister will meet Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance to consider the latest data.
Any new legally binding restrictions would need the backing of Cabinet, and would have to be rubber stamped by MPs.
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So when the Fascist pigs want to terrify their own people, each scariant is deadlier than the last, including the Kentiscariant. But when Macron wants to score a point against Britain (how very novel for a French leader!), our Fascists suddenly find that the Kentiscariant is a tame lapdog.
Well well.
I am not giving Macron a ‘pass’ here, he should have resisted the enormous pressure from his ‘experts’ that sometimes make SAGE look like poodles. But in his speech he was careful not to phrase reference to the Kent ‘variant’ as if it was a ‘britsh/brexit’ issue, which is how most of the UK MSM and this article are painting it. This doesn’t help anyone.
I agree that the almost linear rise in ‘cases’ is more a function of increase tests than anything else, but its also reflected in numbers of hospitalisations and ICU admissions, again in a linear increase.
This is highly unusual behaviour for a virus. There is no explanation I have seen for this.
I suspect some of the numbers are very suspect, and are part of an attempt to convince at least part of the 50% of the French population that are saying no to vaccination.
If people will need a booster jab in September that’s billions more in profit for big pharma and another reason to reintroduce restrictions if there is a seasonal rise in cases before everyone has their booster. I wonder who is lobbying who to push the largely nonexistant dangers of all these variants.
Since viruses continously mutate, and presumably have done for hundreds of millions of years it seems obvious that the immune system would evolve to be able to fight variants of a virus as well as the strain that is currently circulating. Any organism that was immune against new variants and not just the old one would have a competative advantage and be more likely to pass on the genes for developing this immunity. This is another reason why it would’ve been better to allow the virus to spread among people at low risk of serious illness. Natural herd immunity is likely to be better than vaccine induced immunity. Sadly this is one more basic principle of biology/virology that the “experts” seem to have ignored, for reasons only they can know.
Not yet.
A few months ago someone leaked the contract. They can choose to make a profit from July, if I recall correctly
It depends on who gets to call the end of the emergency at which point
1. AstraZeneca can start charging market rates.
2. Authorisation for use under ’emegency’ provisions must surely be called into question ?
… which gives the rationale for continually upping the ante in terms of new Scary Fairies, and continuing the suppression of possible cheap prophylactics like Ivermectin.
They are experimenting on millions of subjects for free, whilst getting lots of coverage, that’s a nice win-win
Your link to the PHE study is hilariously, embarrassingly wrong.
It is actually the link to a BMJ study (March 10) concluding that the Kent variant is indeed much more deadly.
Please provide the correct link.
Yes – even in the report written by the “Swiss Doctor” there is only a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph. The study seems not to have been published (or peer reviewed) yet, and its existence is only known due to a press conference at 10 Downing Street.
There could be an easy explanation for increased hospitalization rate not accompanied by higher mortality rate. The propensity to admit could have been increased compared to the first wave ie less sick cases admitted. The health care sytem did not collapse in the first wave might increase “overhospitalization” ie doctors admit more,knowing it would have less effect on the system. Really the excess mortality and the the true C-19 mortality is the only way to estimate if a variant really is more dangerous.
The Swizz doctor is a bit leaning to van den Bosche scenario saying if neutral antbodies are affected as above could be problematic although they allude to something called T-cells immunity. But another study published a few days ago,again showed that T cells have a broad immunity incl. against variant.
One would bet that natural acquired immunity ,is the most effective T cells response as known by everybody pre 2020 and that an artificial immunity like vaccine can never come up to that level. The article above is down here
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113#.YGTXD75sdDQ.twitter
CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants
This study examined whether CD8+ T-cell responses from COVID-19 convalescent individuals (n=30) potentially maintain recognition of the major SARS-CoV-2 variants suggesting that virtually all anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should recognize these newly described variants.