Upo

If Byram stays fit and healthy, he's a very decent player. His last PL game before Villa was against ManU and he was solid. One of the better performers that season. Really happy for him about his recovery. Using him as a holding midfielder is out of the box thinking and I like it.

Performance under Smith have been somewhat uneven, but on average 2 steps ahead anything Farke got out of the team. The problem is that instead of £10M prospects we needed £15M veterans. As it is, we basically have three PL quality players - Pukki, Norrman and Krul - and a couple who probably will eventually be PL quality. Most new recruits basically needed half a season in Championship to gel and get used to the physicality and pace. I've not totally given up, but we can't draw our way out of relegation. We need to score.

Todd's little tantrum for being taken off is actually a good sign. I'd rather have an underperforming talent with a Lamborghini and exaggerated belief in his ability to turn the game around than a saint who's lost all hope. Frankly I don't give s*** what he does with his money as long as he earns it on field. I hope he buys a Ferrari if it makes him return to his form.

Forget data from SA for a moment. Here is the best news: Source: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-news-uk-latest-live-boris-johnson-party-new-rules-plan-b-covid-12469075 If 90% compliance is true, UK will crush delta and may be able to control spread of omicron until everybody have had their boosters. Caveat: universal mask use has to be implemented in schools. Boosters are absolutely necessary.

Far from it, because we have a tool which is superior to any vaccine or in fact any measure there is or ever will be: High grade masks. How effective are masks? 95-99% effective -> both ways. FFP2 (95% filtration): 1 / 0.05 x 0.05 = 400. -> From one person wearing a ffp2 mask to another wearing a ffp2 mask, it takes 400 times longer to deliver the same number of viral particles from one to the other compared to not wearing any masks FFP3 (99% filtration): 1/ 0.01 x 0.01 = 10000 -> 10000 times longer to deliver same number of particles Do you get it now? We need to get over ourselves and start thinking about masks like we think about wearing shoes: You put them on when you step outside and take off when you come back at home. Mask use in Asia is the norm and that is why Japan has crushed delta despite modest restrictions.

1. No. Just wear high-grade masks. Frequent rapid tests at home. 2. No. Goods transportation has little to no impact on spread of disease. Frequent rapid tests at home. 3. No. Just wear high-grade masks, increase ventilation and HEPA air purifiers. Frequent rapid tests at home. 4. No. Just wear high-grade masks, increase ventilation and HEPA purifiers. Frequent rapid tests at home. In addition: - test & trace & quarantine those who have been exposed fast and decisively - monitor spread of variants with frequent sequencing - Mandate booster shots for all - Test all travelers to and from abroad, repeatedly, even those fully vaxxed. Quarantine until neg. result. Mandate daily rapid testing at hotels. These measures are extremely cheap compared to alternative of mass death or mass lockdowns. It is extremely stupid that this extremely cost-effective and proven measures have not been implemented yet to full extent.

Denmark has probably the best sequencing in the world. Two weeks until it takes the lead. This is real world data that says we are going into mother of all lockdowns.

*Hospitalizations and deaths lag by 2 and 3 weeks behind infections respectively. It takes time for infections to filter to older people when their children or caretakers transmit the disease to them, which is why initially all variants have seemed mild. Also, numbers are revised upwards and may double from initial release. There is a lot of hopium and copium being passed around. Don't fall for the sugar high. There is absolutely no case for thinking this is milder. Avoid crowds - that includes Norwich games. Wear FFP2/3 masks like your life depended on it if you absolutely have to attend. Doubling time of 2.5 days means without precautions you'll be catching it soon with millions of others and life-saving treatment may not be available to you should you need it.

UK will be inundated by Omicron within weeks. Do not get sick for any reason or injured. Omicron doesn't have to be half as deadly as delta to completely overwhelm health care system.

Harsh. I saw him muscle Tottenham player off the ball.

He did ok in the first half. He is strong, but his touch needs to imorove. I can see him working together with Pukki in the future.

Realistically we should have 2 and they 4 goals.

There is definitely some hypocrisy in principle if we allow death from one preventable cause (flu) and not another ( corona). Of course, quantitatively you can make the argument that flu is not nearly as bad as corona and corona is simply intolerable. Yellow Fever made a good post there. Personally I'd make the argument that we should prevent both. Below is development of average life expectancy in UK starting from 1765. Progress goes against convention. We have come to expect more from life than resignation to misery and suffering. Yet that is what we're being asked now. We have the means to do better. Much better.

30k deaths from influenza is an exceptionally bad year. Usually under 25k. I don't know where you get that 40k from. If UK keeps losing 150 per day, it's annualized 50k.

This. It is so obvious they were exhausted, even mentally. They looked sluggish and very little creativity. Just couldn't make it happen. We lost two of our best performers in Rashica and Normann too. We should take comfort in that this was the second time we came back from losing position. We muddled our way to 1 point in away game. It's ok.

There is a reason they've drawn 7 times - more than any team except Leeds. They defended well tonight. If it wasn't for Gilmour's incomprehensible positioning of his arm...actually we'd probably still have drawn 0-0.

Some of you are way out of line. No player did particularily well tonight. He wasn't the worst by any means.

I like Sargent a lot when he is without the ball and running towards our goal some distance away from their box. You want to cheer him tracking back. He is a peculiar player. I see him turn the tide in some matches and be out of place in others.

SA has extremely high level of population immunity due to "everybody" having had covid or vaxxed. Only 30% fully vaxxed, mostly older adults. Children are not vaxxed and are getting disproportionately hospitalized.: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-29/young-kids-make-up-10-of-hospital-cases-in-omicron-epicenter Despite population immunity, total cases and hospitalizations are exploding: https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/covid-19-hospitalizations-rising-south-africas-omicron-hot-spot-rcna6922 Gauteng Province wastewater viral load: If these reports are accurate, and this is striking unvaxxed children hard, prepare for mother of all lockdowns. You have seen absolutely nothing yet. Stock up on FFP3 masks and supplies so you can survive a month at home.

Covid is not going to kill everybody. Even ebola doesn't kill everybody. I was making a point that even if for any reason almost all of us would perish from disease, with 8 bn humans around, 0.01% - e.g. less than a million - would repopulate Earth in less than 1000 years. A giant meteor strike would kill as many, but there would be no functional ecosystems for humans to repopulate. We'd have to terraform Earth. Everybody dies. I'd rather not die of a disease that is preventable with modest means. E.g. mandatory FFP2/3 masks, triple vaccinations, partial social distancing, quick tests at home, test&tracing, HEPA air filters, UV sterilization of surfaces, monitored quarantines, locally applied effective countermeasures, travel bans, banning mass infection events... We don't do these measures because our leaders think that it is better to achieve herd immunity via infection. But there is no herd immunity that can be achieved. The virus simply evolves.

Short term a pandemic that kills almost everybody is everything, but a mere speed bump over long term. A giant impact even is irrelevant short term due to rarity of such an event, but long term it is basically the only thing that matters. Supervolcano eruption and climate change are somewhere in between. A giant solar flare that destroys our electric grid, microchips, data networks and microchip production capacity is a high probability event that might kill as many people as Covid and be a lot - a LOT -more expensive.

Masks work. This has been known since mid-2020. https://www.thelancet.com/infographics/coronavirus/COVID-prevention https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118 2021 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30293-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(21)00003-0/fulltext Of course, mask use is almost certainly stupefyingly more effective than the strong evidence supporting mask use in these studies if the masks that were used were high quality FFP2 masks which filter 95% of viral particles or FFP3 which filters 99% of viral particle vs 60-70% by surgical masks or negligible protection cloth masks offer for the wearer (more useful for protecting others).

To your points 1st: There is no reason why a virus can't be both evasive and more transmissible. There was a popular hypothesis that stated that such a trade-off exists for corona, and it is one reason why there was speculation about delta being a dead-end for viral fitness. And here we are. 2nd: There is a lot of air between not escaping immunity and escaping immunity completely. You can have quite a bit of immunity to virus in terms of immune response and it can still be deadly. 3rd: Virus doesn't have to become more virulent or contagious to basically ruin everything forever. It just needs to keep ahead of population immunity and countermeasures. No sign corona is anywhere near maxed out in viral fitness. There is absolutely no reason a virus would have to become less deadly to survive. Fatality rate could be irrelevant to its transmissibility or it could be an acceptable tradeoff for the virus. Remember SARS1 had IFR 10%, which is 10x delta's. For MERS it was 30%. What separates SARS2 from MERS and SARS1 is that it transmits readily from people without symptoms and does it very efficiently. In principle, SARS2 could become 100% fatal and do just fine until every human is dead. All it needs to do is a) infect a lot of people, very fast, and with some delay between host becoming infectious and onset of identifiable symptoms or b) find another host species to jump in and out from as it burns through emerging human populations. That's what is keeping ebola and rabies lurking about.

I know very well what caused Bubonic plague and using it as an analogous example for a deadly deadly pandemic is not out of place here. But I see you're evading my point on purpose. I'm not panicking. I'm prepared. It is just unfortunately that pollyannas, denialists, anti-vaxxers, and some pathological individuals (usually politicians or high officials) or psychotic QAnon-tier tinfoil hatters are denying people the opportunity to protect themselves with means that are widely available.

Death is an irrelevant consequence for a virus that the host spreads before dying. A more virulent disease can cause symptoms faster and increase volume of viruses the host releases. It could be a significant benefit. Consider Black Death. Bubonic plague killed half of all Europeans (and millions elsewhere) before burning out after a couple years, and then it returned in deadly waves well into 17th century. Rabies kills 100% and exists. Ebola 50% and they really struggle to control it. Here's what I wrote earlier: "If we are lucky, virulence is a side effect of infectiousness. If we are unlucky, virulence is an important mechanism for infectiousness. I think the answer is a mix of both, leaning towards side effect. The fatality rate is too low. Unfortunately it is moving in the wrong direction, so it probably drives infectiousness too. It is notable that every strain has been more dangerous than the previous one."