Yes apparently, sky reported he was being deported a minute ago but then scaled it back to 'facing deportation' 😆
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Andy Murray's take on the developing surrounding circus ...
https://twitter.com/andy_murray/stat...15965870989316
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-59932430
Novak Djokovic: Judge orders immediate release of tennis star
The judge hearing Novak Djokovic's challenge to an order by the Australian government revoking his entry visa has dramatically overturned the decision.
Judge Anthony Kelly ordered the release of the tennis star from detention.
However, there has been no sign of the Serbian player since the verdict. And Immigration Minister Alex Hawke can still cancel his visa on new grounds.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIhW8DBX...g&name=900x900
England and Wales graph.
From the tone of the Welsh Government, I think they are totally willing to put up with the anger that will come their way and have zero fans at six nations matches or force Wales to play in England. Just look at the way they have reacted to the situation with the pitch at Chester being on the opposite side of the border to the main stand and just the general vibes comming from Mark Drakeford, I think we are much more likely to align to their stance than to that of the English (UK) Government.
Ben Rothenberg
@BenRothenberg
· 4h
NEW: Novak Djokovic’s positive PCR test which he submitted to Melbourne court states that sample was taken and positive result returned on December 16, 7 hours apart. This means all those pictures of Djokovic maskless with kids on the 17th came AFTER his positive Covid result
I have a fear that Sturgeon will not relent on crowds yet and will extend the ban. That is despite there being little science or logic to back this position up.
I do accept the travel to/from and pubs could be a riskier area, but the football/rugby themselves are low risk
This is a gamble and if the SRU are looking at england could lead to a bizarre situation of mass travel in riskier conditions to beat the scottish restrictions
Excuse my ignorance - so that looks to me that the chances of being ill while vaccinated is next to non existent - and that only those unvaccinated are likely to get extremely ill?
If that’s the case, I think that sticks up for the claim that the only people unvaccinated are putting at risk is themselves and other non-vaxxed. Therefore there shouldn’t be any restrictions based on vaccination status, if they want to put themselves at risk then let them.
^apologies if that’s been misconstrued by myself.
I'm not getting the Ed Sec;s comments yesterday about a decision will be taken no later than March if exams can go ahead this year. The S4-S6 age group have been vaxxed in higher numbers than the 18-29 yr group. Wore masks all day for over a year in class. Sit in freezing cold classrooms. There's been much less longer term disruption than the last academic year with close contact isolation rules changing. Relaxed mitigations as opposed to stricter in school with no bubbles, extra curricular activities resuming etc. There's going to be constant disruption with kids getting ill and outbreaks occurring, they can't keep cancelling exams. If prelims can go ahead during this wave, there's no reason to cancel exams in the Spring imo.
No probs, you have the gist I think.
It's weekly "critical care" (aka ICU) admission rates, adjusted for the population sizes of each group (unvax, vaxed, boosted). So it doesn't tell us anything about hospitalisation in general but that you are orders of magnitude less likely to get seriously ill if you're vaxed and even less likely if boosted.
To your point, the unvaxed are primarily putting themselves at risk, but there are still some ICU admissions in vaxed, there will also be cases of long covid and also the strain the unvaxed are putting on hospital services in general has knock on effects, so it's not quite as clear cut as you state.
There arev two things at play here. Three in fact.
1) Being at games
2) Travel
3) Pubs
1) is extremely low risk. 2) and 3) are less so. How about targeted restrictions to manage those rather than a wholesale restriction. Buses and pubs for example could have passports enforced
In regards to the hospital admissions, probably hard to quantify, how does the state our NHS was in pre-covid impact how struggling they are now?
If it was in a decent place pre pandemic would they be quite so struggling now? Or is it purely because of covid that they are under pressure?
My point here is this now masking the mess that our politicians were making of our Health Service before all this kicked off?
They made exceptions last season.
Chester are confused as to why this situation, if it needed addressing, was not addressed 13 months ago during the first year of the Covid pandemic.
"We were aware of what the regulations were in Wales and what the regulations were in England," said Green.
"But, if we go back to December 2020, we played two home games with fans inside the stadium. in line with English restrictions at that time.
"Back then, Wales was still in lockdown and Welsh clubs were playing behind closed doors. So, for us, there is precedent there."
With attendances for sporting fixtures in Wales currently capped at 50 people, Morris claims that police advised setting up a fan zone.
"They said we can have 2,000 people stood watching a giant screen in a fan park like you see during World Cup years," he said.
"That's absolutely fine because that's in England, but we can't have socially distanced individuals in a Covid-secure compliance within a stadium. It's a farce."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-59920281
Natural defences against a common cold could offer some protection against Covid-19, too, research suggests.
The small-scale study, published in Nature Communications, involved 52 individuals who lived with someone who had just caught Covid-19.
Those who had developed a "memory bank" of specific immune cells after a cold - to help prevent future attacks - appeared less likely to get Covid.
Experts say no-one should rely on this defence alone, and vaccines remain key.
But they believe their findings could provide useful insight into how a body's defence system fights the virus.
Covid-19 is caused by a type of coronavirus, and some colds are caused by other coronaviruses - so scientists have wondered whether immunity against one might help with the other.
But the experts caution that it would be a "grave mistake" to think that anyone who had recently had a cold was automatically protected against Covid-19 - as not all are caused by coronaviruses.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59911257
Absolutely take your point, but I tend to think it's actually unmasking how close to the wind it's been sailing post-austerity.
Near the start of the pandemic, I asked a family member who is a fairly senior NHS consultant, why we didn't see the same sort of chaotic scenes here that we saw in Italy, given our death rates were actually worse? His reply was that UK hospitals would just never have tried to keep all those older patients alive, they are much more used to making brutal resource led decisions. Palliative care only. Pretty sobering stuff.
Anyway, all that aside, surely the fact the system is creaking so badly means we need to be even more careful how much strain we put on it?
Daily Scottish update;
* 11,827 new cases since yesterday - 29.5% positivity rate
Increase of 50 in the confirmed cases in hospital since yesterday - 1,432
Decrease of 1 in the confirmed cases in intensive care since yesterday - 54
4,392,694 people have now received their first dose of the vaccine - 1,136 people since yesterday
4,048,656 people have now received their second dose of the vaccine - 2,989 people since yesterday
3,115,065 people have now received a booster vaccination - 13,969 people since yesterday
No deaths registered since yesterday
* There continues to be large volumes of tests being processed by labs; this has impacted turnaround times resulting in delays between specimen’s beings taken and results being received and reported. PHS are continuing to monitor the situation.
At a press conference in Belgrade Djokovic’s mother Dijana claimed the Australian Open champion was “subjected to torture and harassment” in detention in Melbourne
Sure he was. The Australians waterboarded him. No, not waterboarded, surfboarded. They surfboarded him.
https://www.ft.com/content/ed89cad2-...43563725385730
Long Covid is another public health crisis hidden inside the pandemic, medical experts have warned, with estimates of the patients suffering from the debilitating disease stretching to more than 100m worldwide.
Scientists are in the early stages of hunting for treatments that could ease symptoms, target the still unclear causes, and get people healthy enough to return to work.
A meta-analysis of studies by Penn State researchers found more than half of the 236m people who had Covid-19 when the paper was published — which has since risen to 275m — had symptoms lasting more than six months.
Amitava Banerjee, a professor of clinical data science at University College London, said even two years into the pandemic, we are “still caught in the headlights”, focused on dashboards that track intensive care admissions and deaths — but not the long Covid crisis.
How is long Covid defined?
Long Covid is defined as suffering symptoms 12 weeks or more after diagnosis.
A recent UK study discovered one in three of those admitted to hospital were suffering from long Covid a year later. Rachael Evans, a clinical scientist at the UK’s National Institute for Health Research, said the post-hospital admission Covid-19 study helped sort sufferers into subgroups and steered work to discover new drugs.
“It really highlights the urgent need for treatments to be investigated and for healthcare support to improve recovery,” she added. “None of us think that long Covid has one mechanism and one treatment.”
What are the symptoms of long Covid?
While patients suffer a range of symptoms, the most commonly reported are fatigue and breathing problems. Some also experience damage to their organs and in the PHOSP study, one in 10 had clinically relevant cognitive impairment, often called “brain fog”. Many symptoms resemble those in other post-viral diseases, including from coronaviruses.
Margaret O’Hara, a trustee at patient group Long Covid Support, fell sick with Covid-19 in April 2020, after assisting on a critical care coronavirus ward. She experienced long Covid for a year — and then, after contracting the disease in October 2021, is suffering again.
“Just fatigue doesn’t really begin to describe the intensity,” she said. “It’s so bizarre. Sometimes I’ll get up in the morning and within an hour it is like I’ve been anaesthetised. Like someone put a chloroform hanky over my mouth and I have to go lie down.”*
Women, people with obesity, and those who were on invasive mechanical ventilation are all more likely to develop long Covid.
It is not clear the degree to which vaccination helps prevent long Covid — other than reducing the likelihood of developing acute Covid-19 — but self-reported data from the UK’s Zoe symptom tracking app suggest it halves the risk.
What causes long Covid?
A great deal remains unknown. However, the PHOSP study provided an important clue that lends weight to a hypothesis that long Covid is caused by a continued immune reaction. It found*sufferers had increased inflammatory markers. Researchers discovered that the people with the most severe long Covid, and those experiencing brain fog, had the highest levels of inflammation.
Sir Stephen Holgate, University of Southampton professor and co-founder of Synairgen, a company that is creating Covid-19 antiviral medication, said MRI scans had also shown inflamed organs.
“The body turns on itself as a result of all this inflammation during the Covid period and attacks its own tissue.”
There may be a genetic predisposition that determines who is most likely to suffer this kind of immune response, so researchers are conducting large genome-wide association studies that try to locate genes that patients have in common.
Another hypothesis is that the virus attacks the cells’ energy reserves, mitochondria. Sub-groups could be suffering for different reasons — or both hypotheses could be true at once.