NWR new zero tolerance covid thread

That's a seriously impressive interval. I think I've managed 5-6 years once or twice, and I thought that was good :oops: .
I've not been to my doctor since I left home for University in 2003. I've registered at surgeries since but never been in to see the quack. Bang on half my life that I have not seen one. Have been to A&E for cycle-related accidents but otherwise I have somehow remained healthy. Must be the wine.
 
To my mind, a bus driver could well be breathing out virus particles that fill his vehicle over the course of a shift making spread very easy indeed. But I suspect someone could come along and say "we have absence of evidence for that". A matter of degree for me, but as with so many things it's a personal take.
Depends on where you are in the country maybe, but bus drivers here sit in a "cabin" isolated from the rest of the bus. Even pre-Covid the vast majority of people had some form of travel card or paid contactless (I am not sure if they accept cash at all now), and the customer takes the ticket direct from the machine.
 
I don't see vaccination/immunity status a protected category under discrimination law, as one can easily change that status by accepting vaccine.
Most people could, but I think we would need to make exceptions for people with allergies or other good medical reasons for not getting vaccinated. And possibly for people objecting on religious grounds?

Other than that, I'm happy for employers to decide.
 
Required by law is one thing, required by private firms/companies/venues is another thing. As long as it is not ruled to be discrimination by court, but I don't see vaccination/immunity status a protected category under discrimination law, as one can easily change that status by accepting vaccine.

I guess this will come down to risk assessment. If a company has reasonable grounds to insist that personnel in certain roles are vaccinated (for the H&S of colleagues, customers, public etc) then would it be illegal for the employer to enforce that?

The discriminatory bit would be if there are certain groups that are discouraged to be vaccinated (are there any – pregnancy or contraindication with a specific disability maybe?) then if this disproportionately applied to specific subsections of society it could be a problem. However this must currently apply in other areas, would it then come down to how people in that subsection are treated? I.e. if staff are refused employment or dismissed solely on being unvaccinated regardless.
 
I guess this will come down to risk assessment. If a company has reasonable grounds to insist that personnel in certain roles are vaccinated (for the H&S of colleagues, customers, public etc) then would it be illegal for the employer to enforce that?

The discriminatory bit would be if there are certain groups that are discouraged to be vaccinated (are there any – pregnancy or contraindication with a specific disability maybe?) then if this disproportionately applied to specific subsections of society it could be a problem. However this must currently apply in other areas, would it then come down to how people in that subsection are treated? I.e. if staff are refused employment or dismissed solely on being unvaccinated regardless.
I suspect @Po-yu Sung ’s point here is the salient one - vaccination status would need to be positively defined as being covered as a Protected Characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act. It is not clear to me that it should be, although one can imagine “Religion or Belief” being invoked if people really want to.

With all that said, I am quietly hopeful that we will see the fear of mass vaccine refusal to prove to be unfounded. I think that a lot of people who have told pollsters that they may not take the vaccine will end up doing so.
 
I've not been to my doctor since I left home for University in 2003. I've registered at surgeries since but never been in to see the quack. Bang on half my life that I have not seen one. Have been to A&E for cycle-related accidents but otherwise I have somehow remained healthy. Must be the wine.
Ah that's the trick then - have fairly serious injuries and you can bypass the pesky GP altogether ;) . My more recent visits have all been sports injuries (ski-ing and tennis) for which the NHS is anyway, literally worse than useless. I'm not sure why I bothered with the GP in retrospect. In the first case I just let time be the healer, the second time a chiropractor put me straight (literally), and in the third one I paid privately to see a sports physiotherapist who was also very professional and effective. I got an appointment to see a NHS physiotherapist 5 months after the accident and three months after ceasing private treatment on the third case. We all love to love the NHS, but there are areas where it is simply hopeless.
 
As a student I once attended my GP with a sports related injury, a chronic one related to rowing. Not only did the GP diagnose it instantly, they traced it back to flawed technique in extracting the oar from the water and gave me a quick tutorial and some exercises to practice the next time I was in a boat that not only solved the injury but improved my rowing.

Tom is fundamentally correct, however. I am often in odd the situation of telling people that the fact we will be slow sorting out their problem is deeply reassuring, and they don't ever want to be in the position of seeing us move swiftly.
 
I suspect @Po-yu Sung ’s point here is the salient one - vaccination status would need to be positively defined as being covered as a Protected Characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act. It is not clear to me that it should be, although one can imagine “Religion or Belief” being invoked if people really want to.
I have only studied biotech laws, not for other fields so know very little about this kind of law. Is it correct that 'religion of belief' have to be established/pre-exist ones? Or anyone can argue in the court: 'it is my very personal belief', for example, 'I believe men should not wear anything under and I should be allowed to work bottomless'? How to distinguish a choice and a belief?
 
I have only studied biotech laws, not for other fields so know very little about this kind of law. Is it correct that 'religion of belief' have to be established/pre-exist ones? Or anyone can argue in the court: 'it is my very personal belief', for example, 'I believe men should not wear anything under and I should be allowed to work bottomless'? How to distinguish a choice and a belief?
The seems to give a good summary of the situation
 
As a student I once attended my GP with a sports related injury, a chronic one related to rowing. Not only did the GP diagnose it instantly, they traced it back to flawed technique in extracting the oar from the water and gave me a quick tutorial and some exercises to practice the next time I was in a boat that not only solved the injury but improved my rowing.

Tom is fundamentally correct, however. I am often in odd the situation of telling people that the fact we will be slow sorting out their problem is deeply reassuring, and they don't ever want to be in the position of seeing us move swiftly.
Clearly the wise doctor recognised a fine physical specimen worthy of rehabilitation. Shortly after leaving college I ruptured a quadricep which pulled back like a roller blind. The GP told me if I was Kenny Daglish they might try to fix it, but I would just have to cope. Next time we meet I shall let you poke the hole in my thigh, and I shall admire your latissimus dorsi.
 
Very much enjoyed this article by the brilliant Zeynep Tufecki. 5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

One thing in particular I appreciated was clearly articulating something I've frankly struggled to - "Risk Compensation" - the idea that by improving things, we make people think things are better so they make things worse.
The theory that things that improve our safety might provide a false sense of security and lead to reckless behavior is attractive—it’s contrarian and clever, and fits the “here’s something surprising we smart folks thought about” mold that appeals to, well, people who think of themselves as smart. Unsurprisingly, such fears have greeted efforts to persuade the public to adopt almost every advance in safety, including seat belts, helmets, and condoms.
 
Very much enjoyed this article by the brilliant Zeynep Tufecki. 5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

One thing in particular I appreciated was clearly articulating something I've frankly struggled to - "Risk Compensation" - the idea that by improving things, we make people think things are better so they make things worse.

There were two startling examples of Risk Compensation that I watched a documentary about many years ago. First was a notorious road with a sharp bend on a dip, which saw a dozen crashes a year and some fatalities. The council spent millions straightening and levelling the road to greatly reduce the bend and dip. Crashes went up to two dozen a year as people took the 'safer' bend at much higher speed. The other was children's play parks where the knee-scraping ashpalt of our youth was replaced by spongy rubber. The broken limbs and cracked head soared as kids saw no risk in flying off a swing or crashing into each other off a roundabout.
 
There were two startling examples of Risk Compensation that I watched a documentary about many years ago. First was a notorious road with a sharp bend on a dip, which saw a dozen crashes a year and some fatalities. The council spent millions straightening and levelling the road to greatly reduce the bend and dip. Crashes went up to two dozen a year as people took the 'safer' bend at much higher speed. The other was children's play parks where the knee-scraping ashpalt of our youth was replaced by spongy rubber. The broken limbs and cracked head soared as kids saw no risk in flying off a swing or crashing into each other off a roundabout.
Similar observations made about whether removing traffic lights would make us better drivers.
(not if we removed them in a vehicular manner though)
 
In viral disease, risk compensation was one (if not the main) reason why NHS England previously refused to fund PrEP, a prevention medication for HIV high risk groups, effectively gay and bisexual men. Put aside the moral argument that cannot and possibly should not be in epidemiology discussion, the reason NHS England then was that people will behave recklessly if they get PrEP.
Then, NHS lost the case in the High Court, and people can access PrEP now.
As we know by early 2020, HIV infection in London hugely dropped. At the same time, other STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea reached record high. It clearly shows that PrEP works for stopping HIV transmission. Note that we don't know yet if PrEP promoted other STIs by the so-called risk compensation mentality, or syphilis and gonorrhoea case number will be this high anyway. A way to see it is to compare the other STIs rate between PrEP and non-PrEP groups, but people might have chose to take PrEP because 1. they are more likely to have more sexual partners, or 2. they are more worried to get HIV so might be more careful? Another way is to check behavioral change, if those people abandon condoms now? There seems to be this trend, whilst how this translates to other STIs increase is hard to measure.
Anyway, it is a no brainer now that PrEP should be given to high risk group, judging by the massive impact on HIV infection and the fact that HIV is way more serious and harder to treat. I didn't and still couldn't understand what NHS England was thinking when they refused to fund it back in 2014.
Risk compensation might be very true, but don't let it stop what should be done.
 
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There were two startling examples of Risk Compensation that I watched a documentary about many years ago. First was a notorious road with a sharp bend on a dip, which saw a dozen crashes a year and some fatalities. The council spent millions straightening and levelling the road to greatly reduce the bend and dip. Crashes went up to two dozen a year as people took the 'safer' bend at much higher speed. The other was children's play parks where the knee-scraping ashpalt of our youth was replaced by spongy rubber. The broken limbs and cracked head soared as kids saw no risk in flying off a swing or crashing into each other off a roundabout.
Respectfully Tom, I think this is kinda my point. These types of arguments are very intellectually alluring, and we tend to fall for them in spite of the paucity of data to back them up. Two dozen crashes a year is clearly not to be desired, in the same way that people being all careless when masked and spreading disease is not to be desired. However - the facts seem to suggest that our brains latch onto these "risk compensation" style arguments far more than we should. Tragically, during this pandemic - especially in countries like ours where mask use was not already prevalent - this particular cognitive bias was deadly.
 
I'm pretty sure there is a risk-compensation effect. The only issue is if it is strong enough to affect the decision not to remove dangers, and in general the answer is "no". In the case of Covid, yes it absolutely the right thing to vaccinate, and also for us to be reminded to continue with lock-down measures for now.

With improving roads to make them safer there is also a statical problem with a naive evaluation of their impact - regression to the mean. Measures are likely to be undertaken after a few years with very bad accident statistics. Then something is done and things improve. But was it the measure that caused the improvement? To the extent that there a random factors at play in road accidents, you might expect an improvement anyway after a extremely bad year.
 
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I have a question:
Is there a correlation between countries/people that especially interested in natural/biodynamic wine, and those that less interested in vaccination?
Not about organic/sustainable farming, but those who believe artificial things are generally not good.
 
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