Corona Virus

What I do find stupid are the people walking around outside in hot weather wearing masks. Firstly you cannot get Covid outdoors walking around and secondly I don't want you to die of heat exhaustion caused by not breathing in enough oxygen.

I went to the hospital last week for a blood test and put a mask on. The nurse asked me to take it off, as if I fainted, she wanted to make sure I was breathing... Sensible woman.

Having said that, most of the people I know who have had Covid recently contracted it overseas and came home with it - not aware that they had it until they started feeling a bit 'off' on the plane. It's not that the UK is pretending it isn't happening, it is happening but it is not causing any major illness. So many have had it, soon it will drop off like a stone. We reached a peak of almost 3,800 people on ventilators in January 2021. The next highest peak was 909 in September 2021, at the height of the Omicron outbreak it reached 777 (January 2nd 2022) and is now 216. Flu and cancer are by far the bigger killers now, so that it why we have 'forgotten it'. It is no longer important in the way that cancer is really important.

How many were already ill with other conditions and only showed as having Covid when tested on admission? 

Not saying Covid isn't still a problem but we need to understand the whole story. 

About 13,000 people died in England and Wales in the last week of July. Covid infections were running at about 5 percent, as near as we can tell now there’s no accurate testing. So about 650 of those dead people might have been expected to have covid, regardless of whether that was the cause of death. In that context, 827 doesn’t look like a big number out of maybe 3 million infections.

The heat in July and August seems to have pushed up death rates — and probably made a covid infection more dangerous for those with other problems — but it’s still hard to make a case for rampant covid causing uncontrollable death and hospitalisation.

I'll ask my doctor for a booster in September.

It will be nine months since my last, I'd rather stay current on the app if things go bad in the autumn/winter and avoid having to start again with an expired vaccination record.

How will authorities know someone in the UK has recently had Covid? They stopped the PCR tests and there are no free LFTs either.

But there is no longer an official test, i.e. the PCR, available. You could buy and LFT to confirm it but the NHS website to register an LFT used the unique number of the NHS test.

Injection 4/n, more probably. But good that it’s happening there and I wish it could be sooner here. I’m sweating (metaphorically) on a friend’s test ahead of a long-planned, and unreschedulable, day out tomorrow. The new set of vaccines are supposed to be effective at preventing infection with Omicron, not just mitigating its effects.