Weston Super Saint

Nice volte face! Previously you stated this : "The whole reason this disease spreads so much is the fact that people without symptoms spread it" That's the quickest you've changed your mind since you stood at the front door with your Brexit polling card! Nice to see you've changed your mind and are still completely wrong! https://theconversation.com/covid-19-when-are-you-most-infectious-150760#:~:text=Contact tracing and modelling studies,five days of symptoms starting. Have another go - it's always good to see how wrong you can be

Luckily it looks like your wife has been 'in the system' since the beginning of the outbreak and before the services were stopped at the end of March. (Obviously there is nothing 'lucky' about the reason why your wife needed to be in the system in the first place). I have a family member who is also "lucky" enough to have been in the system - three previous bouts of cancer and subsequent all clear's - who also had another scare in late Summer. He too had the contacts for specialists and was able to contact them directly to discuss the issues, although he did have an MRI scan in September for which he still has not received the results! (presumably nothing bad was found and his symptoms have disappeared). I believe the wider issue is with people who weren't already in the system, who have struggled to see their GP and thus have not been able to get appointments with specialists and cannot get the diagnosis to get appropriate treatment. These are the people who are being negatively impacted.

Essentially your argument is saying that track and trace is also pointless. If the disease spreads so much because of people without symptoms and therefore without a positive test result - as you are suggesting to be the biggest cause - then track and trace is worthless as they will only track the contacts of positive test results.... That £22bn could have been used to compensate those that were isolated on cruise ships

Apparently there are other ways that the virus can / could / should have been combatted - unless you're going to claim this post from Tamesaint is absolutely horseshit as well? Just because you're too blinkered to considered other possibilities of how things could have been handled differently, doesn't mean there aren't any.

What's your point?

I understand there are barriers. If you mentioned before this year that the entire country would be 'locked down', then a thousand different barriers to success would have been raised. Parliament simply passed temporary laws to try and mitigate for these. Combatting the virus basically has two answers. 1. Remove the population from the virus to stop / slow the spread - aka lockdown. 2. Remove the virus from the population - either using an effective vaccine or by removing those that are infected from society, as has happened in China, Korea etc. So far we (the UK) has only tried number 1. The vaccine is currently being rolled out which will eventually give us number 2. Doesn't mean that other elements of number 2 couldn't / shouldn't have been tried in the meantime. You asked for alternatives, I've given you some. The fact that they have barriers to their success is irrelevant in this argument as it shows that other alternatives exist - I appreciate that no matter what anyone suggests you are going to find the negatives and say it 'won't work', but that says more about your ability to think about other ways to combat the issue.

Again, it's a very simple concept that means we wouldn't be putting 30k people per day on cruise ships. IF - and it's a big if as nowhere have I stated that this IS the plan we should follow, more a hypothetical answer to Egg who asked what other ways COULD the virus be tackled - we had followed this from the outset we wouldn't be seeing the levels of infection that we are seeing now. The virus needs people in order to spread - I think that concept is so simple that everyone can understand it, right? If you take the infected people and put them all together - say, for example, on a cruise ship - then the virus would have no more 'healthy' people to spread to and therefore the number of infections would shrink very rapidly.

You're very blinkered aren't you? It may have escaped your attention but we live on an island. From memory, I don't think there is anywhere in the UK that is more than 100 miles from the sea - I'll give you one guess where the hundreds of cruise ships feel more comfortable... Parliament managed to get many new, temporary, laws passed in very short time, so there's nothing to stop a new one being passed to ensure everyone that tests positive is whisked off to a waiting ship. Just because you've decided it won't work, doesn't mean it won't! Like I said, the Chinese have managed something very similar as well as the Italians. Have you managed to find the bit where I said we should lock all the vulnerable people on a ferry yet?

You're right. Sensible debate does seem pretty pointless when you only read what you want to hear, then decide to make a load of shit up!! Read the cruise ship sentence again - what I actually wrote, rather than what you decided it said...

Where did I say we should put vulnerable people on ferries?

That's because Egg thinks they are ridiculous.

Lol. You claim the second one is ridiculous, yet that is exactly what the Chinese and Italians have been doing - albeit they have used "hotels" rather than cruise ships...

Bit of a harsh way to talk about Bernier.

I've given you two... It's not up to me to solve the Coronavirus pandemic, but I'm realistic enough to know that there are alternative options available and haven't dismissed them all in one fell swoop!

There are thousands of cruise ships around the world not being used. Put everyone that tests positive onto one of them for 10 days (taking them out of the general population) and the infection rate will plummet like a stone.

It's one suggestion, there will be thousands of others from the ridiculous to the sublime. Unless you've genuinely considered every other alternative and examined the 'science' for each and every one of them, you cannot seriously dismiss them all as being 'no creditable alternative'.

Send all the over 60's to the Isle of Wight and rename it 'quarantine island'?

#triggered

I rest my case.

Not really. MLG posted a picture of a duck with the caption 'Happy Ducking Friday'. Since then, you and a whole host of others were 'triggered' into responding to that picture and engaging in an argument that has been done to death several times. It's like watching Pavlov's dogs - then there's also you that doesn't understand that you've even been 'triggered'.

WTF are you on about?

Lots of people 'triggered'. Top trolling MLG!

You had a vote, you bottled it and didn't use it. Stop whining like a child that's had his sweets stolen from him.

Brings new meaning to 2020 vision.

Back to tier 3 for us, which literally makes no difference whatsoever from tier 2, if you aren't going to the pub.