Why we go away in summer

Don't. My wife is currently at her father's in Italy and is sending me poolside photos under deep blue skies and making comments about how it's almost too hot. Due to work, I was not able to go on this occasion and so I too am listening to the thunder and watching the rain piss down.

Am very concerned that by the time my next booked time off, in August (my first for a year), comes around, cases of plague in this stubborn bloody island of ours will be so high that no other country will actually let us in. That would hack me off big time.

It's all well and good saying "oh you should go and holiday in Britain" but I'm afraid that will always be a very distant and depressing second best. If you need a wetsuit to go in the water, you're in the wrong place as far as I'm concerned. And having been to Cornwall several times, my recollection is that the water is freezing even in high summer.

Well as reported in the press, the Europeans are rowing back their own freedoms because of their own increase in cases. I detect a tone that suggests you think it's elements of the UK populace solely to blame for the increases in cases - but you need to acknowledge the fact that the UK does far more testing per capita than any of our EU cousins and is seemingly hell bent on having symptom free people regularly tested.

You should be directing any ire to the idiots making the pointless bloody rules, not people who are just getting on with doing things that people do.

Anyway - if a UK person who wants to travel is double vaccinated, then they should be free to travel irrespective of " cases " if the European countries also allow free movement between their borders for their double vaccinated.

The fact that they may choose not to is nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with them being unreasonably arsehole-ish in order to punish naughty Englanders for choosing Brexit.

For what it's worth - I hope you lot can all toddle off abroad as well so I don't have to deal with anywhere remotely decent in the UK being overrun with frustrated holiday makers.

You posted that it was 27c......   I don't know whether they are accurate or not, but as its air temperature, a measurement in the square under the trees would be the right way to do it.  We've got a bit of sun here now, if I put a thermometer on the table outside it would be rather more than the 21c the BBC say it is, but it still feels a bit cool to me.   My mum used to tell me it was x temperature in the sun when she was on holiday.......that's the heat energy of the sun, not the temperature of the air, so a pointless measurement imo.   

Oh give over for once. Firstly I was directing my ire at the government but I do also despair of the need we seem to have here to always have to be different. 

We had nearly 35k new cases today. The next nearest is Spain on 20k. Of the bigger European countries with population levels similar to ours, France has just under 5k, Italy is bobbling along at a little over 1k and Germany has figures in the mid hundreds. So our numbers do look considerably worse.

The new Health Secretary said new cases here could hit 100k per day by the end of this month. His words. Not mine.

I stand to be corrected but I don't think that will be because the rate at which we are testing people is due to increase by a similar amount between now and then. 

And besides, as ever in life it really doesn't matter what the reality is if the perception is different. You might think this is Brexit related but I think you are plain wrong on that. Sure Brexit doesn't make Europe keen to make exceptions for us, but it is not what this is about. 

I can agree with that.

Sitting by the pool in 30+ degrees sounds like a holiday from hell to me.
Mind you I don't see the prospect of a holiday in stout boots and waterproof trousers as overly appealing either......

We've just decided to take next week off. We have booked a hotel in York for a couple of nights and will then probably go down to nearer London and maybe go to Mercedes World for a drive (I need to check availability) and my daughter wants to go to Bicester outlets too. We will likely stop off around Manchester on the way back up to see my brother and then home for the end of the week. My job tonight is to get things booked.
17 days in Florida has now been fully booked for next May so at last we have something to look forward to.

We will happily take our masks and wear them whenever we are indoors: we have to get on with life and if that means masks and annual jabs, then so be it.

Britain is testing far more people than any other European country and it's actively encouraging people who have no symptoms to go for a test - this massively skews the data and makes us look far worse than we actually are.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/24/britain-punished-germanys-restrictions-mass-testing-strategy/

" Britain is currently testing 10 times as many people as Germany at a rate of 14.52 per 1,000 people compared to 1.4 per 1,000.

Likewise, France is only carrying out 3.84 tests per 1,000, while it is 1.98 in Spain, 2.3 in Switzerland, 2.21 in Sweden and 3.11 in Italy

Britain is averaging about a million tests a day at present. Out of that we are finding about 10,000 cases a day – once the false positives have been removed and cases averaged over seven days. In contrast, Germany recorded just 1,136 cases on June 23, but tested 10 times fewer people.

We might expect that the proportion of people testing positive would not change on a given day if more or fewer tests were carried out. This supposes that if we cut our own testing down to Germany’s levels we would be seeing around 1,000 cases a day.

Likewise, France recorded 2,320 cases on Tuesday but is carrying out nearly four times fewer tests. If we assume the case rate would stay the same with more testing, increasing it would bring the country not far away from British figures.

In Spain, some 4,341 cases were detected on the same day, but it could be argued the country would be picking up 30,000 cases a day if operating on British testing levels "

Look at the positivity rates of European countries and this becomes more apparent. According to the website Our World In Data, Britain is hovering around one per cent positivity, a touch better than France, Switzerland, Norway and Belgium which are all little over one.

In contrast, Germany and Portugal are closer to two per cent, while Sweden is around three per cent and the Netherlands roughly seven per cent.


Based on the above - looking at our data and discriminating against our country without equalising the base line is grossly unfair and completely unhelpful. If " case " data is to be used - they should be using the positivity rate and not " number of cases ".

Now that the vaccination levels are so high in the UK, I have zero interest in the number of cases and couldn't care less if cases hit a million, just tell me the deaths, hospitalisations and the impact on capacity - anything else is just noise and used for cheap political point scoring.

It's fairly basic maths. Using your figures above:

UK is testing 10x more than Germany but has 70x more new cases per day (35k vs circa 500)

UK is testing 4x more than Italy but has 35x more new cases per day.

The UK is testing 3.8x more than France but has 7x more new cases per day.

Two observations on that:

1. that was indeed exactly how it was in Puglia when we were there last year - arriving from much more cautious central Italy we got quite the shock; and

2. it looks exactly like that in London at the moment (with the possible exception of the testing bit although when I mentioned that I'd taken a Covid test before going to the pub on Sunday everyone else looked at me like I'd landed from Mars).

I think I can agree with all of you -
The obsession with cases is being used to obscure the data that actually would be useful - percentage of positive tests, serious illness, hospitalisation and deaths. Case numbers are used as a big stick to beat people with by too many people with axes to grind.
I agree that most people are bored of Covid. Maybe if we all stopped getting tested, we'd miraculously find that there was very little Covid 
We have to learn to live with the disease, as we do with other diseases that we can't eradicate.

At work in Hartlepool (twinned with Puglia..) it must be similar. We're just going through an endless cycle of employees testing positive or being "pinged", disappearing for a week, and returning, only for someone else to test positive and the mad circle continues. 

The UK does test a great deal more but more importantly we don't massage our statistics like some of our European neighbours. Anyone who has closely followed data by country will see at least one example of deaths seemingly being deleted from one large continental neighbour.

Which one out of curiosity?

Those figures relate to the period in which the article was written and number of tests completed varies each day - you can't apply those percentages to a later time period. This is the latest data where UK and Germany have comparable July data and the UK tested 13.75 times more people than Germany and 5.67 times more people than Italy (see picture). The graph clearly shows (behind the popout) that total UK testing has increased all the way through July.



Another factor that is ignored and should be considered is how many of the people tested were asymptomatic - I'll bet the UK has a much higher proportion of asymptomatic positives than anyone else simply because there is a greater push to get people tested who are not ill.