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Petition: Allow football fans to attend matches at all levels

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  • Am I imagining that there was a proposed change to the rules that cut down on how many loanees you could have out?

    Pretty much brought in to stop Chelsea continually hoovering up massive amounts of youngsters and having 40 players out a season.
    Meaning players get to 23/24 have had 5-6 different loans and never played for them.

  • @drcongo said:
    Side note: Germany has had a track and trace app with excellent security and privacy for months now, pretty much since the day the Apple / Google APIs became available. Ours, which is a couple of weeks old, is so shit on both security and privacy that police officers aren't allowed to install it, and the test data is in an Excel spreadsheet so anyone with access to a single record also has to have access to every record. The "government" can review what's happening in Germany all they like, but their incompetence at absolutely anything and everything to do with the pandemic means all they can do is look on in wonder.

    Just to be clear, Serco have nothing to do with the Test and Trace App, despite popular myth. Police officers were originally not allowed to download the app but that has now changed.

  • More than 6,000 medical health scientists and practitioners from institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford have signed an open letter calling for the vulnerable to isolate while young and healthy people return to normal life and achieve herd immunity. The declaration argues that the ‘devastating effects’ of lockdown policies on public health are being ignored.

    My point is, if you think going to watch a match is not safe...then don’t go, it will be voluntary. But
    let’s not destroy the economy and some of the things that make life worthwhile.

  • And then there are some who think those 6,000 are misguided...

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/07/why-herd-immunity-strategy-is-regarded-as-fringe-viewpoint?

    The argument is (I think) that by risking yourself it is almost impossible not to put others you meet at risk.

    Not easy decisions to make

  • edited October 2020

    @Forest_Blue said:
    More than 6,000 medical health scientists and practitioners from institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford have signed an open letter calling for the vulnerable to isolate while young and healthy people return to normal life and achieve herd immunity. The declaration argues that the ‘devastating effects’ of lockdown policies on public health are being ignored.

    My point is, if you think going to watch a match is not safe...then don’t go, it will be voluntary. But
    let’s not destroy the economy and some of the things that make life worthwhile.

    6000 is still a huge minority within those fields

    They're aiming for something which they don't even know is viable, in the hope of avoiding things which could be largely avoided anyway by a competent response.

  • @Shev said:
    Man City exec saying B Teams should be allowed in pyramid. They have found their moment.

    Unfortunately I worry there is an air of increasing inevitably about this, with the struggles so many in the pyramid are now facing. Any support will surely come at a price?

    Long term I’ve always wondered if the very biggest clubs could explore the idea of having ‘B’ teams in national league structures and then be part of a super league as the next gravy train.
    .

  • Good news, there is now a cure!

    See you all at home to Millwall in ten days.

  • My point is, if you think going to watch a match is not safe...then don’t go, it will be voluntary.

    Sure, it's voluntary for me to decide whether I go or not. But I don't get to decide if, say, the parents of kids at the same school as mine go to the match, turn that school into a super spreader and kill me. Doesn't really sound like voluntary death does it?

    But let’s not destroy the economy and some of the things that make life worthwhile.

  • For me, this isn’t really a debate about whether football should be reopened because other things are. And more that those other things should be closed because of the threats they say going to a football match will pose are higher as they are held in a closed environment.

  • Herd immunity only arrives with a vaccine @forestblue not by getting it or we would all be immune from flu/common cold. People are immunised and therefore we get herd immunity except for the non vaxxer idiots who get by because everyone else gets one. No-one knows if you can be re-infected with covid at the moment so there is no herd immunity...people who do get it but very mildly may get it again later severely. I agree we need a way of separating the vulnerable from.the healthy to allow the economy to stagger on. Perhaps a workable track and trace system. They have had six months...

  • There is a flu vaccine though isn't there?

  • The number of deaths from Covid (even measured in the bizarre way we do) remains at very low levels by spring standards. That number hasn't exceeded 100 in a day since July. Less than 2% of people dying in the UK in the last month had had Covid in the last 28 days of their life.

    Some may feel that those very low figures are as a result of the precautions we are taking, some may feel that human life is so precious that even those figures are too high but some may feel that there is evidence that we are panicking a little and getting the balance between safety and living and enjoying our lives accepting some risk a little too far to the safety side.

    I think I am in the latter category. Some precautions yes but we do have to live too. I'm not sure we will ever eliminate Covid. I think we have to learn to live with it.

  • @eric_plant said:
    There is a flu vaccine though isn't there?

    Yup. Not taken up nationally as a whole so I don't think we have herd immunity. For example I dont usually have it but i will be this year for obvious reasons. I also think flu is one of those pesky things that mutates as per the common cold so I'm not sure you can ever entirely get rid of it.

  • @DevC said:
    The number of deaths from Covid (even measured in the bizarre way we do) remains at very low levels by spring standards. That number hasn't exceeded 100 in a day since July. Less than 2% of people dying in the UK in the last month had had Covid in the last 28 days of their life.

    Some may feel that those very low figures are as a result of the precautions we are taking, some may feel that human life is so precious that even those figures are too high but some may feel that there is evidence that we are panicking a little and getting the balance between safety and living and enjoying our lives accepting some risk a little too far to the safety side.

    I think I am in the latter category. Some precautions yes but we do have to live too. I'm not sure we will ever eliminate Covid. I think we have to learn to live with it.

    It's a toss up for me between considering what virologists and scientists have to say about it, and what you "feel"

  • @DevC said:
    The number of deaths from Covid (even measured in the bizarre way we do) remains at very low levels by spring standards. That number hasn't exceeded 100 in a day since July. Less than 2% of people dying in the UK in the last month had had Covid in the last 28 days of their life.

    Some may feel that those very low figures are as a result of the precautions we are taking, some may feel that human life is so precious that even those figures are too high but some may feel that there is evidence that we are panicking a little and getting the balance between safety and living and enjoying our lives accepting some risk a little too far to the safety side.

    I think I am in the latter category. Some precautions yes but we do have to live too. I'm not sure we will ever eliminate Covid. I think we have to learn to live with it.

    You do understand we're at the very start of the second wave, right? You're comparing that to the peak of the first wave? I thought you were numerate. Also, deaths lag 4-6 weeks behind infection rates. Let's see how relaxed people are with the death rate at the start of November.

  • @Wendoverman said:

    @eric_plant said:
    There is a flu vaccine though isn't there?

    Yup. Not taken up nationally as a whole so I don't think we have herd immunity. For example I dont usually have it but i will be this year for obvious reasons. I also think flu is one of those pesky things that mutates as per the common cold so I'm not sure you can ever entirely get rid of it.

    Not really much to do with it being take up nationally in the case of flu, and not so much it mutating more to do with multiple strains of flu (Like there are countless strains of coronavirus, however the Covid-19 strain turns out to be particularly nasty) and they immunise you against the one that is most likely to be prevalent that year. Which is why you have one every year and you can still get flu even after immunisation.

  • @eric_plant , you do realize that stating your opinion so aggressively doesn’t give it more validity.?
    There is no clear scientific consensus and as far as I know no scientific basis for why people can watch football at Hitchin but not at St Albans or watch maidenhead in their club bar but not around the pitch or Crystal Palace streamed in a cinema but not outside in the ground.
    I don’t dismiss COVID as a threat. That would be wrong. I despair at the antics of Trump. I just think we are in danger of getting the balance wrong.

  • We'll agree to differ on our definitions of "aggressively"

  • edited October 2020

    @DevC said:
    @eric_plant , you do realize that stating your opinion so aggressively doesn’t give it more validity.?
    There is no clear scientific consensus and as far as I know no scientific basis for why people can watch football at Hitchin but not at St Albans or watch maidenhead in their club bar but not around the pitch or Crystal Palace streamed in a cinema but not outside in the ground.
    I don’t dismiss COVID as a threat. That would be wrong. I despair at the antics of Trump. I just think we are in danger of getting the balance wrong.

    Even with all the current restrictions the numbers are starting to accelerate.... How do you think we'd be doing without them?

    Anything that involves social interaction adds risks, it's just a choice of what we allow and what we don't up to an "acceptable" level of overall interactions. Yes the rules are clumsy and some activities which are less risk than others are allowed, largely because people have to stretch what's allowed to the absolute limit, but it's not a case of then allowing those lower risk activities on top of the existing ones, it would be instead of, unless we want to see the spread accelerate even further.

    The common question asked is for the evidence for 10pm pub closures helping, and the govt aren't forthcoming because I suspect that having the pubs open full stop has facilitated the spread and they don't want to look like they opened the pubs against scientific advice in the first place.

  • @Username , I agree with your statement “it’s a choice of what we allow up to an acceptable level”. I agree. There is no right or wrong answer. It’s a judgement call.
    I don’t agree with the extreme libertarian view or the “compulsory masks are a breach of civil liberties” brigade but I do think we are in danger of pushing the balance too far in one Direction.
    I’ll leave this subject there.

  • Only thing certain in this debate is that this statement won't be followed through

    'I'll leave this subject there'

  • My concern is that although the overall mortality rate appears to be relatively low, for a significant proportion of the population the rate is much higher.

    Until we can find a humane and robust process to protect that group, as an individual you have to accept that when the R rate is above 1, if you do become infected the odds of you passing the virus through to someone who is at high risk and may die through your choices increases.

    How much that bothers you as an individual depends really on your own values and views.

    Personally, at the moment, it bothers me a lot.

    There is a balance to be made but I would feel a lot happier if some infrastructure and control measures were in place to take account of the unreliability* of (seemingly particularly) Western European (and American) human behaviour.

    *Normally I’d see this as a plus - just not at the moment!

  • Scientists and academics need to debate openly to determine truth. This applies to new threats and illnesses as to all science, it is the ‘scientific method’. Observe, hypothesis, repeat etc. Too many people at the moment want to shut down reasonable debate. There is not a single view of this illness and how to fight it, there are many views and we should listen to them, observe and decide. For Boris to say there is only one approach to fighting this is clearly wrong as there are as many approaches as there are countries in the world.

    In my view, people under 60 years old who do not have other underlying conditions seem to be at a very low risk of death from this disease. Also the passage of the disease outdoors seems to be extremely low. On that basis I am in favor of returning to football matches. In fact I enjoyed my first post-lockdown live game on Tuesday (Camelford 3-2 Launceston in the South West Premier League). Crowd of about 100 very little chance of catching Covid on a cold, wet evening.

    And to those who accuse me of speaking from no knowledge, I have had COVID-19 and have confirmed antibodies. For me it was a nasty disease, like a bad flu with many days of fever, but there are many other risks out there that are killing people. We are making a mistake if we focus on this disease exclusively or excessively and in consequence leave other conditions untreated. And that is what I believe we are doing with 30,000 empty hospital beds reported this week.

  • At the moment our government has failed to deal with a bit of flu that has killed over 42,000 people in six months...nearly the 50,000 that experts predicted unless action was taken that was scoffed at as hysterical by government and right wing newspapers back in february. As they are still failing to tackle it effectively I can see why other things are taking a back seat. Focussing on it is not a mistake. Glad you got through it though @forestblue

  • Opening.pubs and restaurants (Plus the stuff two faces for the price of one promotion) was purely an economic decision which I can understand this government had to make but I fully expected to end in disaster. As with universities (all signed your leases? Got your loans? Travelled a long way from.home? Great! Oh by the way its all online teaching and you cant leave your dorms for two weeks) the need to get people to part with their cash outweighed health concerns.

  • Not all universities are like that @Wendoverman my son still has over half his lessons in person with the lecturers, the only universities you hear about are the ones the press decide to focus on. He also has a friend in Scotland who still has plenty of in person lessons. The one thing I've learnt from all of this is dont trust the media ! I sort of knew anyway, but this has massively confirmed it.

  • edited October 2020

    @HolmerBlue said:
    Not all universities are like that @Wendoverman my son still has over half his lessons in person with the lecturers, the only universities you hear about are the ones the press decide to focus on. He also has a friend in Scotland who still has plenty of in person lessons. The one thing I've learnt from all of this is dont trust the media ! I sort of knew anyway, but this has massively confirmed it.

    It is amazing that the news channels aren't running stories along the lines of "X University doesn't have outbreak of Corona virus,", or "Y university hasn't gone back on their promise of real lectures", almost like that isn't, or at least shouldn't be, newsworthy.

    A lot of the current anti-all-media rhetoric seems to be fuelled by a similar realisation that the news only reports on things when things go wrong and doesn't just fluff the govts ego by reporting on things that aren't a total disaster, as if that is how a "balanced" news service should be.

  • Dont trust the media or dont trust the media that isnt reporting what you want to hear ? Sometimes the weather is not what the BBC told me it was going to be. Those lefty weather men peddling bad weather when actually I'm outside in the sun. There are plenty of positive stories that are reported but people seem to ignore so they can bash. Also the national media has to try and cover an issue across the board and cannot always list the good or bad things from every area they have not included to balance every news report. Surprisingly no-one from government wants to come on proper news outlets and trumpet the successes...because someone will probably ask them a question about 'bad' things and ruin it for them. 'Yes, there are are lots of people dying but hey...why is no-one mentioning the majority of people who aren't?'
    I'm pleased your son is getting his money's worth @HolmerBlue From a mixture of strikes and lock down my daughter did her masters with minimal face to face support and without setting foot in the london uni whose facilities she was paying to attend.

  • It is a sad but true fact about journalism that bad news sells newspapers.

  • But equally news outlets reporting bad news is a sign of a free(ish) media. There's rarely much bad news on state-run telly or in papers.

    Sadly, things going to plan generally isn't much of a story (unless it's some feat of human ingenuity/heroism/endurance.

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