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Interesting point. It is a pity that there isn’t a Windows utility whereby *.cfg or *.txt *.gif etc files could be automatically put into and accessed from a single large archive file. Then nice large allocation units could give the optimum read/write speed without wasting half the capacity of the drive.
Some American friends popped by for a drink and a chat. (They had come over to see all their grandchildren at Christmas). They are Democrats but were still blighted by Trump attitudes as they were nearly as blasé as your twenty year olds. The risk to us was however small as they were triple jabbed and up to date on PCR, and LFT tests thanks to our border check requirements.
Hopefully they will avoid catching Covid during their three week stay with their children. If they are unlucky and do catch Covid it could prove extremely costly for them as the US had put a ‘do not visit’, Covid risk notice against the UK before they flew. In my experience I suspect their health insurer will try to wriggle out of any treatment claims as a result.
If the attitude of my friends is typical, I suspect that Omicron may have a far more devastating effect on the US than the UK. It could also ensure that the Democrats stay in power for years due to the Republican anti-vaxx conspiracy theories eliminating a large swathe of voters.
Hopefully you will not get Covid, but should you show signs do try and get the Pfizer anti-vital as Merck’s Molnupirivir is not much cop. link
Unfortunately, like the Oxford vaccine we bought a lot of Molnupirivir before its ineffectiveness became obvious. However, I suppose 30% effectiveness is better than over-dosing on Ivermectin, the sometimes deadly horse de-wormer and head-lice treatment that American Right-Wing Republicans favour!
How soon before BoJo’s apology for a Government is forced to do ‘something’?
I’ve done an analysis of the easily available South African and European/UK data and the following is what I can glean and where necessary make SWAG predictions. (SWAG== Straight Wild-A*sed-Guess)
a) Omicron Covid appears to be three to four times more infectious than Delta (i.e. four to five times more infectious than the original Covid. The Government is soon going to be reeling from the numbers of reported cases, and even the statistics office is soon going to introduce a new category where over 1.5% of the population is sick in any area of 7000 people. The impact on the transport industry and other industries is easily noticed with train cancellations and empty shelves due to staff shortages, and Brexit impacts.
b) Omicron appears to be about 30-40% less severe in terms of hospitalisations than Delta, so given a level playing field Omicron hospitalisations will be similar to those of Delta. It is not possible to tell if those needing hospitalisation are otherwise medically compromised or mainly anti-vaxxers. (Singapore makes anti-vaxxers pay for Covid treatment!)
c) Once in hospital people die at roughly the same rate as those did with Delta. The stats give no clue as to why this should be so, but I’d guess that it applies to those who enter hospital with their health being additionally compromised by other conditions such as diabetes etc. However we are getting to peak winter conditions, so flu and other things will almost certainly result in over-burdened hospitals. As a result, overall hospital deaths can be expected to soar due to equipment and a staff situation, where everyone must be close to burn-out and not too resistant to general infection themselves.
There are however big unknowns in trying to make such a comparison, as you need to be able to compare the rollouts of a very effective triple-jab against the somewhat delayed (6 months versus a probably more optimum four months) second jab roll-out and differences in effectiveness of one jab versus two and two versus three. It also assumes no change in the percentage of anti-vaxxers.
This means on one hand that a potentially horrendous situation will unroll, and on the other hand, one where a quick triple jab rollout changes the whole game. On the downside there is a scientific downside to any rollout delays which cause some people to simultaneously get both Delta and Omicron infections with the potential for mutations such that a far more deadly form emerges. Against these apocalyptic scenarios, it may turn out that hospitals can cope and the infection peak will be short so achieving effective vaccination by infection — supposedly the Dominic Cummings preferred route to herd immunity and the reason behind his blue-funk trip to Northumberland, also supposedly what was allowed to happen during the Delta wave.
My guess is that the Government will have to do something, but will be held back from any Dutch draconian lock-down moves due to potentially damaging economic impacts. My guess would be that we will see some minor restrictions, an extension of mandatory face masks, work from home and a lots of BoJo rhetoric and meaningless bluster, imploring people to always test before partying and be responsible by isolating if infected. Kids are out of school at the moment but I think they will bring back face masks for them before they go back, and this may go down to primary school levels. They will try to avoid committing to financial support measures, but I think they will find these hard to avoid. The hit on the lower paid and the North will be severe, and cause the Government a lot of angst and give Labour a lot of areas of weakness to attack. (The North because they are lagging behind on infection numbers so it will start hitting them at the worst possible time. No predictions for Wales/Scotland or N.Ireland as they have already anticipated some of my predicted BoJo measures, but I do not known the 3-jab and earlier 2-jab stats for these areas)
They will hope to gain more time to triple vaccinate as many as possible to try to avoid a nightmare scenario with peak infections of three to five thousand cases/day.
It would be nice if the Government came clean with the apparent situation, rather than making us guess. Imo this is a time for an extremely dishonest Government to display a bit of honesty. It is quite acceptable to say that something is a best guess, and is the best they came make based on limited information. In the time honoured words plan for the worst, but hope for the best, with the optimum somewhere between.
If you plan to meet friends and family over the Xmas/New Year period, I’d suggest you put in your orders for lateral flow test kits asap. and suggest that they do the same, as I think some of my predictions will come true.
Ditto, afraid my newish iPhone is ‘good enough’ for most tasks except telephoto.
(Would have been a Pixel except I found the form factor a little too large for my top pocket.)
December 15, 2021 at 7:47 pm in reply to: A simple but difficult question – PC for Flight sim 2020 #69021From what I can see, the XBox Series S may be the cheapest option that gives a moderately acceptable experience.
December 15, 2021 at 7:31 pm in reply to: A simple but difficult question – PC for Flight sim 2020 #69020Personally I have no idea, but I put your question on the web and got this:
Unreal is owned by Epic, and Apple are at war with Epic over their nasty developer unfriendly App Store fees. As a result Apple could miss out on a really big opportunity for their M-1 CPU to ‘own’ the next generation of ray-traced games.
Back on subject, FxGuide has a lot more technical data on the making of the ‘film’. What I really had not appreciated was that nearly all of the demo is rendered in real time on consoles such as the PS5 or XBox Series X.
No question, the science says that three jabs of Pfizer gives significant (95%) protection, but it still leaves a one in twenty chance of catching Covid from an infected person. At the moment the general odds of someone being infected by maskless people are not too bad about 1% in the SouthEast, but you can probably double those odds if you are in a crowded cinema full of maskless teens and twenties. So yes, you can probably get away with it for the moment, but if the mathematically challenged Tory Right win, then those odds of evading Covid halve every four days, and you can welcome in the New Year with yet another lock-down.
btw Church singing is a high risk environment – higher even than being in a cinema full of teenagers.
Hear-hear, have a great Christmas and a much nicer New Year. Good health to everyone, and do not forget to stock up on the booze — apparently the lorry driver shortage caused by Brexit could well result in shortages of fortified wine and spirits. (Another good reason for buying Port and Sherry is that the Treasury is going to increase the tax on it).
‘cos I ant wearing no mask
Why!!
Not only is it anti-social to risk spreading Covid to others, if you choose an FFP3 or better mask, then you will also get a reasonable degree of protection from both Covid and flu. Japanese research shows that Omicron spreads two to four times faster than Delta which means the odds of catching a nasty are much greater even if Omicron is a bit more benign. (Nevertheless South African hospitals are overwhelmed with it). Having had Covid alpha, but not needing hospitalisation, I’d say that it is still worth taking simple measures to try to avoid it as it is bleeding horrible!
I’ll grant that wearing a mask+specs out of doors is a total pain due to the specs steaming up, but indoors the situation quickly stabilises, especially in an air-conditioned place like a cinema.
I think that was a recent change. However, until M$ solve their NVMe issue I am not going to let Windows 11 near my main rig., as to do so would risk turning it into a tortoise.
Lot of talk about the ‘uncanny valley’ when rendering human models, but other than in a few instances I thought that the rendering was pretty darned close. The biggest problem I had was ‘physics’ in the car chase. I thought that sometimes the car took what appeared to be unnatural slides. (not enough slide and ‘wobble’ in the rear axle, i.e they did not build in the fallible human element.)
December 8, 2021 at 7:17 am in reply to: Free Windows 11 Enterprise VM Machine with lots of goodies #68991Dave would know, but I think that Microsoft have been making available limited time limited evaluation copies of their software for a number of years. However, I believe all their previous evaluation copies were for physical machines as I do not remember them using a VM version. I think them using a VM for Windows 11 is probably a nod to the number of Enterprises using VMs for their systems.
Yet another floating Petri-dish case has demonstrated just how good Cruise Ships are at nurturing and propagating nasties.
As the Kent strain appeared to be a descendant of the Indian variant, you can probably lay the while smear against Bojo who delayed putting India on the red-list as he wanted to go there and cut a trade deal in time for a by-election or something. As a result a lot of Hindu were able to return from their religious trip to the Ganges without testing or going into isolation.
Dunno what comes after Omega, but they have been a bit prolific in their use of Greek descriptors. They seemed to have burnt a lot of Greek letters with variants that were only of passing interest due to Kent’s Delta displacing most of them. The Wiki details them, but I must confess to never having seen any previous mention of Iota the New York strain.
Any one else notice that we skipped Chi to get to Omicron – that really is WHO political correctness gone mad!
Thanks. My wife is a fan of MidSommer Murders, so the book is on the list for her Christmas fillers. The format reminds me of the old Fighting Fantasy books that my kids used to love.
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