With France now reaching over 90,000 new Covid cases new rules are to be announced Monday. It seems they will consist of a PS plus a recent LF test needed to get into Bars Restaurants etc. and mask wearing changes
Well I hope there is a better supply of LF tests as none available round here!!
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90k - pah! We had just shy of 120k here, world beating old boy, world beating! 
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and how many worse than the common cold?
In UK Prof Tim Spector says half of âcoldsâ may be Omicron.
Who cares?
(and donât start that long Covid hype unless you have some real data, please)
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I imagine the 6581 people admitted to hospital in the UK in the week up to 20th Dec care.
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And everyone in ICU/ hospital with covid are just doing it out of spite 
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Same here.
Restaurateurs will be up in arms due to the lack of the availability of lateral flow tests.
104K cases here today, 16K+ in hospital with 3200 in ICU, France is in no better shape than the UK sadly.
So how is the vaccination working then? Massive rise in cases and hospitalisations, how can it be better now that so many people have been double or even triple vaccinationed (me included)?
Because vaccination does not and never has meant you canât catch Covid, but it can and does lessen the effects of the virus,
Whereas you most likely could end up in hospital/ICU/die before vaccination, the effects in most cases are vastly reduced once you have been vaccinated and keeps you out of hospital.
People need to get away from the idea being vaccinated means you cannot catch Covid.
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As far as I understand from local media, France is unlikely to implement so-called 2G (nothing to do with poor mobile reception) ie ICU tests for bars and restos. I think for the righteously vaccinated it will be business as usual, or rather for what is now âusualâ and sod the rest!
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I donât think of myself as ârighteously vaccinatedâ and certainly donât think sod the rest, are you and do you think like that yourself 
Griffin36 is correct, that vaccination does not completely prevent infection - even having the virus does not prevent infection, and some numbers Iâve seen suggest that post-vaccination immunity is better than post-infection immunity. But it does reduce the likelihood of infection, and it considerably reduces the chances of serious disease, hospitalisation and long-term effects or death.
At the moment itâs hard to know where this is leading, and how weâll eventually return to normal. I suspect a significant part is presently played by school-aged children acting as a reservoir of infection, and once they have been vaccinated/infected then re-infection rates in the vaccinated general population will reduce. Thatâs just a guess on my part though.
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Certainly the infections seem to be coming from school now both in England and France. Two of my children and their families have recently had Covid (not Omicron as far as we know). This definitely came via the primary school age children. Also my Pilates instructor here in France had to self isolate as her son had tested positive.
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Iâve always felt school-aged children were a reservoir of infection that would keep it going. But I felt it would be very unpopular to say so. Plus I think France made a decision in favour of the future - keeping schools open to keep childrenâs education going. Though hard on teachers.
I also have doubts about vaccinating children particularly under 12 or so. For adults and particularly older adults or people with comorbidities the benefits seem to far outweigh the risks. For the youngest, one hopes that the risk evaluation was done well.
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@Hautevalleegites itâs because this variant, although luckily milder for many, has the ability to spread at an exponential rate. This means itâs touching so many people so quickly, that even if only a very small percentage are badly affected, the total numbers are much more overall.
If most people werenât vaccinated, hard to imagine but the numbers in hospital and ICU could be 10 or maye even 100 times worse.
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This is just my personal opinion, but the idea of balancing harm to children from vaccination appears to only take into account direct medical harm that might come from the vaccine, rather than the other forms of harm (lost education, lack of social contact, general deprivation in poorest families etc) that come with the pandemic. If children were vaccinated and this enabled more school uptime, reduced reinfection of the older population then a lot of those harms might be alleviated.
The situation may not be as simple as that, which could be one reason vaccination hasnât been rolled out for this age group (4 years up) so much.
We also badly need to get ROW vaccinated too.
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I was lightly alluding to 'righteousness â in the Biblical sense of winnowing on the Day of Judgement , rather than self-righteousness, but on reflection, perhaps that was a tad too opaque.
Nevertheless, Iâm really fed-up with anti-vaxers who resent restictions on their so-called âfreedomâ to infect others, but donât appear to object to other pre-existing non-obligatory social controls like passports (youâre not obliged to travel internationally outside the UE) or driving licences (driving isnât compulsory).
Iâm also tired of being delayed or having to make complicated detours on Saturdays to avoid demonstrators who block the streets around the market and wave placards with slogans about the purity of their bodies, whilst exhaling clouds of vaping smoke over passers-by.
Iâm also exasperated by anti-vaxers who talk about their âresearchâ whilst being naively unaware that one of the primary rules of real research is to test the reliability of your primary sources of information.
Iâm also really angry reading about how many people are so selfish and solipsistic that theyâll fake a vaccine pass. If Iâm sat in a resto, I assume the people on the next table are vaccinated and unlikely to be a vector of infection. If I canât trust that - where are we? Obviously Iâm very glad the government is raising the penalties for that really anti-social act.
So, sod them all?
Well not quite, one is my younger brother who at the age of two contracted polio after having been innoculated, and has an understandable life long fear of vacccination. Fortunately he lives in a remote mountain village in northern Spain and is unlikely to come into contact with anyone, particularly as heâs unable to enter the local cafe or library.
Second is my oldest friend whoâs a recovered alcoholic, suffers from depression and is in a very fragile mental condition. She complains that she canât do anything or go anywhere despite living in the heart of one of the worldâs great cities, I hope in the coming year, her therapist can convince her that the best way she can improve her quality of life is to get vaxxed.
But otherwise, sod the rest!
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