A wilding

I remember my evangelist Christian sister, knowing I was into SF/F, pushing the first Harry Potter on me a few months after it came out and telling me that it was going to be the hot new thing. Then next time we met she refused to discuss it at all, having discovered or realised or been told that it was occult and to be avoided.

Fortunately I care very little what you think about me. Though I should perhaps correct the impression you have taken of the level of precautions we are taking - for example we had a fortnight's holiday last month (self catering in the UK, but we did eat out in gardens a few times). The only reason I am even slightly defensive about our choices is that I realise that we are making them from a position of relative privilege. And I did of course answer the question on when we would consider returning to normality: After the rate of new cases stops rising exponentially. Or after the data on the risks of the Delta variant becomes clearer, depending on what it then shows. Or after we have caught it despite our precautions (and hopefully recovered). You may think that this position "is simply preposterous and defies all logic" - that is your privilege. And thanks for the support @Raja

For the record, I do realise that we are fortunate to be able to go on being careful in comfort. (Though we have certainly not been taking as as far as "staying indoors"!) However I would say that the estimate of the chance of a fully vaccinated person needing hospitalisation when they get Covid still has large error bars, but is certainly orders of magnitude greater than that of being hit by lightning. Possibly when those error bars get smaller, after we have a few more weeks of data, we might reconsider, especially if the estimate comes down further. And of course the implicit plan is to let the virus run through the population! Given that the return to normality has been declared "irreversible", and that the test and trace system is still pretty useless, I cannot see how anyone could possibly claim otherwise. Indeed, you admit as much with your "the virus is never going away".

However one of us may be in the smallish percentage of people who need hospitalisation despite having been vaccinated. In which case our chances are much better if they are not being overwhelmed at the time.

Sometime after the rate of new cases stops rising exponentially ... (Or possibly after we have had it and hopefully recovered.)

Basically, the unstated implicit policy now is to let the new Delta variant spread throughout the country unchecked, and to hope that the vaccinations are sufficient to prevent the hospitals being overwhelmed by cases, and that the death toll is not too bad. Personally, I think the we are screwed, and Mrs W and I are going to continue to stay more or less in lockdown mode despite having had both our jabs.

We are going to find out. The number of cases of the delta variant is rising exponentially, with, as you say, the only choice coming up being as to whether or not the UK opens up and increases the exponential factor. We seem to have basically accepted that the variant is going to be allowed to burn through the whole country. So in a month or two we will have some very good stats. (Assuming that the NHS does not break under the strain.)

Chiming in here with my recent experience. We are in one of the UK's Delta variant hotspots. Numbers of cases in the local area have been doubling weekly for a month now, and they are nearly all the Delta variant. Scuttlebutt is that a major cause is a privately run quarantine hotel that appears to have been very lax - a version of this story has now reached the BBC: Our local area, population several tens of thousands of people, has now been declared a "surge testing zone". Everyone living here has been asked to take a PCI Covid test. Frankly this seems pretty pointless to me, given the turnaround time for test results and the fact that many people are anyway unable, unwilling, or cannot afford to isolate if they come up positive. But we were good and ordered the testing kits. I am appalled at them. The instructions are complex and very poorly worded. I very much doubt that I have done the test successfully (I am one of the substantial proportion of people whose tonsils cannot be seen without a tongue depressor). Only after multiple reads did we understand that we had to register online, then do the test, and post the kit in a special postbox so that it then would be picked up by the postman within an hour of us registering. With Johnson obviously not willing to do more than at most delay the end of restrictions for another week or so, I think we are stuffed. I think we just have to desperately hope that, when the Delta variant rips through the population, then the vaccinations are enough to stop the hospitals being completely overwhelmed. Early indications of an uptick in admissions are not a good sign. Edit: I have read that the accuracy of the home PCI tests may be as low as 25%. I am now no longer surprised at that.

IIRC he was born and brought up in England and has lived in the country all his life. He is also ethnically half English.

Excellent slip!

Changing the subject, I wanted to flag up another horror being perpetuated by our government, one they seem well on the way to achieving by stealth. Remember their plan to sneak in a "care.data" ( ) system a few years back? This was a scheme to upload the complete medical history of everyone in the UK onto a single centralised database and then sell access to whoever they then saw fit. They put up a fig leaf of "anonymisation" (easily broken and explicitly reversible "if there is a valid reason") plus vague promises that they would be careful about who they gave access, but the implications were still horrifying, and a big groundswell of opposition forced them to cancel it. Well it is now back, and they are doing everything that they can to make it a fait accompli before everyone notices, while we are all distracted by the pandemic. The announcement was made on an NHS blog, and apparently on flyers in some GP's surgeries (as if anyone is visiting them right now). They are rushing it through, with the upload scheduled to take place on 1st July. You can opt out, but the deadline for doing so is June 23rd. And don't be fooled by the comforting lie they tell that you can always opt out later - that would just stop subsequent updates to your medical history from being uploaded. If you want more details you can start from this BBC article (though it is way too kind on the government) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57341897 The opt out form can be found here: https://digital.nhs.uk/ And, anticipating a counter argument: there are already mechanisms for looking at our medical data for research purposes, but there are restrictions on who can see the data and what it can be used for that our government obviously considers irksome.

You get me as well.

@Toth Just in passing, and since you have expressed doubts in the past, you are obviously a very good teacher.

Well if I was going to put up a defence for them, I might say that they could have legitimate concerns about the "must be C of E" thing. But you are probably right.

And the Turks - don't forget Turkey was "certain" to join to EU and we would be flooded with them.