I have a friend who had a positive lateral flow test this morning; she had her Covid booster on Tuesday. I'm guessing the booster wouldn't make you test positive...? I'll have to google and find out. So I'm hoping she won't become really unwell, having a double dose of the virus, so to speak. She's widowed, very sociable, and while she's been diligent about her jabs I am not entirely confident that she will isolate for 10 days if her PCR is positive...
Meanwhile I had coffee with someone this morning and was not particularly comfortable with sitting indoors for the length of time that we were chatting, although it was the big airy cafe of a garden centre. This afternoon I went up to our church for a thanksgiving service, the first time I've been for months. It was pretty full but nearly everyone was masked. I made sure I sat near an open window and at the end, refreshment time, I grabbed a cup of tea and piece of cake and headed straight for the chilly-but-well-ventilated garden. I was one of about five people out there; the rest chose to stay inside the building, which surprised me.
I have a friend who had a positive lateral flow test this morning; she had her Covid booster on Tuesday. I'm guessing the booster wouldn't make you test positive...?
It should not.
Lateral flow tests have a very low rate of false positives (if you don't count schoolkids dipping them in orange juice). Your friend almost certainly has Covid. That said, given that she was vaccinated earlier this year, she's likely to only get a mild dose of it.
you're fully vaccinated – this means 14 days have passed since your final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine given by the NHS
But that's not clear if it means double vaccinated, or double vaccine and booster.
The booster will not have made her test positive. That says she caught Covid19 from somewhere else.
Yes; I've just discovered that about the booster and positive testing from googling.
The NHS website says you do have to isolate if you're the one with symptoms or a positive test. But you don't have to if you live with someone with symptoms, or a positive test, but you yourself are fully vaccinated - and, presumably, symptom-free and testing negative.
No, it's not clear about the vaccines; a lot of us are getting near the time for boosters now.
A friend of mine also has a beef with the NHS website as sore throats and runny noses are also symptoms but the website doesn't list them. Having said that, I had a runny nose walking home from town this afternoon as the air was chilly; I'm not planning to do a lateral flow on the strength of that.
I've had a runny nose for weeks, but I'm helping with Rainbows (5-7 year olds) once a week and with secondary age students twice a week, so I suspect the germ carriers are doing their jobs.
I have only had negative lateral flow tests throughout, testing twice a week, so am ignoring it as every time I've had a PCR to double check symptoms with negative lateral flow tests it's come back negative too, and recent news stories have put the Lateral Flow tests at 80% accurate (see this story from Pulse (link)).
Yes, lfts are sensitive at picking up infectious cases which is why they can sometimes show negative when a PCR shows positive. People had assumed this meant they were inaccurate but it just means they are detecting slightly different things.
Please don't use words like "accurate" about these tests, because it's far from clear what "80% accurate" means. There is a probability of getting a false positive, and a probability of getting a false negative, and these are completely different things*.
In the case of LFTs, the number that is often quoted as being around 60%, or maybe 80%, is the fraction of positive cases that the LFT will detect. That's important if you're trying to use a test to demonstrate that a person doesn't have Covid, and so is safe to interact with.
If you have had a positive LFT test, that number is almost completely irrelevant. The number you care about is the one that tells you how many people without Covid test positive, and that number is rather small. Something like 0.3% of people without Covid will test positive on an LFT.
Now, that's a small number, but it's not zero, so when LFTs are used in a mass screening program, you're going to throw out a load of false positives.
Here are some example numbers. Suppose 1% of the people in your area actually have Covid, and suppose you test 100,000 of them with LFTs.
1,000 people have Covid, and of those, between 600 and 800 will test positive.
99,000 people do not have Covid, and of those, 0.3% (297) will test positive.
So given those numbers a person with a single positive LFT is somewhere between 60 and 85% likely to have Covid.
If, however, the prevalence of Covid in your area is only 0.1%, then you have 60-80 people with Covid testing positive in your screening program, and 300 without, so there's about an 80% chance that the positive-testing person doesn't have Covid.
A PCR test, by contrast, has about zero false positives, and about 5% false negatives. So for those 100,000 people with 1% Covid prevalence, you'd get
1,000 people with Covid, of whom 950 will test positive
99,000 people without Covid, of whom none will test positive.
So consider the people who have a positive LFT and then take a PCR test.
You had 600-800 people with a positive LFT, and Covid. Let's just take 800 as the number for simplicity. 95% of them will test positive on the PCR, so 16 of them have a negative PCR and 784 have a positive PCR.
You had 297 people without Covid, and a positive LFT, and they all test negative on the PCR.
So everybody who tests positive on the PCR has Covid. 5% of the people who have a positive LFT and then a negative PCR still have Covid.
*Well, in many cases, you can trade off between the two by moving a threshold around.
The results show LFTs to be more than 80% effective at detecting any level of Covid-19 infection and likely 90% effective at detecting those who are most infectious, a much higher level of accuracy than previous studies have suggested.
and
There is a spectrum of infectious amounts of the Covid-19 virus and we show that LFTs are likely to detect cases 90-95% of the time when people are at their most infectious.’
He added: ‘The tests could achieve even 100% sensitivity when viral loads are at their peak and therefore catch nearly everyone who is currently a serious risk to public health.’
Which is not what your argument says.
So if I am regularly testing and consistently testing negative, (plus wearing a mask in shops and busy places, socially distancing most of the time and washing my hands regularly), I am not convinced I should be booking PCR tests whenever I have a sore throat or snotty nose.
The results show LFTs to be more than 80% effective at detecting any level of Covid-19 infection and likely 90% effective at detecting those who are most infectious, a much higher level of accuracy than previous studies have suggested.
and
There is a spectrum of infectious amounts of the Covid-19 virus and we show that LFTs are likely to detect cases 90-95% of the time when people are at their most infectious.’
He added: ‘The tests could achieve even 100% sensitivity when viral loads are at their peak and therefore catch nearly everyone who is currently a serious risk to public health.’
Which is not what your argument says.
Yes, it is. It detects cases 80% of the time is the same statement as saying that is has false negatives 20% of the time. That the rate of false negatives goes down when people are most infectious is reasonable.
So if I am regularly testing and consistently testing negative, (plus wearing a mask in shops and busy places, socially distancing most of the time and washing my hands regularly), I am not convinced I should be booking PCR tests whenever I have a sore throat or snotty nose.
A snotty nose or a bit of a sort throat is far more likely to be caused by something else. If you're consistently testing negative on LFTs, you're even less likely to have Covid. @Nenya's friend had a positive LFT, which was the angle I was really addressing.
In your case, with a negative LFT, then for a single test, and with the same 1% prevalence of Covid, you'd have:
1,000 people with Covid, of which say 200 will test negative
99,000 people without Covid, of which 98,700 will test negative.
In other words, 0.2% of people who test negative have Covid. You know you've been taking better precautions than the average person, so your odds are lower than that. Having repeated negatives lowers your odds further (you can't treat the tests as independent, because there are some correlating factors that are due to your individual body, so it's not straightforward to calculate exactly how much further). On the flip side, you have a couple of minor symptoms, which shift the numbers the other way a bit, and I don't have enough data to say how far. But realistically, in a normal winter I have a runny nose for quite a lot of the time, as do many other people. So I don't think it can shift the numbers very far.)
(As it happens, I had a runny nose and a sore throat this morning. It's not because I'm sick at all - it's because the weather is cold and I spent a couple of hours outside running around getting stuff squared away for the winter. I don't intend to take a Covid test either.)
I had a text message from my GP to say my test was negative. I didn't realise how uptight I was until I received it.
I was glad I could be tested at my usual medical practice, a short distance from home, which meant I could ride my bike there. Formerly getting to either of the testing stations would have involved me putting other people at risk.
Huia - the slowest thing on the Christchurch roads
My friend's PCR is positive and she has to isolate until a week on Sunday. She lives alone so it'll be hard for her.
I realise I've been mistaken about the incubation time as she had to name people she'd seen from the past 14 days, and she had been in contact with someone on 6 November who subsequently tested positive and apparently it could have been that... I was more inclined to think she had picked it up in a concert she went to on 14 November. Maybe there's no way of knowing.
At least with the booster plus contracting the virus she should be bristling with antibodies!
My booster is due on 27th November, but in the meantime I'm invited to a Baptism at Our Place on this coming Sunday. It's a separate service, at 12 noon.
I'm reluctant to go, as face coverings and social distancing have gone out of the window as far as England is concerned, and I'm not really looking forward to being in a large group of people (it's an extensive family, 3 people - one toddler and two adults - are being baptised) and I suspect that the church will not feel very safe. Even 20 minutes' worth of hobbling around Tesco's feels dangerous!
Difficult, isn't it? I'm over-anxious too. I think if I'd gone to the aforementioned thanksgiving service at Our Place yesterday and the only seats were available had been in the middle of the church, with everyone unmasked, I wouldn't have stayed. Had I not been able to head into the garden with my tea and cake I wouldn't have stayed for that either - and it takes a lot for me to forego cake.
Having said that, Mr Nen went to a funeral this afternoon and apparently there were about 60 people there and they all stayed for food afterwards. Not many people were masked at the funeral and in the pub afterwards no one was. Maybe I should banish Mr Nen to the spare room for the next fortnight...
I went to a concert in a church last Sunday afternoon. I was lucky and found a seat right at the back, reasonably well spaced, unlike the rest of the seats. About 200 people at a guess. Refreshments afterwards included delicious looking cakes, but I left as soon as the music stopped. I can’t imagine how they served refreshments to that crowd. Maybe lots of others left after I did. It was certainly not Covid-safe, except perhaps in that 80% + were of an age to have had their booster, I guess.
I was talking to a neighbour yesterday who had been to unmasked England for a funeral. She was met off the train by a member of the family who informed her that another family branch, close to the deceased, all had Covid. “What bad timing” she sympathised, thinking that they would miss the service. But no, they were all there, shaking hand and hugging and unmasked. At the reception this was the family which handed round the food. Yes, my neighbour is just out and about again after having caught it. Does no one know that it can still be serious?
That's very sad, @Boogie . It's very, very dangerous for deniers and those of us who are just unlucky. My mate is 3 weeks into an induced coma. No worse, but no better. Some of one lung has died.
I would not have kept my participation at a funeral down to a minimum (church, distanced) in those circumstances @Cathscats .
I attended a funeral here a couple of weeks ago but it was outside (at the house and then the graveside) and I skipped the refreshments in the nearby hotel. Even if less than half the mourners stayed it would have been rammed.
Just back from buying a few essentials at the completely maskless (apart from me) local Co-Op.
I think I'll give the baptism tomorrow a miss, as I'm beginning to feel that discretion is definitely the better part of valour. @Cathscats' horror story of her poor neighbour's disastrous trip to Maskless England is scary...
The usual turnout at Sunday Mass is OK-ish, as peeps are widely spread out, and many still wear masks, but I'm not too sure that the baptism family (bless them all) will be quite so careful.
Although masks are still technically mandatory on public transport here, they're definitely becoming rarer. I really wish bus drivers had the authority to deny entry to those without, but I suppose if they tried, people would just say they were exempt, and who would know if they were lying?
I doubt very much that all the people without are actual "anti-maskers"; I just think they can't be bothered to put them on, or think that because they're vaccinated, they don't need to.
On London Transport it is theoretically compulsory to wear a mask, but I reckon it's about 50:50 now, having travelled locally today. Shops I'm not the only one wearing a mask, but I'm in a very small minority. Even with research saying 53% protection from mask wearing.
Well, I've decided to avoid the baptism tomorrow. I emailed the chap who invited me - it is he who sort of represents the family, as he is a regular attender at church, or was, until Ye Plague.
Like me, he's being very circumspect, though he's now had his booster jab. He was very understanding, as I guessed he would be, and I hope it's a happy and SAFE occasion for them all!
On London Transport it is theoretically compulsory to wear a mask, but I reckon it's about 50:50 now, having travelled locally today. Shops I'm not the only one wearing a mask, but I'm in a very small minority. Even with research saying 53% protection from mask wearing.
It is compulsory to wear a mask on public transport here in Sydney. We regularly catch the train here to go a few stations and have yet to see someone not wearing a mask. The same with shopping locally - everyone is wearing a mask except while at a cafe etc. Vaccination rate is about 95% of adults. It's a bit hard to get infection rates, but the data I could find said that there were 13 current cases across the municipality - population is about 127,000.
Other areas of Sydney have not been as successful in attaining a low infection rate. From what you hear, always the most reliable data of course, is that both vaccination and mask wearing is much less common in those suburbs.
I went to the club house at our mobile home park to help decorate. There were about 12 people there with no masks in sight. I grabbed some things and went into the separate pool room from the others, and I was happy to say a few people peeked in and said, "Oh lovely no-one has every put holiday decorations in the pool room before. Little did they know.
I get a bus every week into Glasgow (and, back again) for my lecture course, and I rarely see anyone without a mask (maybe about 1 in 20 people) - though about the same rate of chin coverings that miss the nose (after all this time, why haven't they figured out how to get their masks to fit properly?). Our supermarkets are also still almost totally masked, though Lidl still feels less safe because of no space between people (it's the store design with narrow aisles and generally less space). I don't know why Glasgow area is different from the experience of @Piglet in Edinburgh.
I get a bus every week into Glasgow (and, back again) for my lecture course, and I rarely see anyone without a mask (maybe about 1 in 20 people) - though about the same rate of chin coverings that miss the nose (after all this time, why haven't they figured out how to get their masks to fit properly?). Our supermarkets are also still almost totally masked, though Lidl still feels less safe because of no space between people (it's the store design with narrow aisles and generally less space). I don't know why Glasgow area is different from the experience of @Piglet in Edinburgh.
Currently on a tube; there are 10 of us in this carriage, 9 wearing masks. (Now 12 and 11). Rates of Covid locally are high and heading up again according to the Zoe study.
Masks are almost universal here on public transport and indoors. It shows that government policy works. Initially we all wore them because we didn't fancy a hefty fine, but the result of that was to get the message across that it was important. Now we all wear them because it's considered antisocial not to. You do see people with them around their chin, but you almost never see anyone not at least pretending to wear one.
Here in NZ masks are mandatory on buses and in supermarkets. Supermarkets have a no mask no entry policy with staff handing out masks to people who come without them. There are meant to be medical exceptions but when I've been to the two I use everyone has been masked. Buses have a notice up in the bus interchange pointing out that masks are mandatory. The main maskless people are bus drivers, who also have a sign stating that some people have an exemption from mask wearing on medical grounds.
I have tried a wide variety of masks and even using ones that tie behind my head I find my hearing aids are endangered when I remove the mask so I tend to leave them on when I'm in town unless I'm eating or drinking.
I've seen a handful of people wearing lanyards with sunflowers on them, which I think signifies that they're medically exempt. The automatic stop announcement on the bus reminds us every few stops that masks are mandatory (unless exempt), but I've rarely seen anyone put on a mask when the announcement comes on.
Our Dear Governor has just signed four bills making masking and Covid-19 vaccination mandates illegal, which goes against Federal directives.
Basically, I think he's doing everything he can (in many ways) to go against any Biden policies. I'll bet he takes the infrastructure funds, though. Rolling my eyes.
Oh, he's been vaccinated!!! But a whole bunch of his sycophants have not; some of my neighbors, a few people in my church... people too close for comfort.
A respiratory consultant shares his perspective on his unvaccinated patients in a Guardian article https://tinyurl.com/2jv7m33f
This fits with what I have heard from other doctors, that although vaccinated people are sometimes admitted to hospital with covid, 90% of those in ICU are unvaccinated.
Booster booked for late December, must book my winter flu jab.
Although masks are still technically mandatory on public transport here, they're definitely becoming rarer. I really wish bus drivers had the authority to deny entry to those without, but I suppose if they tried, people would just say they were exempt, and who would know if they were lying?
I doubt very much that all the people without are actual "anti-maskers"; I just think they can't be bothered to put them on, or think that because they're vaccinated, they don't need to.
This is what stopped me using public transport - after the government left it up to companies and the companies said they weren't going to fully enforce mask wearing.
I'll see how effective the booster is but until then I'm not going back on a bus.
South Embra pretty compliant - I've seen very few unmasked as I've bused into town. Mr F (who's high risk category) prepared to travel by bus to medical appt tomorrow.
Yes, I've just worked out how much I'll spend in a year with petrol at current prices, and how much a bus ticket for a year costs, and it looks as though I'll be on the bus as soon as I get boostered, not without considerable reservations about who I am sharing it with, though...
Oh, he's been vaccinated!!! But a whole bunch of his sycophants have not; some of my neighbors, a few people in my church... people too close for comfort.
To attend church (and a lot of other business, professional rooms etc) here, you have to show your certificate of double vaccination. We're in the roll-out for the third jab at the moment, and due to have it in January.
I rarely see anyone without a mask (maybe about 1 in 20 people) - though about the same rate of chin coverings that miss the nose (after all this time, why haven't they figured out how to get their masks to fit properly?).
They pull them down so they can breathe more easily.
If only they stopped to think about that for a moment or two...
I've seen a handful of people wearing lanyards with sunflowers on them, which I think signifies that they're medically exempt.
The sunflower lanyard thing is "I've got a hidden disability" - I most often see this at airports on, for example, autistic kids who might be overwhelmed by the crowds / noise / environment.
A small number of people who have a hidden disability might also have a good reason to have a medical exemption from mask wearing.
Having booked my booster online (on my own initiative), I received this morning a letter from the NHS inviting me to book my booster online.
Never mind - better than no invite at all!
Tess Coe was a semi-maskless zone this morning, but not too bad. If I could stir myself at an ungodly hour, I suppose I could try shopping there during the night.
Comments
Meanwhile I had coffee with someone this morning and was not particularly comfortable with sitting indoors for the length of time that we were chatting, although it was the big airy cafe of a garden centre. This afternoon I went up to our church for a thanksgiving service, the first time I've been for months. It was pretty full but nearly everyone was masked. I made sure I sat near an open window and at the end, refreshment time, I grabbed a cup of tea and piece of cake and headed straight for the chilly-but-well-ventilated garden. I was one of about five people out there; the rest chose to stay inside the building, which surprised me.
Yes indeed.
The booster will not have made her test positive. That says she caught Covid19 from somewhere else.
It should not.
Lateral flow tests have a very low rate of false positives (if you don't count schoolkids dipping them in orange juice). Your friend almost certainly has Covid. That said, given that she was vaccinated earlier this year, she's likely to only get a mild dose of it.
The NHS website says you do have to isolate if you're the one with symptoms or a positive test. But you don't have to if you live with someone with symptoms, or a positive test, but you yourself are fully vaccinated - and, presumably, symptom-free and testing negative.
No, it's not clear about the vaccines; a lot of us are getting near the time for boosters now.
A friend of mine also has a beef with the NHS website as sore throats and runny noses are also symptoms but the website doesn't list them. Having said that, I had a runny nose walking home from town this afternoon as the air was chilly; I'm not planning to do a lateral flow on the strength of that.
I have only had negative lateral flow tests throughout, testing twice a week, so am ignoring it as every time I've had a PCR to double check symptoms with negative lateral flow tests it's come back negative too, and recent news stories have put the Lateral Flow tests at 80% accurate (see this story from Pulse (link)).
Please don't use words like "accurate" about these tests, because it's far from clear what "80% accurate" means. There is a probability of getting a false positive, and a probability of getting a false negative, and these are completely different things*.
In the case of LFTs, the number that is often quoted as being around 60%, or maybe 80%, is the fraction of positive cases that the LFT will detect. That's important if you're trying to use a test to demonstrate that a person doesn't have Covid, and so is safe to interact with.
If you have had a positive LFT test, that number is almost completely irrelevant. The number you care about is the one that tells you how many people without Covid test positive, and that number is rather small. Something like 0.3% of people without Covid will test positive on an LFT.
Now, that's a small number, but it's not zero, so when LFTs are used in a mass screening program, you're going to throw out a load of false positives.
Here are some example numbers. Suppose 1% of the people in your area actually have Covid, and suppose you test 100,000 of them with LFTs.
1,000 people have Covid, and of those, between 600 and 800 will test positive.
99,000 people do not have Covid, and of those, 0.3% (297) will test positive.
So given those numbers a person with a single positive LFT is somewhere between 60 and 85% likely to have Covid.
If, however, the prevalence of Covid in your area is only 0.1%, then you have 60-80 people with Covid testing positive in your screening program, and 300 without, so there's about an 80% chance that the positive-testing person doesn't have Covid.
A PCR test, by contrast, has about zero false positives, and about 5% false negatives. So for those 100,000 people with 1% Covid prevalence, you'd get
1,000 people with Covid, of whom 950 will test positive
99,000 people without Covid, of whom none will test positive.
So consider the people who have a positive LFT and then take a PCR test.
You had 600-800 people with a positive LFT, and Covid. Let's just take 800 as the number for simplicity. 95% of them will test positive on the PCR, so 16 of them have a negative PCR and 784 have a positive PCR.
You had 297 people without Covid, and a positive LFT, and they all test negative on the PCR.
So everybody who tests positive on the PCR has Covid. 5% of the people who have a positive LFT and then a negative PCR still have Covid.
*Well, in many cases, you can trade off between the two by moving a threshold around.
Which is not what your argument says.
So if I am regularly testing and consistently testing negative, (plus wearing a mask in shops and busy places, socially distancing most of the time and washing my hands regularly), I am not convinced I should be booking PCR tests whenever I have a sore throat or snotty nose.
A snotty nose or a bit of a sort throat is far more likely to be caused by something else. If you're consistently testing negative on LFTs, you're even less likely to have Covid. @Nenya's friend had a positive LFT, which was the angle I was really addressing.
In your case, with a negative LFT, then for a single test, and with the same 1% prevalence of Covid, you'd have:
1,000 people with Covid, of which say 200 will test negative
99,000 people without Covid, of which 98,700 will test negative.
In other words, 0.2% of people who test negative have Covid. You know you've been taking better precautions than the average person, so your odds are lower than that. Having repeated negatives lowers your odds further (you can't treat the tests as independent, because there are some correlating factors that are due to your individual body, so it's not straightforward to calculate exactly how much further). On the flip side, you have a couple of minor symptoms, which shift the numbers the other way a bit, and I don't have enough data to say how far. But realistically, in a normal winter I have a runny nose for quite a lot of the time, as do many other people. So I don't think it can shift the numbers very far.)
(As it happens, I had a runny nose and a sore throat this morning. It's not because I'm sick at all - it's because the weather is cold and I spent a couple of hours outside running around getting stuff squared away for the winter. I don't intend to take a Covid test either.)
I was glad I could be tested at my usual medical practice, a short distance from home, which meant I could ride my bike there. Formerly getting to either of the testing stations would have involved me putting other people at risk.
Huia - the slowest thing on the Christchurch roads
I realise I've been mistaken about the incubation time as she had to name people she'd seen from the past 14 days, and she had been in contact with someone on 6 November who subsequently tested positive and apparently it could have been that... I was more inclined to think she had picked it up in a concert she went to on 14 November. Maybe there's no way of knowing.
At least with the booster plus contracting the virus she should be bristling with antibodies!
I'm reluctant to go, as face coverings and social distancing have gone out of the window as far as England is concerned, and I'm not really looking forward to being in a large group of people (it's an extensive family, 3 people - one toddler and two adults - are being baptised) and I suspect that the church will not feel very safe. Even 20 minutes' worth of hobbling around Tesco's feels dangerous!
Perhaps I'm being over-anxious, but...
Having said that, Mr Nen went to a funeral this afternoon and apparently there were about 60 people there and they all stayed for food afterwards. Not many people were masked at the funeral and in the pub afterwards no one was.
Very sad
I would not have kept my participation at a funeral down to a minimum (church, distanced) in those circumstances @Cathscats .
Unlucky - he’s been vaccinated 😢
I think I'll give the baptism tomorrow a miss, as I'm beginning to feel that discretion is definitely the better part of valour. @Cathscats' horror story of her poor neighbour's disastrous trip to Maskless England is scary...
The usual turnout at Sunday Mass is OK-ish, as peeps are widely spread out, and many still wear masks, but I'm not too sure that the baptism family (bless them all) will be quite so careful.
I doubt very much that all the people without are actual "anti-maskers"; I just think they can't be bothered to put them on, or think that because they're vaccinated, they don't need to.
Like me, he's being very circumspect, though he's now had his booster jab. He was very understanding, as I guessed he would be, and I hope it's a happy and SAFE occasion for them all!
It is compulsory to wear a mask on public transport here in Sydney. We regularly catch the train here to go a few stations and have yet to see someone not wearing a mask. The same with shopping locally - everyone is wearing a mask except while at a cafe etc. Vaccination rate is about 95% of adults. It's a bit hard to get infection rates, but the data I could find said that there were 13 current cases across the municipality - population is about 127,000.
Other areas of Sydney have not been as successful in attaining a low infection rate. From what you hear, always the most reliable data of course, is that both vaccination and mask wearing is much less common in those suburbs.
More English folk in Edinburgh
Generally it's a bit better than that, and shoppers still seem to be complying with the rules
I have tried a wide variety of masks and even using ones that tie behind my head I find my hearing aids are endangered when I remove the mask so I tend to leave them on when I'm in town unless I'm eating or drinking.
Basically, I think he's doing everything he can (in many ways) to go against any Biden policies. I'll bet he takes the infrastructure funds, though. Rolling my eyes.
This fits with what I have heard from other doctors, that although vaccinated people are sometimes admitted to hospital with covid, 90% of those in ICU are unvaccinated.
Booster booked for late December, must book my winter flu jab.
This is what stopped me using public transport - after the government left it up to companies and the companies said they weren't going to fully enforce mask wearing.
I'll see how effective the booster is but until then I'm not going back on a bus.
To attend church (and a lot of other business, professional rooms etc) here, you have to show your certificate of double vaccination. We're in the roll-out for the third jab at the moment, and due to have it in January.
They pull them down so they can breathe more easily.
If only they stopped to think about that for a moment or two...
The sunflower lanyard thing is "I've got a hidden disability" - I most often see this at airports on, for example, autistic kids who might be overwhelmed by the crowds / noise / environment.
A small number of people who have a hidden disability might also have a good reason to have a medical exemption from mask wearing.
Never mind - better than no invite at all!
Tess Coe was a semi-maskless zone this morning, but not too bad. If I could stir myself at an ungodly hour, I suppose I could try shopping there during the night.