Comments by "Alan hat" (@alanhat5252) on "ZOE" channel.

  1. Herd immunity is indeed the only way out of this now, the question is how that herd immunity is achieved. Lockdown after lockdown till enough people are vaccinated seems to be working to an extent but I would have preferred isolating all cases at the beginning when there were just a few & proper checking at the borders which would have removed the need for lockdowns or vaccines. Tests have been available since January or February last year, it's just the scale that couldn't be managed early on & Government funding could have sorted that out pretty quickly, most of the world's reagent is made in Yorkshire, (although training dogs would probably have been quicker... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9 )
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  2. Fascinating, thank you. Too much to think about to start commenting.
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  3. the incidence graph for my area (as shown in the Zoe app) is still climbing steadily, there's no suggestion of the flatlining Tim mentions here
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  4.  @brynleytalbot778  Prof Ferguson is probably right, he's got the resources to check these things, but letting the virus run rampant as the Government was going to do would have crushed the NHS & killed, according to Prof Ferguson's figures, a quarter of a million people achieving herd immunity across the whole country. But we also have to look at more recent figures & see that the virus is mutating into more dangerous forms, Prof Ferguson's initial estimate was based on the Wuhan strain of the virus which kills less than 1% but what actually arrived here was a European strain which kills just under 3% (so three quarters of a million dead) & then we bred our own strain which kills even more, so maybe a million dead & just as important is #LongCovid which gets ten times as many people &, if left to run, would have brought down maybe ten million people which is literally half the workforce. Bearing in mind that it takes around 3 to 4 medical staff per patient, even if we were to employ every child (including toddlers) & every retired person there aren't enough people in the country to deal with the sick & we can't import people because we've exported our virus right round the world so every other country has problems of it's own & can't spare the staff. This is why we had to do something about it. Wuhan showed us how to do it, very simply shut every door till the virus runs it's course but without spreading. It worked. 78 days later they were clear. Because we only ever had extremely partial lockdowns here we're more than 78 WEEKS into this & still not sure the end is in sight.
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  5. Can I request that you sack your fake-greenscreen software, please? It's very distracting. I'm not sure why you feel a need to conceal your location but this isn't the best way of doing it.
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  6. 7:17 is the Isle of Man in the UK? It's in the British Isles but it has it's own government, it's a British Protectorate rather than a member of the Union. (Similarly with the Channel Islands)
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  7.  @Juupke  WHO did a YouTube video on that yesterday -- some vaccines are better than others for different things, overall they're all pretty good at keeping you out of hospital _if_ you take the full course
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  8. just putting each group of numbers on screen together as text would help too.
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  9. that was my first thought too. I'm not at all convinced by the stereotypical "periods" reasoning.
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  10. 42:37 please be careful how you use the phrase "strange fruit", it has very strong connotations for some people. Some consider the song the beginning of the civil rights movement.
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  11. is there a way to change [usual self] in the app? I made some mistakes & it's really irritating correcting them every single day.
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  12. You may be interested to read The Specialist by Charles Sale
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  13. also men who have anal sex
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  14. can you #WearAMask, please? Even if you take it off before speaking -- ask your Behavioural Science friends, it really does make a HUGE difference
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  15. There's 2 really big shifts in Government figures -- 1) there's a 40% reduction in the number of tests, even Trump spotted this one -- less tests = less cases found. 2) Government figures have stopped counting re-infections -- if you've had covid before you're counted just once regardless of whether you get a new infection, even if it's from a different variant.
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  16. 2:56 - you're not sure why rates are increasing in Scotland - it's been wet in Scotland so the airborne virus isn't drying out & dying so fast.
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  17.  @suerowland7463  & those of us who can't keep long strings of numbers in our heads.
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  18.  @louisehibbert9768  my thinking is that it's more likely to be about your work patterns within the home & waiting till it's convenient.
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  19.  @mikethebloodthirsty  how, exactly, is an engineer better at explaining virology than a leading PROFESSOR of virology a professor who is also the lead scientist on the biggest app in the world? Come on -- exactly how?
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  20.  @mikethebloodthirsty  testing does not make any difference whatsoever to the number of cases, where it does make a difference is the number of cases DISCOVERED In a disease where most people spreading it are asymptotic it's really important to know who has got it so they can be isolated till it's run it's course so they don't spread it to anyone else. After more than a YEAR AND A HALF how can you not know this?
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