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sassassin posted:Sky are putting the price of my phone and broadband up £11/month (almost a 50% rise) so it's time to switch. Are plusnet any good or avoid? Seem to be the cheapest at the moment for the basic stuff (don't need fibre). Been with Plusnet ~6 years and they've been rocksolid, especially after I got an upgrade for £3 less a month late last year. Edit: Page tax. I used to get the 214 bus from Kentish Town to highgate, because gently caress walking up that hill.
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May 18, 2022 15:39
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Reveilled posted:For me personally I am basically back to normal. It doesn't seem like the health service has much interest in pursuing further vaccination that will be given on a widespread scale, so the protection I have now against the disease is likely to be all the protection I will ever get (barring some future annualised vaccination program like flu where most of the uptake is among the elderly), and I don't believe I can go the entire rest of my life without getting the virus. This is a good post and saved me from saying the same thing. Ironically part of the problem is testing - not because testing is inherently bad but because we don’t test anything else (common) on anything like the scale we tested for Covid, so it’s actually very hard to contextualise the testing figure against similar airborne respiratory viruses that also kill people. Obviously 50000 cases a day sounds like a lot but if we tested for the flu, what would that number look like? The same? Bigger? Smaller? It’s a huge failing of our public health communication because all we get is one number with no comparative context which makes it impossible for the public to meaningfully interpret it. Testing is good but it’s only truly meaningful for understanding risk if it’s compared to risks we already take as an air-breathing species.
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May 18, 2022 15:49
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OzyMandrill posted:I like plusnet a LOT. been with them over a decade, initially cos they were in Sheffield and so was I. They give 50p off per month if you recommend someone, and I had maybe 4 people put my username in the box in signup over the years, so I now get £2 off a month, which is awesome (nudge wink) For anyone who wants this kind of functionality and is on gmail - you can do this with (for example) myname+tesco@gmail.com - the + indicates the start of a comment or something in oldschool email syntax and gmail honors it. I assume other providers do this also but I only use gmail so it's the only one I've confirmed.
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May 18, 2022 15:52
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Jeherrin posted:as an air-breathing species.
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May 18, 2022 15:53
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JollyBoyJohn posted:I think its pretty much done now op Depends what you mean by done. If by done you mean the government treating it seriously, yeah, it's done. But as of March 2022, the most recent mortality numbers available, "In England, the year-to-date COVID-19 mortality rate was statistically significantly lower than the top two leading causes of death (dementia and Alzheimer's disease and ischaemic heart disease), and statistically significantly higher than all other leading causes." And that's with there still being uncertainty of how common & serious long COVID can be. Which is where comparisons to flu fall short. To quote the abstract of an article in Nature Medicine, "The cardiovascular complications of acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are well described, but the post-acute cardiovascular manifestations of COVID-19 have not yet been comprehensively characterized. Here we used national healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to build a cohort of 153,760 individuals with COVID-19, as well as two sets of control cohorts with 5,637,647 (contemporary controls) and 5,859,411 (historical controls) individuals, to estimate risks and 1-year burdens of a set of pre-specified incident cardiovascular outcomes. We show that, beyond the first 30 d after infection, individuals with COVID-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease spanning several categories, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease. These risks and burdens were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care). Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial." Maybe I'm more cautious than necessary because my father has hosed up lungs/COPD which would make him particularly vulnerable to COVID but I ain't buying what the governments selling. Even if it means I'm the only fanny on the bus or in the shop with a mask on, hardly an inconvenience. forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 16:04 on May 18, 2022 |
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May 18, 2022 16:00
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forkboy84 posted:Depends what you mean by done. If by done you mean the government treating it seriously, yeah, it's done. I mean my personal response is just to not even acknowledge covid at this point, I just don't care. I don't have any elderly dependents or people I contact regularly so I have respect for people who have that as a reason but it just doesn't apply to me. My grandad died in April, a day after his 85th birthday, it wasn't really covid related although I suppose you could say he just kind of just got bored of life and stopped wanting to breath after being confined to his house for just over 2 years. I'm not trying to use that as a "gently caress the covid response" take but yeah, if you ask me, the mental damage to people far outweights the physical. And I say that as someone who coped with the lockdown about 10 times better than any other IRL human I speak too.
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May 18, 2022 16:14
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Reveilled posted:If your threshold is less than 10 deaths a day, what's your criteria for deaths? Died only from COVID, has COVID listed on the death certificate, or death within 28 days of a positive test? COVID as one of the causes on the death certificate is how the government stats define it here, that's what I've been going with. I figure that's a fairly conservative figure - I'm sure the tories are doing all in their power to keep COVID off death certificates to push their "COVID is over" narrative. I also like to check out the COVID case map here - you can see things look a lot better today than they did on say, 1st April, which is why I'm beginning to consider that the pandemic might actually end some day. The 1918 flu pandemic took a little over two years to end as well, which is encouraging to hear. Gort fucked around with this message at 16:36 on May 18, 2022 |
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May 18, 2022 16:28
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Gort posted:COVID as one of the causes on the death certificate is how the government stats define it here, that's what I've been going with. I figure that's a fairly conservative figure - I'm sure the tories are doing all in their power to keep COVID off death certificates to push their "COVID is over" narrative. Without wishing to be pro-establishment: I don’t believe the tories (or any gov) has control over what does on the death cert (source: father used to write them). What makes it tricky is that death from generalised respiratory distress is hard to differentiate the From from the With; the measure is (crudely) ‘would this person have died at this time in the absence of this infection or were they likely to die at this time anyway?’ That is an inherently subjective question because doctors aren’t fortune tellers. They do the best they can. Furthermore, it’s hard even to tell what the primary cause is. Yes, someone might have Covid, and while in hospital they die. But did they die of Covid, or did their heart give up because of compound stresses of congestive heart disease, pneumonia, and Covid? If so, what killed them? What goes on the cert? It’s hard. Death certificates are a subjective thing. Excess deaths get you closer, because when there’s a significant cause of mortality on the loose one can be reasonably sure that it will account for most if not all excess deaths when compared with sufficient historic data to flatten out the noise.
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May 18, 2022 16:42
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Reveilled posted:For me personally I am basically back to normal. It doesn't seem like the health service has much interest in pursuing further vaccination that will be given on a widespread scale, so the protection I have now against the disease is likely to be all the protection I will ever get (barring some future annualised vaccination program like flu where most of the uptake is among the elderly), and I don't believe I can go the entire rest of my life without getting the virus. Not to say you're wrong or whatever, but I will point out that since covid isn't going away, it's not like you're going to get it once and be done with it. There's almost definitely going to be new variants and you're almost definitely going to be catching covid several times over your life. The difference between covid and the flu in that regard is that with covid you're rolling the dice every time on some really hosed up poo poo. Granted it's a small chance, but personally I'd like to minimise it as far as I can because I personally know several people with really awful long covid symptoms that I'd like to avoid.
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May 18, 2022 16:46
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JollyBoyJohn posted:I'm not trying to use that as a "gently caress the covid response" take
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May 18, 2022 16:46
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Deaths are the wrong thing to focus on when it comes to covid at this point. I don't want to catch covid not because it could kill me, but because there's a very good chance, relative to any other commonly transmitted and transmissible disease that it could cripple me in a myriad of different ways, possibly for life. And it's super hard to know just how much of this is actually going on, because we're basically just ignoring symptomatic long covid and have no way to know what kind of occult damage is being done silently that will pop up years or decades down the line, but it's a lot more people than those being hospitalised and/or dying. I'm going to live life more normally in times of relatively low transmission, as seems to be the case right now - I might go to the pub or restaurant or cinema or whatever and sit indoors without a mask, though I'm never not going to wear masks on public transport, in shops, etc., because it honestly makes little difference to me in those settings whether I do or don't. When we're in the next wave - and there will be another wave, and another, regardless of whether new variants pop up (they will) - then I'll go back to normal covid routines. This will be the pattern for years or decades, but hey, that's the way it goes. Pre-2019 isn't ever coming back again, so one must adapt. Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 16:53 on May 18, 2022 |
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May 18, 2022 16:51
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Guavanaut posted:then most of the lockdown would not have been necessary. in which case i'd be back in an office 5 days a week and frankly i'd rather have died of covid
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May 18, 2022 16:52
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Barry Foster posted:Deaths are the wrong thing to focus on when it comes to covid at this point.
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May 18, 2022 17:10
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Sign me up for a goon meet. Especially a beercurry one
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May 18, 2022 17:17
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I may be temptable from the wilds of SW17 to east London also.
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May 18, 2022 17:24
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Other overall factors to consider about health is hospital capacity - since the Tories got in there's been a general deterioration of capacity generally but specifically about bed occupancy where the winter peaks go down after winter but never return to the previous years lows. This racheting up year on year is taxing on regular services and increasing service vulnerability for the next winter peak. If covid keeps hospitalising people and that just continues because no one does anything then there's a higher chance of total system failure during the following winter as there's been no recuperation period for the service and so people just can't access treatment. Onto deaths the all cause mortality figures are published weekly and even though the baseline now incorporates the pandemic years the latest death wave pushed our overall figures way above the statistically significant limits. If we just keep having Omicron waves sweeping around then continuous protection like masking and continued interventions is the right course of action as it's observably causing an unusually deadly period.
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May 18, 2022 18:19
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I'm another person who's still distancing and turning down public indoor events for now, until statistics improve. Rolling death statistics (at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths) are on a 1-month delay, and are trending down slowly for now, but are still higher than they were around christmas last year. Like was said earlier, there's monthly summaries on causes of death, (like https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales/march2022) which includes ranking causes of death, where in March COVID-19 was the #6 cause of death. For me, I'm going to still be deeply concerned about COVID until either: * deaths drop below pre-christmas levels and keep dropping * covid deaths drop off the top 10 causes of death * the WHO declares COVID's no longer a pandemic At some level I might accept mingling indoors with strangers (god knows there's been enough gigs I've missed out on), but I think I'll be testing regularly and masking where practical until it's over.
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May 18, 2022 18:49
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forkboy84 posted:Maybe I'm more cautious than necessary because my father has hosed up lungs/COPD which would make him particularly vulnerable to COVID but I ain't buying what the governments selling. Even if it means I'm the only fanny on the bus or in the shop with a mask on, hardly an inconvenience. I always explain it to normal people using biscuits. If I have a mouthful of biscuit and cough on you, you're getting a faceful of biscuit crumbs. Now, if you have a mask on and I don't, you're still getting a face and mask covered in biscuit crumbs. If I have a mask on and a mouthful of biscuits, I get a mask full of crumbs and you don't get any on you, whether you're wearing a mask or not. Replace biscuits with 'covid germs you wouldn't know about for the first week because you're asymptomatic' and even my dear old mam got the idea. And government public health messaging has never really fought for this point since it became obvious that ministers like Gove, Sunak and Johnson just don't want to wear them, and it comes dangerously close to proving Thatcher wrong and the Joker right that there is such a thing as a society, and we live in one.
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May 18, 2022 18:56
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I think that's the hosed up thing is that wearing a mask - unless it's a fitted n95 with fresh filters - isn't about protecting you, it's about protecting others. Though if I wear a mask and you cough biscuits all over me, a lot of them will stay the outer side of the mask so a fraction (how big a fraction depending on mask quality) will get through and these may or may not be the crumbs that get in my lungs and make me cough your biccie crumbs. That's why I will double mask in particularly crowded/confined spaces and have every intention of putting on the plastic face shield too when I fly. Obviously, masks need to be washed/changed. Some of the poo poo I used to read about people complaining their masks were smelly etc after a couple of months' wear :shockprobe: used to make me feel sick! It's only their own disgusting lung juice with added bacterial activity making them smell. I'm sure there's a double-slit experiment idea in here somewhere but I'll have to think about that. If you don't look at the biscuit crumbs do they focus in just two places but if you look they make an interference pattern across the mask-wearers mouth. I digress into the quantum universe.
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May 18, 2022 19:18
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If you don't directly see me eat the biscuit it's impossible to tell if it was a bourbon or custard cream until the wave resolves into a particle.
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May 18, 2022 19:31
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I'm on Virgin Media at home because it's the only broadband that isn't nuclear dogshit in my area. At work we're on TalkTalk and if anyone ITT is a network engineer please hit me up because I have questions
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May 18, 2022 19:31
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I've not worn a mask for like 2 months now and have just been going about my business like pre-pandemic. I'm actually genuinely surprised we haven't caught it yet (yes we could have been asymptomatic, but we still get regularly tested via the ONS survey). Can't speak for everyone of course but it really is like the pandemic is over, here.
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May 18, 2022 19:32
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Bobby Deluxe posted:If you don't directly see me eat the biscuit it's impossible to tell if it was a bourbon or custard cream until the wave resolves into a particle. Or is it like in The Fly where the transposition goes a bit wrong and you end up with half bourbon / half custard cream  
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May 18, 2022 19:35
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I've not worn a mask for like 2 months now and have just been going about my business like pre-pandemic. I'm actually genuinely surprised we haven't caught it yet (yes we could have been asymptomatic, but we still get regularly tested via the ONS survey). Can't speak for everyone of course but it really is like the pandemic is over, here. I wish my experiences were similar, several friends caught it over the course of a week, including a vulnerable friend who'd been extra-cautious and is only just through the worst of it now.
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May 18, 2022 19:37
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Barely anyone at the local co-op wearing a mask, even the staff have given up. Starting to feel like the odd one out - same as when I went for a meal with the in laws for father in law's 60th. I'm not going to rehash the argument again but it really feels like people have internalised 'back to normal' as 'lets stop doing anything at all to stop the spread.'
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May 18, 2022 19:40
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Or is it like in The Fly where the transposition goes a bit wrong and you end up with Bourbon Creams is already the proper name for bourbons, should have called them Custard Bourbons imo. Would have avoided the need for that clunky explanation
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May 18, 2022 19:49
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I stayed the course through the pandemic until the beginning of this year, but it started to affect me so badly I felt like there was a crushing weight on my skull, and I was barely holding myself together. I still mask up quite frequently, especially for shops and buses, and I don't go out quite as much as I used to, so I haven't just thrown all caution to the wind, but I have absolutely hit the point where the need to socialise on a somewhat regular basis is an actual need and not just a desire.
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May 18, 2022 19:49
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I've been super cautious, rarely leave my house except to walk to Morrison's 5 minutes down the road once a week where I always wear my mask (Scotland too so until last month 90% of people were still wearing theirs). Have been to small social gatherings about 5 times in the entire pandemic, wore a mask every time I rode the bus, diligently alcohol gelled my hands after getting off the bus, etc. I've been to larger public areas twice - an indoor pub once where i caught something but it was gone after a week and the two LFTs I took didn't test positive, but otherwise never caught anything. And then last month cos "well it's gotta be over by now right? everyone is just doing stuff and I've been invited to do stuff so lets do some stuff" spent the evening on a nice open-air balcony pub drinking with friends. 5 days later could barely get out of bed from fatigue, spent a whole day barely awake except to cough, took a test after a few days more of coughing and wow i'd never seen an LFT light up like a christmas tree like that, I was used to my negative tests taking the full half hour to be like "nah you're fine", this thing the goo was on a race to get to that first line, bold as you can fuckin see it full on "gently caress you, it's covid, no doubts, no grey areas". I barely ever leave my house and I still caught that poo poo. Two months later and there's still some weird throat-cleary stuff that doesn't seem to be shifting and it sucks. At least triple vaxxed meant it just was a lovely time for like 3 weeks and not a life-threatening lovely time.
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May 18, 2022 19:57
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What happens when everyone's vaccinations wear off?
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May 18, 2022 20:00
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I think you are supposed to keep catching it and giving it to other people because that's cheaper than vaccination.
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May 18, 2022 20:02
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https://twitter.com/jane__bradley/status/1524647337557172225?s=20&t=koyHLf4qAx2BdAmGtwl4Jw Unlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/...&smid=url-share
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May 18, 2022 20:13
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Tarnop posted:What happens when everyone's vaccinations wear off? Long covid & excess mortality goes up
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May 18, 2022 20:21
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Kieth meets tory Rabbi Mirvis https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1526567873761640452
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May 18, 2022 20:27
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Bobby Deluxe posted:it comes dangerously close to proving Thatcher wrong and the Joker right that there is such a thing as a society, and we live in one. Like the goal was to reduce water usage, which it definitely did, but because it did it by charging households by the litre the general effect was that the lower income houses proportionally reduced their usage the most, and those were hardly the houses that had swimming pools or giant patches of begonias, so the reduction was in essential use. But it wasn't enough to immediately seem like a big deal, it wasn't like people started making GBS threads in their yards and not washing their hands, it was more like a broad and shallow reduction in handwashing time from 30 seconds to less, a reduction in the number of weekly showers, a little here, a little there, not enough to really tell, just chipping away at one of the principal things that separated urban living in 1980 from urban living in 1890. And then dysentery and hepatitis came back. And because it wasn't immediately obvious what had happened, people didn't instantly know what to blame. And so of course some types blamed Muslims for wiping their arses with their hands and so on. Public health requires broad statistically minded non-obvious measures, and the country is run by people with an allergy to that kind of thinking because it's not 'common sense' and it's not about the individual. And that's how you end up with "we trust the British people to use their own common sense" for the fluid dynamics of a novel virus that even people who study fluid dynamics and novel viruses were still speculating about.  Tarnop posted:What happens when everyone's vaccinations wear off? 
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May 18, 2022 20:27
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https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1526889635095449601?s=19 I can't wait to lariat a cop in the upcoming riots
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May 18, 2022 20:33
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I'm still limiting my out days to about once every 2 weeks, because I'm high risk. The only venue I've been to since restricitions went down was to see Stewart Lee, cos we bought the tickets a year ago and we were on the back row so I figured all the virions would be going away from me. I know that's stupid, but it was the only way I could talk myself into thinking it wasn't completely reckless! I would come to a goon meet if there was one though.
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May 18, 2022 20:39
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what biscuits are blue though
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May 18, 2022 20:39
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Hell yeah goon meet let me insult you all irl
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May 18, 2022 20:41
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I miss having a sense of smell at work. Which you wouldn't think would be a thing, but I dunno, the odd occasion I've had to take the mask off cos I was doing something exerting and I black out trying to breathe through it otherwise, it has just reminded me that I do actually have that extra sense I have barely used in the last two years.
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May 18, 2022 20:42
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Bobby Deluxe posted:what biscuits are blue though Smurf Oreos if you only eat the filling.
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May 18, 2022 20:44
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