My local hospital no longer requires masks in non-clinical areas, although some locations that technically don't require it of everyone are still mandating it for anyone who is not a patient or a visitor who would visibly have been exempt under the original community masking rules. This has resulted in a wide variety of attitudes to masking among visitors. My office is on the extreme low-mask end, in that most people are happy about no longer needing masks according to the rules. I am the only person masking in my office, although everyone else is supportive of my choice. Surgical masks remain available to everyone at every entrance. Routine testing is supposed to still be required but I haven't seen much of it happening (although some people are doing it on Fridays or the day before doing something they consider risky, and I'm still doing it every week as per current recommendations for non-clinical staff). Care home staff continue to be on a much stricter policy (for some reason the one some of my relatives work at went up to 4 times a week for staff recently...) Social distancing is still required (except there is now an exemption for relatives), although in practice nobody is enforcing it in corridors. It is enforced in places like lunch queues and waiting areas. Handwashing is enforced rigourously among staff and inpatients, and it's hard to tell the extent to which visitors/outpatients do it. Fresh air is being widely encouraged. Due to the beautiful weather, most people are happily partaking of that piece of advice by being outdoors and opening windows wide. No vaccines are being offered in the UK to under-5s, nor are they seriously expected to be made available on the NHS. This is because under-5s are having so few hospitalisations that they're tending not to happen in trials, which will make it difficult to pass NICE requirements for funding (Pfizer and Moderna, undeterred, have vaccines about to start Phase III anyway, and this may be available privately if Phase III is passed). People over 75 or in care homes can now get a 4th dose of vaccine, which means there's a good chance everyone will be able to get one at some point in the autumn. My hometown now has a walk-in clinic which will serve everyone eligible with whichever dose they are eligible to have, so the booking barrier has been lifted (though it's still an option for people who would prefer that method). The COVID ward at my hospital has no patients, but it is still on the cleaning rota in case it needs to go into action in a hurry. Nobody is seriously expecting "in case" to happen over the summer.

I remember being taught on several different occasions that, in the absence of more specific instructions from the teacher, that the best answer possible in one's own words should be given. Different students will, of course, parse that sort of advice differently - especially since it was not until about age 13 when I was taught to ask the teacher for length/content recommendations if they were not explicitly provided. Since a lot of my peers never appeared to learn the part about asking the teacher about anything, the temptation to cheat would seem obvious - though by the time the internet was common among my peers, we'd reached a level of education where this level of explanation was routine rather than the exception.

If your child has a clear manuscript hand, has had reasonable opportunity to practise cursive without worrying about learning other content at the same time (and thus to build speed) and shows no interest in other methods of extending learning of cursive such as calligraphy, then allowing your child to "rest on their oars" regarding cursive is reasonable. Focus on neat handwritten work (and typing if that's not solid yet), and let cursive take whatever proportion of written work is appropriate for your child. (It's possible to require manuscript, cursive and typing for some subjects and offer a choice in others if that makes sense in context).

The question bothers me face-to-face because the asker has usually forgotten what I said by the time dinner actually gets made, with the result that my answer made no difference to what was served and the asker doesn't even remember why it made no difference. (For clarity: if the question is happening, it's invariably because someone else is doing the cooking). It also doesn't help that I often don't have a preference (I am not a fussy eater and my parents taught me to eat a reasonable portion of what I'm served unless it's truly unpalatable - e.g. burnt - or it involves the one food they know I can't swallow), and when I do have a preference, often have no idea what exactly is in stock (exactly what gets bought varies depending on what goes through the shopper's head during recent shopping trips, meals only partly follow a set schedule, food sometimes goes off out of schedule and there's rarely chance to check the supplies before an answer is socially expected). Thus I can't tell if any preference is even possible to serve on a given day (unless it's one of those "set schedule" occasions, in which case the question rarely gets asked because the person making dinner knows what's for tea without asking). When my parents were asked "What's for tea?" they'd usually reply "Food" unless there was something particularly special about the intended meal, which I think is a perfectly reasonable and mildly amusing approach if you are indeed the person who will be making the food. (Naturally, this is not an issue in forum posts, since the asker will presumably use the forum thread as a reminder and isn't seriously planning on plating up a meal for me personally tonight).

Everything is getting more expensive, but the regular level is relatively reasonable (about 10%). The next price level down is going up at a frightening rate, to the point where "value lines" are starting to get discontinued because they'd just end up the same price as the regular lines of the same item. Shelves are getting spotty in terms of what is available, but it seems to be different things in every shop and on each day, so being prepared to visit multiple shops and/or go shopping more often is currently enough to bridge the gap (the multiple shop approach got selected here).

I haven't seen any from Dundee, or Edinburgh, but the Moderna Omnicron Variant Vaccine's currently recruiting for Aberdeen (although this only appears to be open to young people) and two different studies are currently recruiting for Glasgow. (one of which is only open to pregnant women). Perhaps if trials were open at more centres, it would be possible to get more people. (I'm annoyed that there's finally one I can geographically do... ...but because I got COVID in March, I can't sign up for it until the end of this month, by which point they may have everyone they need because it's already been open for a couple of months).

Everyone in my household is still strictly masking whenever out of the house unless eating/drinking at least 2 metres away from people not in my household, and avoiding crowds. I have to accept people getting 1 metre of me at work because the proximity rules got changed a few weeks ago, but I'm still not using the right given out at that time to de-mask at my desk. I am planning to go to a couple of concerts, but do not yet feel ready to go to the town centre when it is busy. Especially with many other people now having sloppier masking technique (or indeed dropping masking altogether) I've definitely got some odd post-COVID symptoms (swollen feet) and don't want more. (Nobody else in my household who got COVID is reporting such symptoms, and my brother's still managed not to have COVID). I would expect autoimmune diseases to be on the rise because of the sheer number of other diseases that also rise in people who have had COVID infections.

If it's anything like the UK, the struggle to get vaccine recruits for testing is an issue - among other things, one has to have avoided COVID for at least 90 days prior to enrolment and stay COVID-free for the entire time until the first dose (which can be up to 2 months after enrolment at the moment because it's going so slowly right now). A lot of people are getting turned away due to recent infections because it's possible to get re-infected within the ~5 month window that has to be kept clear, The result is that every UK COVID trial I know about is running at least 1 month behind schedule, and the larger-scale Phases II and III ones are 2-3 months behind where they wanted to be.

Happy news: my local hospital just emptied its COVID ward. Nobody with COVID in my local hospital requires intensive care any more. The only patients with COVID in the hospital are now able to be accommodated in single-bed bays (thus can isolate without having to be in a roomful of other COVID-positive people), with similar monitoring regimes as other people with significant infectious illness (so, not needing constant monitoring or 1:1 nursing). There's also enough single bays to accommodate everyone else who needs a single-bed bay. The COVID ward will remain designated as such for a while to ensure it isn't needed again during the summer (there is contingency to have it re-open as such, or become a generic "winter ward", later in the year depending on how the virus changes.

I was going with the fact that the recall notice in the shops specifies the recall is voluntary in nature. Although this does not change that returning items involved is a good idea.

Well done from the developer! There's a version for Firefox too.

The UK recall is still deemed voluntary, which is a surprise.

I don't think you've missed any conversation on the point. My personal hypothesis is that women might be more likely to test and mask when communication from Westminster makes it sound like testing and masking is optional (although Scotland is governed by Holyrood for - among other things - devolved public health matters, Westminster politics gets a lot of airplay)? Would be interested to see some actual research, though.

25,7% increase in COVID deaths this week, 14.3% increase in admissions, 3.2% drop in tests (because it's hard to get a free lateral flow test now).

I don't understand how this is possible, given that in the UK from next month, non-free COVID tests are going to be £20 for 4 lateral flow tests and £70 for 1 PCR test despite these no longer being NHS-subsidised in any way. (Unfortunately I expect the UK's decision to scrap most free tests will also make the statistics unreliable, and make it much more dangerous to do things with other people - the hospitals are already getting an increase in cases from the loss of mask requirements from many aspects of life in the UK).

I think I'd need more information to make a judgement. When I was competing in swimming competitions, I would probably have been told this in a situation like that described. Luck was basically seen as a hidden variable that accounts for the part of performance variability which can't be accounted for by controllable factors like training or fitness. "Warm-up" means that you do it to warm up muscles, get back into the groove of how competitions flow and push yourself while carefully self-monitoring to avoid injury. Such a message would have been code for "You could do well, so give it a good effort, but it's also possible that you can do everything in your power and still get something you are not happy with; don't be too hard on yourself and stay within your body's boundaries". The more straightforward "OK, remember you've been ill, your goal today is simply to go out there and enjoy it, not to bring home a medal" wouldn't have have registered due to competitive instincts; the sentiment would have needed to be couched in competitive terms. Some other members of the swimming club I was in would definitely not have interpreted the sentence the same way (for various reasons, ranging from attributing "luck" to God or random circumstance, to not seeing the point of doing anything as a metaphorical warm-up). Most of them would have responded better to "OK, remember you've been ill, your goal today is simply to go out there and enjoy it" than what Ting Tang quoted at the start of the thread, if the aim was to encourage a good effort within the body's boundaries. The "not seeing the point of doing anything as a metaphorical warm-up" attitude is, I think, quite close to what Ting Tang was worrying about, and for that sort of child what she quoted would likely cause a more unhealthy attitude to competition, so I can see why Ting Tang is concerned. (Especially since some parents think an degree of competitiveness others find unhealthy is a good thing). The moral of the story is that one has to encourage and guide the child in front of them. The wise parent's #1 desire at this point would be for their child not to get ill or injured again during the activity, desire #2 for them to have fun, and finding the wording that gets that through to a child is not always an easy task.

In England, it's over-75s and immunocompromised people at the moment, with emphasis on "at the moment". It's not clear what the exact issue is, but the way it's being described, it sounds more like a supply/sequencing matter and the people who will benefit most getting the vaccine first. There's hope there'll be a new version of the vaccine by early autumn (i.e. not just the same thing we've been getting for the past year-and-a-bit, but one that takes into account later variants), in which case this would be a nice 6-month window between these people getting this booster and them being the first to get the improved version of the jab in late September/October. Just spent 1 hour and 20 minutes failing to log a (negative) test result. It's bad enough when the website claims a random test in the box is not genuine when all the other ones used from it so far were classed as legitimate (it came from an NHS employer, so it had better be a box of genuine tests!) It's worse when the IVR (phone menu system) for telephone test result logging doesn't allow you to join the queue if there are already 10 people in it (this is to serve a country of over 65 million people, and as you can imagine, even at 7 am on a Sunday morning, there are that many people in the queue). The thing that really got me upset was it took 40 minutes to find someone on the one part of the phone system that was working who recognised it was possible for there to be a technical element at play, rather than trying to claim I was failing to press "1". No wonder test logging isn't as popular as it used to be...

If you don't have a convenient English 101 course to join, the University of Maryland has posted a series of web pages about what it expects to see from college writers. It would be an option to simply go through the list one item at a time, and have DD research anything she's not covered yet. With DD's background, this is unlikely to be a year's work.

I consider myself extremely lucky that I work somewhere whose attitude was that not taking it seriously would simply be creating more work for themselves in the long run. (I work in healthcare, and if the sequelae identified from "mild" cases does anything to stop people from being healthy, my workplace will find out sooner or later). Most other workplaces near me now expect people to keep working through COVID-19. Consequences of this are... ...predictable.

Well... ...work's just ordered me to stay home until at least a week on Monday, regardless of my health, due to the office now being shut for deep cleaning and fumigation (how the latter works against COVID-19, I do not know and did not ask). Turns out that a lot of the team had COVID without knowing, according to the PCR tests my bosses insisted everyone else do. Those who were working from home (and demonstrably negative for COVID) have been excused all but the minimum targets, because everyone agrees that being as strict as usual would be pretty silly with much of the team absent. The good news is that everyone's getting paid while this continues.

26 March is Make Up Your Own Holiday Day, if anyone is interested.

There was a skipping game I used to play that started: / There's a / party on the / hill, will you / come? / With you / own green* / bowl and your / own / cream / bun? * - "Green" would be substituted for any other single-syllable colour. I say "started" because I was really bad at skipping games and usually got tripped up by that skip happening on the very first word, and I never saw anyone get past "bun".

I can stop worrying - LFT finally picked up my virus today 🙂 ("just serious enough that I can tell when I don't have it any more" is preferable to me than "mild enough that I can accidentally infect other people"). I have easy access to home LFTs for now (although home LFTs will cost money from April). My workplace continues to have approximately eleventy million tests available for employees, and still expects twice-weekly testing for people in my role, so if I was truly out of tests, I could ask them to send me some. (They were going to step down to "weekly required" on "scientific advice" this week, but for some strange reason decided otherwise...). Now to hope I get three negative ones tomorrow, Friday and Monday to give the best guarantee I can of safety to my colleagues. One other household member has the virus. From the timing and context, we think they picked it up independently from me, and that we did not give it to each other. Everyone else in our contact network is clear, and I hope it stays that way. We're being very strict about isolation because after two years of explaining to other people about the concepts of viral load, we want everyone's to be as low as possible. My workplace has been awesome about the whole thing - not only did they exempt me from daily reporting, but they also told everyone to get a PCR test in response to my situation (another colleague found out they had COVID as a result). They've also isolated what started the whole thing and put measures in place to prevent either a recurrence among us, or other people elsewhere on site from being affected by the same problem. We're going to be doing track-and-trace together (by phone) today, since the official track-and-trace system apparently hasn't noticed current events. We think it's BA.2, although it is unlikely that I'll ever get official confirmation. I got my booster ten weeks ago, and had been considering signing up for a study to investigate candidates for a 4th jab. (Most studies require a 14-day gap between an infection and signup, on the basis that it takes at least another 14 days to do the paperwork needed before any actual job could occur). The good news is that the protocol used in the brain study is being applied by several other ongoing studies, so we'll get to see whether vaccines and other variants affect this. In addition, a lot of Hong Kong's successful approach to the first wave was organised by people who were involved in the now-suppressed 2020 protests (the government's questionable initial handling of COVID-19 was one of flashpoints for the protests). Citizens who aren't trusted by government due to protesting often struggle to fully participate in things like pandemic public health promotion. Vaccination would have been a big help in reducing lethality, but not having people regularly reminding each other to keep each other safe, or do the little things that let people who test positive self-isolate, isn't much good either. We also know some vaccines just aren't good at stopping Omnicron (the UK experience suggests Pfizer is one of them) and are instead useful for reducing lethality. Given how fast the virus has mutated so far, a new variant is also likely to be contributing - and if it started in the rural areas like Alpha, China may not have had opportunity to find that out yet (given its viral testing capacity is primarily in the biggest cities). It also means that, ultimately, there's more chance of "low-risk" people having to do more restrictive things (like another partial/full lockdown) when someone in power concludes that people cannot be trusted to keep themselves sufficiently safe for the economy to keep working. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine over the next few weeks, it seems to me that such a conversation could well happen in the UK around Easter. Lots of businesses which were perfectly capable of surviving the first two lockdowns are in the process of being killed off by the after-effects of lockdown #3. On-again, off-again rules negatively affect children separately from the effects of the measures themselves. While I've seen no evidence of masks negatively affecting children without disabilities, (the effect on children with disabilities varies in ways that makes intuitive sense for people familiar with those disabilities), lockdowns absolutely do affect children's development due to fewer opportunities to develop social skills in a variety of environments (in the UK, there are reports of 6-7-year-olds who can't do desk work because they've forgotten how to be in one place and focus on a specific activity in a non-home context). Lockdown effects are especially bad when children see adults being allowed to do things they consider recreational when they cannot even go to school (which in the UK has now happened twice). Worst of all, from anecdontal experience, is removing restrictions when it's obvious to the children that this is going to cause harm, even to the causes the people advocating the removals claim to support. Dropping masks without getting the virus nearly/completely extinct in an area is prioritising immediate gratification over total benefit, Even for freedom. Boosters already have worn off for some people, and they're getting reinfected. Research is being done on multiple tailored boosters, but as the UK studies are still calling for volunteers, it's likely to be several months before it's available. There is talk of a non-differentiated booster before that, but reading between the lines, I'm starting to wonder if national cashflows and/or simply disinterest based on how little effect this booster's had (we'd expected 6-8 months of protection based on Israel's figures, but at this rate the UK is looking at 4-5 months) might impinge on this. The rule about the NHS requiring 2 jabs for clinical staff has gone already because of the latter. So yes, I think this spring we will be functionally non-protected against serious disease, and need to act accordingly. (I'm looking at reducing my outside commitments to work, library and one particular friend, all of whom are happy to follow things like 2-metre social distancing and masking for everyone not exempt).

Makes sense to try that. My workplace has a set procedure for when LFTs can be used following a positive test, so that would be the starting point (short version: it's impossible for me to return before Day 6, and that falls on a day off...)

That would be particularly interesting as PCR testing is deemed unreliable if done within 90 days of a positive test. Which puts me in a bit of a bind - I'm still testing negative on lateral flow tests despite a PCR test I took yesterday indicating I am positive (for the first time). It's not clear how I prove I've done with this particular COVID-19 infection, given that the lateral flow test is presumably still not going to state whether I have it or not given it's continously claimed I don't have it.