Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/free-covid-tests-pcr-scrapped/

Cheers Boris. This'll do wonders for getting people back into the office

What a fool Boris is

Similar to you to start with - sore throat for a day, cold like symptoms the day after, then a fever for a day or two, then 8 days of a persistent and debilitating headache that made anything involving a screen tolerable for only for a short period of time. I stopped testing in the end, kept getting positive tests so waited my isolation period out in it's entirety.

Well, at least the infection numbers will improve...

Less tests, less positive.

Problem solved and the pandemic is gone.

if you are still suffering try to research things that raise your glutathione levels.
On top of that I would be taking:

1200mg of NAC a day
Min 4000iu D3
Zinc
Magnesium
B12
(all available cheap next day from amazon)

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-to-increase-glutathione

Not medical advise etc, its just what I would do.

All over it! I had an Amazon voucher that I didn't know what to do with so I'll do some digging. Thank you.

Research coming out of HKU suggests COVID shrivels your nadgers, reduces sperm count and lowers you sex drive. https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1634785-20220220.htm

I think the concerning bit for me is that after saying they were culling all the hamsters last month this now makes that look like a cunning plan to get hold of more test subjects.

How has HK got it so wrong? I mean I know Carrie Lam is usless but the recent surge and the rulings are crazy. They have had all the data knowledge of Europe and China and still the HK Gov have managed to balls it up. Or am I being unfair? What's gone wrong?

The kept the virus out very well for such a long time that people, especially the elderly didn’t get vaccinated. This was fine while they rode the knife edge of zero covid through a tough border then two things happened at the same time.

1. Delta came in through infected hamsters, looks like the virus can be transmitted through fecal matter and a hamster drags its arse over your skin when you handle it.

2. A member of cabin crew broke the home isolation rules after coming off an international shift and went to a restaurant just after Christmas, this gave omicron to a few people before they got hold of the infection chains during the holidays when a lot of going out was happening. Then we got to CNY and it has exploded.
   Because of the high density housing, crap sewage (people get infected through sewage pipes from neighbours venting into their apartment), combined with a blanket refusal to do anything the government says and people are running around.

Of course the biggest factor for me was the consequences of being positive, if you came forward as positive you got sent to hospital for minimum 24 days, your friends and family got sent to quarantine camps for 21 days. The facilities filled up very quickly when HK fell off the zero covid knife edge but before they did a lot of people who suspected they had it stayed at home for fear of quarantine and it spread through the sewer venting mentioned above.

They test the sewage and do overnight lockdowns to mass screen all residents, one block with a few thousand residents had hundreds of cases and the block was locked down for a week. Even then there were pictures of crowds queueing for their daily test with no distancing at all.

Now the hospitals are full so people wait a week at home with a positive diagnosis, the quarantine camps are being used for positive cases so close contacts are no longer being isolated. People still do not come forward with symptoms and there is an underground campaign encouraging people to go to blue shops and restaurants if they think they have COVID, a last act of defiance.

A maintenance worker at our block tested positive on a lateral flow test one afternoon, he then needed to go to a community test centre for a pcr, he went first thing the next day, a day later the result came back as preliminary positive so the sample was sent to a government lab for confirmation, the lab had a backlog so he wasn’t confirmed for a few more days. By the time he had his positive result it was about 4 or 5 days after his LFT (or Rapid Antigen Test “RAT”). Until his confirmed positive he was under no requirement to isolate and was not eligible for sick pay. There are calls for the government to accept pcr results from the community testing centres without needing to validate all positive cases and even accept RAT tests.

Now Beijing it’s running the response, they are building mass isolation sites (remember everyone marvelling at how quickly they build these isolation hospitals, well they generally have exposed wires, leaky pipes and start to fall apart as soon as the photo op is over). All parks, school fields, set aside development land is in scope for a isolation camp and a full lockdown is only days away. Schools are having summer break in March and April so those sites can be used as mass test centres and isolation wards so the knock on the door will be returning and people carted off in the middle of the night for weeks of isolation.

Earlier this week an 11 month old baby was separated from its mother because the child was positive and the mother was not, this is an increasingly common story on the quarantine support facebook group, although that is the youngest i have seen, normally it’s primary school children not baby or toddler age.

Since the school closures and return of the threat of quarantines there is another push for people to exodus HK, flights doubled in price this week and as of Tuesday you can fly via Singapore to the U.K. without any pre-departure tests so if you think you (or your kids) have it and can afford the ticket, get a ticket not a test is the mantra.

Tldr, they fell off the knife edge of zero covid, just like AUS and NZ, when they did they didn’t have a good enough vaccination rate. The structures the have for dealing with positive cases incentivise people not to come forward when they suspect they have it.

I landed at LHR at 6am Monday morning, fuck that shit.

Why was the vaccination rate low?

Because there was no covid in HK.

they’re now at about 86% first jab. They only got there by banning completely unvaccinated people from all shopping malls, food markets, restaurants, welfare offices and many more places. The ban starts tomorrow so that 86% is going up quick.

In a couple of months the ban will extend to single jabbed as well.

Thanks for that. Very interesting.

Earlier this week an 11 month old baby was separated from its mother because the child was positive and the mother was not, this is an increasingly common story on the quarantine support facebook group, although that is the youngest i have seen, normally it’s primary school children not baby or toddler age.

This is horrible. What utter nonsense, the poor kids. I mean, the parents, too, but in the kids it may well cause lasting trauma.

The regulations regarding positive tests is mad but the housing situation makes it a tough problem just beacuse of the density but surly home isolation is better than people not testing . That story of a kid being separated is nasty. HK Gov really do amaze me in how spectacularly they can get things wrong.

Hope that the vaccination program will get things back on trcak.

I'm about to travel abroad in a couple of weeks for the first time in a couple of years with my family. I don't really know what the situation is in terms of insurance in case of cancellation / positive tests etc.

Has anyone got any recommendation for decent insurance that will pay out for cancellations in case one of us tests positive or is affected in some other way?

I can't recommend it because I've not claimed but my bog standard Admiral travel insurance, which cost £22 for a year, covers Covid-related cancellations if you catch it up to a fortnight from departure.

As I understand it that's quite normal now.

Quiet in this thread innit? Has anyone else noticed that the BBC just stopped Covid coverage completely on 21 Feb?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus

It's almost like they got a memo from the Government or something...

More evidence that covid-19 started in a market, not a laboratory

https://archive.ph/jb231

ONS survey in the UK may be shrinking:-

"
We will need a smaller, but representative sample of existing participants like you. We will be in touch with you as soon as we can to confirm whether your household has been selected to remain in the survey.
"

1.4 million people have Long Covid in the UK, but sure, it's all over or something.

I wonder what this autumn/winter will bring. But for now I guess the relative peace and quiet is nice... if you are not in the NHS/work in a care home/have long covid.../etc...

Hopefully the situation in Hong Kong will finally put the "Omicron is Mild" argument to bed.

On that note, a good friend of mine was hospitalised with Omicron in Netherlands today. He's really not well. Only 28. Nervous as fuck for him.

The Omicron is mild for the vaccinated will persist as thousands are riding it out at home trying to dodge the government. The seriously ill and dying are predominantly over 65 with one or less dose of a vaccine.

Source: this poster, its a goodun
https://www.covidvaccine.gov.hk/pdf/death_analysis_en.pdf

The Omicron is mild for the vaccinated will persist

Well sure, of course its mild in the immune. Just taking a poke at the "its mild in South Africa so it'll be mild everywhere else" pseudoscience we've seen so much of.

Will be interesting to see what happens with vaccine waning and Omicron. Hopefully protection from serious illness persists for a long time.

True, but also ‘it’s mild in the under 60s’ could be argued from the HK stats above. Since SA doesn’t have much of an aged population the ‘variant is mild’ would ring true based on the SA population as it’s a skewed sample.