flamingowings wrote:

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My partner and I have negative covid tests so we are on our way to NZ on Tuesday. Thanks for all the previous posts and well wishes about this during the many months I've been posting about it in various threads.

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 Fab news FW! Have a great flight and all the best in your new lives together ! 

look forward to reading your posts in the middle of our night ! And hearing about the NZ tennis scene. I still remember New Zealands Chris Lewis in 1982 reaching the Wimbledon final, and the team of him and Russell Simpson , Jeff Simpson playing Sweden in Davis cup at Eastbourne on the grass (to avoid the trip back after Wimbledon) which was a Davis cup classic. 

JonH comes home wrote:

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flamingowings wrote:

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My partner and I have negative covid tests so we are on our way to NZ on Tuesday. Thanks for all the previous posts and well wishes about this during the many months I've been posting about it in various threads.

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 Fab news FW! Have a great flight and all the best in your new lives together ! 

look forward to reading your posts in the middle of our night ! And hearing about the NZ tennis scene. I still remember New Zealands Chris Lewis in 1982 reaching the Wimbledon final, and the team of him and Russell Simpson , Jeff Simpson playing Sweden in Davis cup at Eastbourne on the grass (to avoid the trip back after Wimbledon) which was a Davis cup classic. 

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 Best of luck in your new life FW !

And I remember Chris Lewis at Wimbeldon - I was at the semis that year, have some pics in an album somewhere.

Bob in Spain wrote:

I spoke too soon.  We seem to have had a massive spike in numbers in my town.  It has shot back up from 34 cases about a week ago to 144 cases on Friday which is almost as high as it has ever been.

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And the yo-yo effect will continue to happen until people, and those in power, acknowledge and act as though it is a long-term problem that is not solved by reading short-term fluctuations in data as reason to change behaviour or to see the job as nearly done. By now we should have learned well that months of hard work can be undone and easily eradicated in just a few short days pf relaxed vigilance. 

Especially that seems true of the UK variant, certainly in terms of transmissibility. Transmissibility is apparently worse than lethality in this instance, as it will lead to more deaths from the higher number of infected than just a slightly more lethal but less transmissible variant.

Here is an effective encapsulation of what taking a pandemic seriously entails: https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1345210393715564544

Contrasting re-entering South Korea from the UK to the experience entering the UK from Dubai.
This is how you take effective, pro-active measures. And indicative of how countries that have outperformed have done so.

Sadly, I'm  reasonably certain that European & North American populations would have intractable civil libertarian issues with this sort of process. We would rather err on the side of letting people die than allow any utilitarian consideration to limit our individual expression. That's probably true even if the disease in question hypothetically primarily attacked healthy young people or even infants. The 'self' would still prevail in our societies. Mercifully, COVID does at least spare us the gruesome proof of that, for now. Maybe the next mutation won't, though.

indiana wrote:

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In covid deaths per capita there were 3 countries ( at least with populations of over a million ) with reported deaths of over 100 per million last week ( Saturday to Friday ) - ie. over 1 in 10,000 in just a week. The UK was in between the contingent parts of the old Czechoslovakia.

1. Czech Rep. 116 per million
2. UK 110  ( 7462 in 68.08 million ) 
3. Slovakia 105

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 Moving on from the previous week's figures above, the UK's worst week yet for covid deaths has not been quite enough to go to #1 for a single week, as Portugal has been on an even more upwards trajectory.

Deaths last week to Friday 22/01 :

1. (5) Portugal 135 per million

2. (2) UK 128 ( 8686 in 68.086 million )

3. (1) Czech Rep. 101

( this is based on reported deaths figures on the worldometer site for all nations with populations of over a million )

flamingowings wrote:

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My partner and I have negative covid tests so we are on our way to NZ on Tuesday. Thanks for all the previous posts and well wishes about this during the many months I've been posting about it in various threads.

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 Best wishes FW