At this moment one of our A350s is flying to #India. On board are 120 ventilators, medication and 13 soldiers in support against #Corona. A # Bundeswehr oxygen system will follow next week. thanks to
@BMG_Bund & everyone involved for the joint effort.
Edit, it’s not much but hopefully every little bit will help.
Fantastic piece by Arundhati Roy about the situation in India
Nice to see an Indian Media outlet criticizing the “supreme leader”
While I do not agree with Arundathi Roy’s view points quite a bit, She’s spot on here.
Just out of interest, what do you disagree with?
The whole narmada dam movement where she sold out…
and then the hyperbole and the extensive “shrieking”
I’m the first to admit that the Indian system is rotten but she doesnt have something else.
102.293 yesterday over here.
Had my second dose today. 
It may sound cynical, but I’m truly freaked by the smoothness of the process. 
So far nearly 6 million have been vaccinated with half of them having both the dosages. 
Yesterday 93.399 jabs what brought the week total to 640.000 only 9.000 from their estamated week total.
That’s now over 50 million doses administered in the UK.
Just sharing something quite uniquely Singapore, Phua Chu Kang is a classic Singapore TV character who is popular around the region. First video is when we first suffer a big number of cases last year and then the 2nd one is the recent one for encouraging vaccination.
Just a light hearted take for an important message in the midst of this pandemic, Singapore is also seeing new clusters forming including one in one of government hospitals.
De Santis has signed an executive order banning the imposition of local covid restrictions across the state. His rationale is that we put our trust in vaccines and now we have to show that we trust them.
Florida is in the lower half of the US states in terms of vaccination rates and has fully vaccinated less than 30% of its population, and already hit a wall. De Santis has also been fighting with the cruise industry to try to prevent them from docking anywhere in the state if they require proof of vaccination for passengers.
This isn’t just bad policy, it’s totally incoherent.
And as we speak, Singapore has enforced more restrictive measures, to Phase 2 from our previous Phase 3 which we enjoyed for a number of months now…
Didn’t realize that IPL was on.
It started in April and was suspended just today.
I’m going to nail my colours to the mast here. Anyone who has criticisms of the government in here are either seen as anti-Boris, Anti-Conservative, anti-right-wing rather than anti-shit-decision-making, so I am going to call it how I see it or at least want to see it. Here are the things I agree/disagree with:
All current approved vaccines are very effective at protecting against severe disease, death and transmission for the Wuhan and B.1.1.7 strains. Little real world data is available for how effective the AZ vaccine is against transmission of the B.1.351 and P.1 variants. The little data that is available is not at all promising. The circulation of the S.A variant that spread through a South London care home recently and infected 10 residents - 6 of which had at least 1 dose of the AZ vaccine - should be a reminder that the virus isn’t going away in a hurry. These variants must be the focus area for the UK government. No vaccine is bullet proof against these variants but the AZ vaccine on current (admittedly weak) evidence, is not very effective.
I don’t like the traffic light system for travel that is coming into place. Its a variant (!) of the government’s earlier ‘redlist’ travel restrictions which allowed the virus to come through the back door. Take South London again where the the variant was introduced from a passenger from Africa whose country wasn’t on the red list at that stage but is now. A very reactive approach that only identifies those countries that pose risk after the fact.
Following on from 2, my solution is that the green and amber list should only include countries that are in a similar situation as the UK. Those countries must include a high proportion of genome sequencing of their positive test results so that variants can be identified early and at least allow fair warning for the UK government to modify their traffic light list where necessary.
For god’s sake limit the number of flights to countries that are on the green and amber lists. Brits are going to be keen to escape UK over the summer and we don’t need a small number of countries being overburdened by Brits on top of the tourists from all the other countries wanting to do the same. Its not a good strategy of fighting a fucking virus.
The vaccines are semi-effective against variants. Some protection is absolutely better than no protection. But that additional protection is about to be offset by the UK moving into uncharted territory with the relaxing or outright removal of social distancing rules. If the Pfizer reduces variants by 45%, we could be losing some of that percentage benefit by just easing restrictions and everyone being in each other’s personal space.
As some opposition politicians said this week, create airport terminal bubbles to stop red, green and amber passengers mingling in the airport. When I went through Singapore they did this very well with passengers that were using Changi as a stopover being grouped together based on where they had come from. If the government is serious, they will both limit flights and at the same time use the reduced capacity at the airports to repurpose terminals to split passengers in this way.
To even allow travel to red list countries is to actually learn no lessons from what countries such as Australia have been struggling for over 12 months. Hotel quarantining is inherently difficult to manage. Look how many times the virus has escaped this managed quarantine. This happened in Victoria where they were only letting in about 800 passengers a week. Now multiply that for Brits that likely won’t have the same passenger restriction cap. Now do the same for the amber list countries that have passengers self-isolating at home where you are relying on them to follow the rules.
The B.1.1.7 variant will die a quick death in the UK due to the vaccination rollout. But this IMO will be replaced with the VOC’s that we need to be careful about. I disagree with the way the government are about to roll out international travel - and believe me with in-laws that are both in the very high risk category and are overseas and who we haven’t seen since they visited in September, I would love the situation to be different for my wife’s state of mind in the least - but I will judge this government on how well they stop the virus (VOC) at the border. No ‘we couldn’t have foreseen this variant’ excuse will fly this time.