Drat

House prices aren't the problem. Inequality of income is the problem. There is a lot of wealth out there, enough to sustain high house prices. Most people in the company I work for own houses before their late twenties, however these are highly skilled, well educated, hard working. Great for them. However the gap between their income and the income of a large minority working in industries such as hospitality, retail etc is disproportionally large compared to the skill gap. This is the problem, and it effects more than house ownership.

You do understand that to get "natural" immunity you have to catch COVID (and survive)?

So why is this site reporting that Brazil has had plenty of excess deaths in 2020? https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Simple answer, exodus from the city now working from home has been shown to be possible and productive, expect this trend to continue.

Also note that the UK has received about 10M doses of the Pfizer vaccine manufactured in Europe so far (out of 40M ordered). However, a vital component of that vaccine is sourced from the UK, so that is quite an equal exchange

Oh the irony Look we lost the vote, Brexit has happened, get over it. To be honest, the effect of COVID will be greater than the effect of BREXIT, and the effect of global warming will be greater than the effect of COVID in the long term, so get a sense of perspective

Specificity for the PCR testing of COVID is greater than 99.9% (the chance of someone without COVID having a negative test), so false positives are less than 0.1% But yes you are right, once prevalence becomes very low, if the number of tests stays high, then FP will have an effect on the reported number of cases. But if the number of tests drops significantly too, then you might get a zero COVID utopia

Might explain why their number of cases is high and showing no sign of dropping. Of course their death rate is lower than the UK, but that is because the UK has more people with a high BMI, so I guess that is why we should take more precautions than the French do

I am a live and let live sort of person, and generally tolerate different views. However for this man I only have contempt

Very true. Sadly there are many others on here who misunderstand and exorcised their brains instead

Actually, the enlightenment was mainly about the rule of reason through scientific methods, and against the domination of religious supremacy based on hocus pocus The proponents of conspiracies are against scientific methods and want to gain soft power by using to hocus pocus to frighten people My preference is not to ban things, but make sure there is a great big finger pointing to the patently bogus information with a caption saying "this is ridiculous" - which is kind of what is being proposed

Seems silly when most of the EU just has large unused stocks of the AZ vaccine already, or is take up better in Italy?

That is not how the research worked. There was a good description on R4 this morning by one of the scientists who did the epidemiology, well worth finding it if you can and fancy taking on a bit more knowledge. To cut a long story short, they followed people who had been picked up as infected from the weekly random testing that is being done, cross linked it to the database of people who had been vaccinated, and then further linked it to hospital admissions. This has been going on since December, so plenty of time where there was a large population of vaccinated and un-vaccinated.

LOL!!!!

LOL!!!!