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Congrats Kin and the rest of the babyhavers! I have no helpful advice but good luck to all the babies with goons for parents. Booster vaccinations are definitely available for all adults who had their second more than 3 months ago. Source: I am a vaccinator. The computer system also hasn't been updated and flashes up warnings every time someone is under the 6 month limit. The priority is for over-40s and vulnerable people, but walk-in clinics aren't going to turn you away. If there's a pharmacy offering appointment-only Covid vaccines near you, I recommend going an hour before closing to see if there are any spares. There's almost always a handful of doses that need to be thrown away. You're unlikely to get one if you leave it until less than half an hour because Moderna and Pfizer require a 15 minute wait afterwards. There's currently an issue with staffing vaccination centres, because all the volunteers who were trained up have gone back to work. This is why the number of walk-in places have dropped and there are huge queues even at the appointment-only sites. They've taken bookings expecting x-number of vaccinators but they're down one or two, there's a patient who takes three times longer to vaccinate for various reasons, and suddenly there's a gammon shouting that a 20-minute delay is outrageous and he can't possibly wait that long because he's parked on double yellows and it will be our fault if he get another ticket. Lady Demelza fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 14:56
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TACD posted:Vaccine question: what’s the point of the little cards? My understanding is they don’t actually count as proof of vaccination for anywhere that matters, are they just like a receipt or in case a restaurant or somewhere wants to check vaccination status? Care home workers and other people required to get vaccinated have to show them to their manager otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to start theor shift. Care home managers don't have access to their employees' medical records so this was considered proof enough. I've had to show mine to people I was about to vaccinate as proof that I wasn't part of a secret plot to inject them with something that will kill them. There was a stack of blank cards and a biro right in front of me, but they were reassured enough to go through with the vaccination.
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Dec 4, 2021 18:12
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Does anyone else remember the mid-90s film Different for Girls? It was about two childhood friends who reconnect as adults, and one of them is a transwoman. From memory, it was pro-trans (and anti-police), although I imagine there would be all sorts of cringey moments on a rewatch. They had a male actor playing the transgender character for starters. What I'm trying to say is that there was trans-supporting mainstream media 25 years ago, TERFdom wasn't a universal state of being, and even at the time it was originally broadcast Linehan's transphobic IT Crowd episode was excessive. It feels like we've gone backwards. Edit: did Starmer go to Peppa Pig World with a child? I feel like that's an important factor as to how much enjoyment one would get from the visit.
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Dec 5, 2021 00:49
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The problem with a 'failsafe' ID card is that routine interactions are focussed on establishing that somebody has the card, not on establishing their ID. At the moment people can muddle through with utility bills and bank cards as well as passports. With a specific ID Card, it'll end up as the sort of situation where if someone gets mugged, has their house burn down, or posts their ID off to get their details updated, and they suddenly can't do anything because they don't have the one magic card. Provisional driving licences aren't always accepted as ID, for reasons that nowhere has been able to articulate. We're getting this way with 2 factor authentication. I can't access my email or bank account without my mobile phone, and I've often wondered what would happen if it broke. The point of failure there wouldn't be that I can't prove my identity, it's that I lack a physical thing. If voter ID laws are passed, I bet there will be newspaper articles about people being disenfranchised because there's been a delay in driving licence/passport renewals or something, and the polling station won't accept anything else as valid.
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Dec 5, 2021 16:45
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TACD posted:we regret to inform you the funny images app is turning your images into NFTs NFTs are a scam but meh, I can't see how they're going to make money off these ones, it's a throwaway image from a one hit wonder app. An acquaintance (who is also a bitcoin evangelical) went to an NFT conference recently. Even the attendees weren't that enthusiastic about partng with their money which means it can't even step over the low bar set by MLMs of getting them to believe their own hype.
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Dec 7, 2021 01:12
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jaete posted:Yeah I went to my nearest walk-in place today as well. Nice lady at door explained that at the moment they're doing 6-months-later only, can't do shorter time. She did say something like "we have no doctor on duty therefore can't do it", not sure if I understood that correctly though. But, need to wait for an unknown amount of time before they're authorised to do 3-months-laters. That's a shame. Even before the 6-month limit was officially dropped, at the centre where I was, the pharmacist was overruling it because some people had managed to book appointments at 5 and a half months. There weren't many walk-ins but it was the same for them, as long as the pharmacist had glanced at the screen and okayed it, they got boosted. There are lots of logistical issues about suddenly making millions of people eligible without increasing site capacity, but luckily I've had very pragmatic people in charge who realise that if you turn people away, some of them will not come back. As in, they give up, not that they die of Covid. The pharmacist's attitude was that if you've got a syringe full of vaccine and a willing arm in front of you, then you have to have a better reason for refusal than "you're 72 hours early".
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Dec 7, 2021 23:56
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Blame the costs and don't go. I've seen a lot of people aghast at how much the tests costs to travel, but that will be nothing compared to the costs if you test positive in France. The best case scenario then is that you end up stuck there in asymptomatic quarantine and then have to pay for yet more tests.
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Dec 8, 2021 23:27
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Count me in as another who wouldn't vote for this current version of Labour. I've never been a member but I've given time and money to campaigns, and that's not going to happen again either. Call me crazy, but I'll probably vote for the candidate who best represents my views. If it ends up being a 3-way race between Labour, Tory, and UKIP, I shall spoil my ballot. An election is a couple of years away yet, and Labour might be bankrupt by then.
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Dec 9, 2021 21:55
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Kier Starmer has tweeted that Boris Johnson is unfit to lead our country, and I had to doublecheck it was his verified account. This sounds dangerously like something an opposition leader might have said several disgraces ago.
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Dec 10, 2021 01:26
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Just Another Lurker posted:Think i will try making paneer next week, fancy a change. The process is really simple but I can never manage to compress it firmly enough so it's a bit crumbly.
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Dec 11, 2021 17:56
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goddamnedtwisto posted:"Match the NHS's best vaccination day" - that was the opening up to under-30s when they used six football stadiums as well as having the really big centres running at full pace, there is literally no way that they can do that at such short notice. Can't wait to see how many tens of thousands turn out on Xmas Day to get jabbed! I got a notification today urging that more vaccinators are needed urgently at all sites. Once again a big announcement has been made with no guarantee there will be the people to carry it out.
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Dec 12, 2021 21:49
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Endjinneer posted:If it's looking like a shambles at the mo, it's because the vaccination programme staff had a couple of hours of non-specific warning that some thing was going to be announced on Sunday night. Tesseraction posted:What are they losing the staff to? Burnout? There was a huge drive to train volunteer vaccinators a year ago, and then lots of them couldn't get a shift, because you had to go through a site induction ("here is the first aid kit and the fire escape" etc), shown how to use the computer system to update patients' medical records*, and then be supervised vaccinating the first few patients. Meanwhile, bank NHS staff were signing up for (paid) shifts, and they took priority. One nurse mocked volunteers for doing for free what they were getting £20/hour for. Very quickly, the NHS started limiting or refusing to accept volunteer vaccinators who hadn't previously been to the particular site, there because they didn't want to waste time doing the inductions. There were a few stories in the national press about it. What this meant was that thousands of people either gave up out of frustration or because it had been so long they didn't have confidence that they would remember their training. Then by autumn the volunteer vaccinators began to go back to work/university, but it was OK because the programme was slowing down for adults and the volunteers couldn't vaccinate under-18s anyway. Some of the larger sites that had given over their premises for vaccination centres wanted them back now they were allowed to re-open. A lot of the volunteer vaccinators still around are the ones who have been doing what they can for months, whether they are retired or fitting in shifts around their work and personal commitments. Boris mentioned training up more people, but there's no guarantee that the ones who trained and dropped out will come back, and I can't imagine there is an untapped pool of millions who simply forgot to volunteer the first time around. But in making this announcement without ensuring anyone involved in doing the work was prepared, the Government has set the NHS up to fail. * The story of the goon who got 30 jabs is nonsense, you can literally see the date of previous covid vaccinations. The system will flag up a warning if it thinks they're too close together. You could do it under other people's names though.
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Dec 13, 2021 21:14
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Homemade paneer is always crumbly. It is impossible to apply enough pressure to make it firm. It still tastes OK but crumbling it into a curry just isn't the same. Flavoured gin is the way to go. Once the mixer is in there you can barely taste the gin. One of my colleagues tested positive yesterday, probably with Delta as that's still the main strain around here. Work still has not told any of us who were in the office with him at the beginning of the week, despite the fact that we created an entire sign-in system designed for this. The result is that all of us who were potentially exposed carried on staffing the customer service desk and attending in-person meetings. One of those meetings was with half a dozen university students, who are travelling home for Christmas to various places all around the country this weekend.
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Dec 17, 2021 01:51
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Guavanaut posted:The good thing is that there's a fair body of research from the BLM protests last year that Covid didn't spread well at all in outdoor protest type environments even with crowding. BLM protests stayed local, as a rule, but you can guarantee people have travelled to London to take part in this one. There's no way that someone hasn't picked Omicron up on the journey and taken it back home.
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Dec 19, 2021 02:53
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Pablo Bluth posted:It's the US constitution. A coloured truck is only worth 3/5ths of a white one. 
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Dec 19, 2021 18:37
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My family have managed to extend the usual Christmas squabbling by having a pre-fight about whether Christmas should go ahead. The person most vociferously against gathering is pretending this has nothing to do with the fact that half the family group are vegans and thus they risk accidentally eating a vegetable from the buffet.
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Dec 19, 2021 22:44
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Actually I wonder if turkey and goose are the big Christmas meats just because they're much bigger birds and it's easier to cook one big one than two or three chickens? Close. Turkey wasn't a Thing until the Victorians, when one decent sized turkey would feed a middle-class family (husband, wife, children - not the servant(s)). kecske posted:today I learned that you can self certify off work without a doctors note for 28(!) days. That's a recent thing because doctors don't have time to see patients who are ill any more. Businesses are predictably up in arms that all their staff will immediately skive off for a month and live it up on statutory sick pay.
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Dec 20, 2021 13:35
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My mother's Christmas veg recipes: boil everything, and if you can't fit all the saucepans on the hob, microwave it. The only correct way to eat kale is from a Chinese takeaway where it has been deep fried and is called 'cripsy seaweed'. Zero vitamin content and all the fat of a doughnut, but in a vegetable beloved by health and wellness influencers.
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Dec 20, 2021 20:47
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Peaks and troughs are always a feature of pandemics or epidemics. Infectious diseases always drop in summer, which is why normal flu is a winter thing. A lockdown doesn't change the shape of the graph, it changes the numbers involved. Even in Sweden, there were restrictions: people were advised to work from home, to keep socially distanced, and large gatherings were cancelled. Early on Sweden had one of the highest death rates in Europe and, as you say, the notable difference with other countries was that they didn't lock down. Edit: complacency is a huge factor too. Cases go down, people drop their guard, cases go up again. It's worse when there are no mandates in place, but even when there are people are more likely to decide that 'just this once' doesn't matter, whether that's wearing a mask in a shop or nipping round to see a friend despite restrictions. Lady Demelza fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 19:16
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ThomasPaine posted:it's what we do now that matters. Good news: nothing, we're doing nothing. Let's hope that having 52% of the population boosted and a potentially less severe variant dominant is enough.
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Dec 21, 2021 19:44
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I didn't think re-infections had been counted in the various different case statistics for a while, so it wouldn't surprise me that deaths would be treated similarly. People who get het up about the 28 day thing generally don't understand how death statistics work. They're alwyas educated guesses. They don't test every single one of the thousands of people who die of flu in normal years, so whilst they're broadly accurate, they will be errors. Except in most years, nobody cares if your 85 year old flu patient actually died of a massive stroke in their sleep, because it's not a political hot potato. Same with co-moribidities, they raise the risk of death of everything, from illnesses to accidents to surgery. This has only become a source of contention with Covid, because apparently the medical community are conspiring to blame everything on Covid.
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Dec 22, 2021 00:00
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Potatoes: sprinkle a little semolina or flour over them to make it nice and crispy. Don't add them to the oven until the fat is nice and hot. Flavour with garlic and rosemary, but the garlic can burn in the high temperatures needed for decent roasties. Seb, do your roast and watch Dr Who tonight, if that's what you want to do. Or if they start arguing, go out for a walk. There's nothing wrong with letting people know that their behaviour makes you not want to spend time with them.
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Dec 24, 2021 17:22
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Currently being forced to watch all those unbearable posh people do up houses for Christmas parties (held outdoors with guests in t-shirts and the foliage in full bloom).
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Dec 24, 2021 18:44
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Merry Christmas goons, you are all lovely people and excellent comrades. Another 40 minutes and I can stuff my stuffy face with the next dose of cold medication.
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Dec 25, 2021 19:21
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Covid is vascular, it causes inflammation of the blood vessels and that causes pain. Normal NSAIDs don't touch it in some people. It's awful.
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Dec 26, 2021 14:06
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crispix posted:i keep a sledgehammer i once used for fence posts under my bed in case any ne'erdowells break in till my place of a night I keep a hatchet in my hallway because of various feuding neighbours used to like smacking each other on their doorsteps. When a painter/decorater came round he asked me about it and then nodded sagely as I explained and said it was a good idea, living where I do. Never had to use it. Probably because everyone knew I kept a hatchet by my front door to greet any grumpy callers.
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Dec 26, 2021 19:43
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InspectorCarbonara posted:If nothing else covid has removed any hopes I had that we could stop climate change. If people and governments are this reluctant to take the relatively small measures to stop a pandemic then lmao at them taking the bigger measures and changes to lifestyles that it would take to save us from that. This. We had major world leaders falling ill with Covid and they still haven't taken it seriously. That's like having your home destroyed by wildfires or floods and still refusing to believe climate change is happening. Re: Covid escaping from a lab, if you were creating a bioweapon you'd want something with a higher mortality rate. You don't want a pandemic that will spread everywhere including your allies and predominantly kill the over 80s, why bother with that? You want a disease that kills like Ebola. And if you are creating a bioweapon, you make sure you are creating a treatment alongside it, just in case of accidents.
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Dec 27, 2021 22:16
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:My SPOx has never gone below 93 and is normally 95-96 This isn't terribly good unless you have an underlying medical condition. Do the pulse ox's include any guidance on how to take a reading and what can affect it?
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Dec 29, 2021 17:13
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I've just received an email from North London NHS (I've volunteered as a steward a couple of times for them which is how they have my details) asking me if I fancy training to be a vaccinator, no medical training or experience required. Things have got to be *really* loving poo poo if this is the level of desperation. I'm a vaccinator and if it's anything like a year ago, you have to do a whole load of e-learning all about the immune system and each individual vaccine, which is interesting but much more detail than you'll ever need. I have overheard my fellow vaccinators regurgitating this and I guarantee you people with a needle phobia do not want to know the volume of the liquid about to be injected into them. The practical training was a day course that was probably about 50% safeguarding and infection control, and 50% first aid and vaccinating. There was a huge mix on my course from people with loads of experience (vets, nurses) to people who had a first aid at work certificate and frankly looked terrified at the idea of someone dropping in front of them needing CPR. They've relaxed a lot since the beginning. On my first vaccination shift I had to do an oral exam with the Health Care Professional on site (a mix of vaccine facts and first aid knowledge) and be supervised by them for the first dozen or so injections, so that I could be formally signed off on both vaccinating and using the awful, unintuitive computer system. The last shift I did was at a large vaccination centre and I was paired with someone who had been trained at the beginning of this year. He'd not been able to book a shift in the last 8 months, and was allocated as my 'buddy' to be trained. He watched me do a few as a refresher, then I supervised him, and that was it. I'd recommend it! It is *intense* in some centres. Be prepared for criers and fainters, and in big centres ask if there's a bed where you can give them the vaccine lying down (and give them a biscuit before to raise their blood sugar slightly). And nobody will mention what to do if anti-vaxxers storm the barricades because we're all pretending they aren't getting more and more brazen. Edit: just seen you've been offered paid shifts. It might be different for those, I'm a volunteer. If it's paid you're less likely to be mocked by the NHS staff on overtime pay Lady Demelza fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Dec 29, 2021 |
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Dec 29, 2021 22:03
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I'm one of those weird people who wouldn't mind getting called up for jury duty, which means either I never will, or I will get an incredibly boring fraud trial that lasts for months where everyone is an insufferable hedge fund manager. A friend did jury duty a couple of years ago. It was a sex offence and the person was found guilty unanimously, but she genuinely got to hear an "it's what she was wearing" in the wild from a fellow juror.
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Dec 30, 2021 18:51
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An acquaintance of mine has gone ACAB after finally getting his
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Dec 30, 2021 21:04
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OwlFancier posted:I was sure I had caught it yesterday because some idiot wandered into urgent treatment asking what the text message she had gotten being told to isolate meant, and also she found out her sister had covid on boxing day and she had dinner with her so can she have some LFTs please. Last summer my mother rang her self-isolating friend to see if she needed anything. During the conversation it emerged her friend didn't realise that self-isolating meant "don't leave the house" and had still been merrily wandering around supermarket.
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Dec 31, 2021 12:48
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I haven't been able to shake a respiratory infection for good 10 days now, although my [tmi] cough is productive [/tmi] so I never really though it was Covid. If I do get Covid I'm stuffed, because these wheezy-rear end lungs and congested nasal passages are struggling enough. Multiple LFTs and a PCR have been negative, and I've been swabbing my throat even with the nose-only swabs. Apparently you shouldn't swab the side with a nose piercing, and there seems to be a huge potential for error if all I do is swab one nostril.
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Dec 31, 2021 17:15
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