staffordian wrote:Wear a face mask now or face a lock down later.
No brainer IMHO. Given that the government have a history of reacting too late during this epidemic, I'm very happy to see them go for a minor inconvenience now, regardless of how the Omicron eventually plays out.
Utter nonsense. People are just getting too swept up with covid hysteria. Why do you declare that it's a binary choice between face mask now or lockdown later? What are you basing that on? This is why I say people are just getting swept up in the hysteria, because they are just coming out with such black and white statements, but don't seem to provide any rationale for how they arrive at it. But they just present their statements, as per above, as though they are a given.
There's no reason to presume that there would have been a lockdown later.
As I've already pointed out, cases are still lower than at the point that the mandatory mask wearing was scrapped back in July... back then all the pro mask wearers were telling us that cases would sky rocket when masks became optional, and they were demanding that they must remain mandatory ...
... back then, the government ignored them and in reality the very opposite happened ... cases starting falling back down at quite a rate.
Cases have largely gone sideways the past few months, and that's with most people largely back to normal.
And even if the virus just let rip and everyone caught it, even scientists accept that the risks aren't high...
"England would only suffer 35,000 Covid hospital admissions if EVERYONE caught virus right now because of previous immunity and jabs, study suggests
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers estimated the remaining hospitalisation toll
They say England would suffer another 35,000 admissions if everyone came into contact with the virus
It was the lowest rate of hospitalisation in Europe because of immunity from prior infection and boosters
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... gests.html "
And to be quite honest, with the delta variant still the main strain in the UK, there might actually be benefit from more of us catching this variant - for which the vaccines are known to give us a reasonable degree of protection from hospitalisation or death.
It's well known that the vaccines only teach the immune system to recognise the spike protein, and it's known that this new variant has many mutations in that area and the worry is that this means it will evade the existing vaccines.
It's also known that catching the virus allows your immune system to learn to attack more of the virus - ie the non-spike protein part - thereby helping protect against new strains - like this new strain that's just been detected from South Africa - that potentially has altered its spike protein quite substantially.
You never know, perhaps that's actually the government's idea...
They saw that removing the mandatory mask wearing caused cases to fall back in July...
... perhaps they are hoping that by re-introducing mandatory mask wearing, cases of the delta variant will actually increase thereby giving more people more broad immunity in preparation for the omicron variant becoming established.
