Lighthouse

I’ll go with the flow and agree on LB but outside the starting XI I think striker would be our next priority. No team in the top two divisions should be starting Shane Long because of one injured player and there remain serious doubts about MO’s attitude. A more physical Pellè/Lambert type would be useful when teams defend deep.

Actually, I'd say Djenepo has pretty much matched Boufal's contribution perfectly - a couple of excellent goals a season but (as of yet) not really much else. SB's replacement this season is Walcott, who has already done more in a dozen games than Boufal does in an average season.

I guess that's the key to it. It's being reported that the AZ vaccine is easy and cheap to mas produce and distribute. You'd think at some point the bottleneck in vaccinations will come not from the number available but our ability to administer them, at which point there will be some surplus.

How would everyone feel about the vaccines being available privately to people who are not in the ‘at risk’ groups? Footballers were used as an example on the main board. Supposing people, who wanted to travel but were only in their thirties or forties, could get a jab through BUPA or whoever; this would then give them a QR code which could be used to travel abroad.

The issue is that testing doesn’t stop it from spreading. With the country facing a tier 5 lockdown, football may well be called off for a few weeks.

There’s obviously an element of media sensation in all of this but I think the worst is yet to come for this wave. Last time we didn’t reach peak hospital loads until a couple of weeks after the lockdown started.

I still reckon they’d had a couple of million killed. Everything about their population and the way they initially handled the situation suggests it should have been a bloodbath over there.

The new strain has moved the goalposts somewhat. I’d want to get the R number below 1 ASAP and tackle it from there. According to Google there are 8,700,000 over seventies in the UK. If we can stem the spread of infections and get the large majority of those people vaccinated, there shouldn’t be a need for any more lockdowns. A reasonable number of under seventies will still get sick (and a few of them will die) but at a rate the NHS should easily cope with, even without lockdowns.

IF we can crank these vaccines up to two million a week nationwide and have a hardcore 2 week circuit breaker now, suddenly the future all looks brighter. Sadly it’ll just be half arsed measures which people will try to circumnavigate and the vaccines won’t really start to have an effect until summer.

Correct.

Don't be silly. Places like Kemble and Bournemouth have got entire taxiways stuffed with disused jumbos. They've got over 300 seats each.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-55471235 What a surprise, a bunch of Brits who think the rules don’t apply to them.

It also means the aviation industry I’ve worked in my whole life up until March basically no longer exists. As far as my personal interests go, open everything up but that’s not what’s right for the world. We’re a couple of months away from having the majority of at risk citizens vaccinated. Combine that with intermittent national lockdowns to cut the R number as needed and we can get through this.

I do accept all of that but your point about cancer deaths is counter to your argument, not in support of it. It’s because so much capacity is being taken up by the virus that consultations and scans are being missed or put back. The lockdown is in proportion to not turning away people at the door of A&E, telling them to go home and die quietly because we don’t have the staff and infrastructure to cope.

No, they’ve managed to record the most deaths, there’s a big difference.

So what ‘other measure’ would lead to lower rates of infection, without lockdown, that we aren’t doing already?

I’m increasingly starting to think that having different regions in different tiers is just a stupid idea. The Euston photos showed, it just leads to people from areas of high infection flooding into areas of low infection. If London needs a lockdown, give Cornwall one too, so what? It’ll protect that area in the long term and insure the infected people in London stay there. Even if infection rates are low elsewhere, there’s no harm in them being pushed a bit lower by lockdowns.

That elephant starting to look a little bit ‘Earth Song’.

It’s been the wettest on record apparently.

I’d have thought she’d be singing ‘Dirty Diana’.

I was watching a video a while back, might have been Matt Dillahunty but I honestly can’t remember now, where he explained how the assumption of a sinister, higher power was an evolutionary survival mechanism against apex predators. In humans it can manifest as superstition, religion and conspiracy theories. It’s all the same basic line of thinking. I guess for some, that could manifest as cynicism of the EU.

Very bright academically, a former airline captain and currently in law school. I guess it’s like many of the politics and social threads on here and in the wider world; once you start down the wrong path and only seek confirmation bias, even the smartest people can believe the strangest ideas.

Rather tragically, a good friend of mine who is by no means stupid is completely taken in by it all. He recent posted on FB that the latest lockdowns were an example (which he had perfectly predicted) of the government continuing to turn the screw in taking away our personal freedoms. He won’t listen to several dozen doctors in Wales telling him critical care units are on the bring of capacity but he will share a blog, written by an Alabama redneck on ket, stating that microchips are indeed in the vaccine and if you ever go somewhere with a wifi signal the government will know your precise location.

Season’s greetings! A toast to Saints fans around the world!

I’m still optimistic that some sort of Easter getaway is salvageable given enough vaccinations to the at risk groups. USA might be optimistic with Donnie in charge for another month but other, less bat sh*t mental, countries might be civilised and habitable by then.