The Great Mask and Vaccination Debate of 2021

For a few articles on Covid in the UK, the BBC has collated quite a lot of information ....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus

.... and it's views are generally pretty balanced, since that is mandated in the BBC's charter, and its mission statement ...

Mission, values and public purposes

The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.
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Maybe your daughter might be prepared to listen to opinions from a non-US source Digerati, and if she thinks the BBC is just a UK Government mouthpiece then I suggest she reads some of the articles in their Politics section ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics ... which should disabuse her of that idea.
 
LOL

I suggested she check out the BBC news and Cambridge hospital website. She came back with the BBC is run by the government and Cambridge is part of the NHS. As far as your link, remember, the news only tells us what they want us to hear - according to her.

For peace in the family, I have given up.
 
As the old saying goes .... "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" .... so I genuinely hope that her lack of trust doesn't come back to haunt her.
 
That's part of the problem. My son-in-law (her husband), who also was not vaccinated, got COVID. So he stayed cooped up and isolated for 10 days in the basement. She didn't catch it from him. So that proves, in her mind, she does not need the vaccine.
 
Yeah, I can see where that would cause a problem. Of course, I hope she understands that just because she didn't get infected by one person, that doesn't mean she can't get infected by another.

Although she may have been in contact with her husband during his quarantine, if she didn't actually contract an infection from him, then her body won't have developed any kind of immunity, and that means she's still at risk from others with Covid.
 
Here in Australia, I just experienced something the other day that I hope is not typical across the rest of the country.

I developed two of the symptoms that indicated I should get tested - a sore throat and a slight fever, so I dutifully decided to do the right thing and head for a testing station in my car. The first and closest one I drove to I learned had just closed for the day, despite no sign at the entrance. It was just after 5.00pm. I was directed to another testing station about 5 km away that was supposedly open until 7.30 pm so I drove there, saw cars in line and drove in to join the queue. A chap came up to my window to advise me that this location was currently 'suspended' - yet even he didn't know what that meant when I asked him, just said that's what he was told to say. I was then directed to yet another testing station another 3 or so km down the road. This one was open so after checking in with my mobile phone and getting my unique number, I was able to join the queue of cars only to find that of the two lanes that had been set up for testing, only one was open and being used with around six to eight gowned people sitting at a table seemingly doing nothing but chatting to each other. Two gowned individuals were servicing two cars at a time, with the rest kept waiting for a good distance before the testing area. About 30 minutes later, it was finally my turn. The test was quick - taking no longer than about 5 minutes, yet I was told to sit there, engine off and wait for an SMS thanking me for getting tested which took about another 5 minutes. Now the wait times were starting to make sense. As I was leaving the area after getting my 'thank you' SMS, I noted there were around another ~40+ cars in line. I would have been interested to hear how many (if any?) got turned around or sent away when it hit 7.30 pm. I have the entire experience saved on my Dash Cam.

The point of the above story is that though I was determined to do what it takes to get myself tested, how many people would have just given up after being turned away not once, but twice and then seeing a long line of cars at a third location?

My thoughts. To close a covid testing station at 5.00 pm is crazy. 7.30 pm I can understand, but to me 8.30 would make more sense as our current lockdown curfew isn't until 9.00 pm. I still have no idea what 'suspended' means at the second testing station, nor why there appeared to be so many testing staff at the third location, only to see the vast majority of them sitting down at a large outside table apparently doing nothing while a perfectly good testing lane was closed and not being utilised.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but it seems to me that our testing procedures are about as good as our vaccination rollout was. I'm 60 years old and suffer from emphysema and COPD, yet a vaccination wasn't made available to me (or my wife who is 4 years older than me) until about 6 weeks ago when we finally got to have our first jab of AstraZeneca. Our PM dropped the ball big time on this whole covid fiasco and I'm convinced the only reason for our low infection numbers is the quick action of each states premiers initiating quick locdowns. I hope the PM enjoys his time left in power because I'd be gobsmacked if he managed to get re-elected, assuming he bothers to try.

Oh, and no, I wasn't infected. I got an SMS giving me the all-clear about 24 hours later. I kind of knew that anyway as my symptoms had disappeared completely by the following morning.
 
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The following video has some colourful language, but one I found highly enjoyable. Mods please delete if deemed not appropriate.

Is this the perfect anthem for the anti-mask brigade? :LOL:

 
I was surprised the other day when I looked up the vaccination figures for Australia, and saw how low they were. 62% for first dose, and only 38% for those with both doses.

Here in the UK, the figures are much higher, 89% for first dose, and 79% for both doses. I haven't looked up figures for the US yet, but as far as I'm aware they are roughly around the same sort of levels as the UK.

Of course we're a small country with a mostly urban population, so vaccine distribution is generally fairly easy to organise, but nonetheless Australia does appear to have dropped the ball a bit with their vaccination program, and after reading andrewlen's post I can understand where some of the problem appears to lie.
 
Quite true Gary. I and many people I know were keen on getting vaccinated. For my own part, my GP of 35 years had bluntly informed me that I was in a high-risk category because of the condition of my lungs and that if I were to get infected with Covid it would more than likely kill me. I've been a hermit inside my house for months now, barely wandering outside unless absolutely necessary. Yet I couldn't get vaccinated because it wasn't 'my turn' yet. When I was finally able to get my first dose, I asked if I had a choice of the AZ or Pfizer vaccine. Nope, not unless I wanted to wait until around the end of the year. The doctors are just as frustrated as the patients are but they've been silenced by the powers that be. The whole thing has been a total balls up from the word go and it's still not getting any better. So I don't believe it's that people are resisting the jab in Australia, it's more a case of availability. Both crazy and frustrating when you see all of the promotions about getting vaccinated asap.

Just realised an interesting twist to my short tale above. In going to the testing station I was directed to go to, I just realised that I had inadvertently broke the 5 km radius rule of how far we are allowed to travel during the lockdown that day. I doubt it would have happened because I had a valid reason, but imagine if I'd been pulled over and booked for doing the right thing to boot. Now had that have happened, I'd have been on the phone to my journo mates in mainstream media and made such a fuss! lol :)
 
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We've been lucky over here, the vaccine rollout was surprisingly well organised (everything else associated with Covid was a complete disaster, but that's another matter altogether), I just got a call from my Doctor way back in February this year (1st dose) and again in May (2nd dose), went along to his surgery, and got the jab(s).

Most of the restrictions were removed over here on July 19th, and despite some of the dire warnings that this would cause an avalanche of new Covid cases, so far that has failed to occur. One can only presume that is due to the high vaccine uptake.

Mask wearing is no longer mandatory in most places, and there's probably about a 50/50 split between those who still wear them, and those who don't. Personally I don't, unless I'm in an area where I will come into unavoidable close contact with others, in which case I do.
 
Your government is obviously much better organised when it came to getting enough vaccines to go around than ours was. I wanted to get vaccinated around Feb of this year but was told I had to wait my turn as there was a shortage of the stuff to go around, despite the media-fueled scare about blood clots and whatnot. As to masks, I'm quite sure if I asked, my GP would have happily given me a medical exemption from wearing one, but as it doesn't bother me one way or the other, I never bothered with it and just put one on whenever I need to be around others. Folks around my community aren't shy about expressing their opinions if you stand out from the crowd so it's just easier to wear one for me. Only time it really bothers me is if I forget to rub anti-fog on my glasses before leaving the house and they fog up to the point that I can't see. A trick I learned from my motor bike days when I wore a full faced helmut every day. One smear is good for about 2-3 hours :)
 
Yes I wear glasses as well, so I know all about them fogging up when you put a mask on.

You used to see loads of people with their masks pulled down from their noses, so that their glasses didn't steam up, which kind of takes away the point of wearing a mask in the first place, but then I've always believed that getting people to wear masks was as much a placebo, and to get people thinking about things, as any real attempt to stop the spread of infection.

Obviously, when masks are worn properly, and in clinically controlled environments, they are highly effective, if they weren't then medical staff would not wear them, but when subject to all the variables of a mass population spread over a multitude of different environments, then I'm not as convinced of their efficacy.

That being said, where they are mandatory, then I believe people should wear them, even if it is only to give others some small sense of security.
 
NYT site not available without signing in I'm afraid, but from what little I could see, your over 65s seem to have a similar vaccination percentage (92%, 82%), it's only your overall vaccination figures that are lower (62%, 53%).

You also vaccinate your children though, which drops your overall figure, whereas we only vaccinate those over 16 (unless they are clinically vulnerable in which case we'll vaccinate those younger).

The prevailing medical opinion over here at the moment, is that the risk/benefit balance is not sufficiently pronounced to warrant vaccinating children. Whether that will still be the opinion in the near future is still open to debate.
 
Gary R said:
You also vaccinate your children though, which drops your overall figure, whereas we only vaccinate those over 16 (unless they are clinically vulnerable in which case we'll vaccinate those younger).
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No, we do not. Approval is being sought for the vaccine for children but, as of the moment, it has not been granted. That's why in-person school remains such a fraught proposition. Particularly since the USA has such a number of benighted fools who are willing to argue that their personal freedom and desires matters more than anyone else's right to the maximum amount of safety that can be had by simple measures.

I worked in the schools for a number of years, and all of us who did knew that kids were "human petri dishes." And we now have a variant of Covid that seems to be causing just the sorts of problems in younger individuals, including children, that "the original" did virtually only in adults.

That approval can't happen fast enough for me, and I don't work in that environment now. The sooner kids can be vaccinated the better.
 
Sorry, my error, I saw the figures for 12 and up in the NYT article you linked to (73%, 62%) and assumed you were vaccinating children, since to me a 12 year old is a child.

Which Covid version is causing damage to your children, because as far as I'm aware (and that's all I'm saying) there have not been any reports over here about any of the versions that we are exposed to, causing an actual risk to children. The reason we appear to be considering the possibility of vaccinating our children is to reduce the chances of them acting as unwitting virus spreaders, and not because the virus is particularly hazardous to them as individuals.
 
Considering the overall population of the USA, they're still doing much better than Australia when comparing the overall vaccination rate.

Just goes to further highlight the incompetence of the Morrison government. If he doesn't start spending taxpayers money where it's most important soon, Mr Morrison may well find himself removed from office before his tenure in power is over. I find it hard to contain my anger when I look at our death rates that although are not as disastrous when compared to other countries, are still way higher than what I'd consider as acceptable collateral damage from the pandemic. So many of those lives could have been saved if only the vaccine rollout was done in a way that it was made available to anyone who wanted to be vaccinated sooner.
 
Of course any deaths are a tragedy to those concerned, but I think we need to sometimes put things in perspective. What is the normal death rate for Australia, and are the Covid deaths adding significantly to your annual death toll or not.

Here in the UK, I believe the annual death toll is generally around 600,000, and strangely enough, from what I've read, it has remained pretty much the same even though we've lost around 130,000 people to Covid.

Although of course we don't exactly know how many of those 130,000 deaths were actually caused by Covid, we just know that the people who died tested positive for Covid within 28 days of their death, because that's how we record things over here.
 
I've not researched the normal yearly death rate for Australia to be honest. I just see the ever-growing Covid related death count on the worldometer site and I guess it triggers me. Perhaps I need to delete that shortcut and stop looking at the updates all the time. It's not doing my blood pressure any favours. :)
 
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