Seems the right thread to post this.
We're booked for a holiday on Mull mid-May...then to the east coast. The company have Emailed us to say we can now go to Mull. Last week travel restrictions were lifted over mainland Scotland but not the islands. We booked this holiday a year ago assuming restrictions would have been lifted and Covid history.
Anyway, the purpose of this post was to share what a passenger who arrived at Heathrow last week said on Friday on Radio 4. I can't recall which country he'd flown from but what disturbed him was that he was in a line of passengers entering the Uk with not very good social-distancing but worse..his queue was one side of a rope barrier and passengers from a red -listed country was on the other. People are queuing for as long as 7 hours and it was reported that a lady had fainted. Border Force are overwhelmed. The paperwork that should be done on departure is being carried out here leading to the excessive delays in processing people.
I think we'll be hit again with a variant and a new lockdown imposed. In India new daily infections passed the 200,000 on Thursday alone.
This should have been stopped but the prime minister, Narendra Modi, had an eye on the forthcoming elections and didn't want to upset people who might otherwise vote for his Party.
'I left everything to God', says one devotee who attended the festival amid a devastating second wave.
www.bbc.co.uk
They thought they'd got on top of it. India manufactures more vaccine than any other country and it's now delayed it's exports preferring to priorotise their own citizens which is having a knock-on effect on global supplies.Workers in Mumbai have lost their jobs and the railway stations are packed with them leaving to go back to their villages. As most know, there's a new variant B.1.617 with two escape mutations on the spikes..hope I've got that right. There are 77 known cases here up to last Wednesday and it's causing a fair degree of anxiety amongst scientists although it's still classed as VUI..variant under investigation rather than VOC-variant of concern. No doubt it will become the latter soon. The majority of the cases here have come from international travel. I assume people coming from India. PHE said there is currently no evidence to suggest that disease from the newly identified variant is more serious than previous ones, nor is there current evidence to suggest vaccines are less likely to work against it.The South African variant has one escape mutation and that has been found to be partially resistant to the current vaccines. The B.1.617 variant has been detected in 11 countries, according to the tracker.
Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said the variant featured two "escape mutations" – E484Q and L452R – that "are causing people to be concerned. Basically, applying what we know about other human coronaviruses would suggest that this is going to be even less controlled by vaccine. But we don’t know that for certain at the moment." Despite its high number of Covid cases, India is not currently on the government’s “red list” for travel, which sees people who have been in those countries in the previous 10 days refused entry to the UK.
Here's my concern. Without going through other scenarios here where the 'politics' allowed large gathering-events to go ahead in March last year to save loss of revenue it seems to me that there's more than a hint of this in this case. Boris Johnson plus advisors and industrialists are due to fly to India on the 26th to put the case for the reduction of import tarrifs (into India) on Uk whiskey and cars and set up an interim free trade deal. He wants to double trade with India to £50billion by 2030. Originally it was a three-day visit but it's now been reduced to possibly just one day and a reduced number of participants. Maybe it won't take off here but as a precaution shouldn't India be placed on the red list ? The reason I say this is that Indians are the largest ethnic minority population in the UK numbering 1.4 million. There must be a lot family travelling between the two countries.
How is Kyrgyzstan dealing with Covid-19 ? The Health Minister has announced that a hot drink made with extracts from the poisonous aconite root could treat Covid-19. However, he did add a word of caution. Drinkling it could cause spasms and death.
The WHO stated that the treatment was not recommended as there had been
no clinical trials .
Quote:
When taken by mouth: Aconite is UNSAFE. All species of the plant are dangerous, and so are processed products. Aconite contains a strong, fast-acting poison that causes severe side effects such as nausea, vomiting, pupil dilation, weakness or inability to move, sweating, breathing problems, heart problems, and death.
With a pedigree like that I can't see the WHO carrying out any clinical trials anytime soon..
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