[nffc]

One thing I was thinking about earlier is that we've now had covid around for over 18 months.


Obviously we have a test which can detect the presence of virus in a sample but not whether the person is infected or spreading it to others.


And we still have the facility and still are testing people for the virus even though the numbers are largely stable and not making gigantic dents into hospitalisations or deaths thanks to the vaccination, even though it hasn't yet caused it to go away, and maybe never will.


We are surely now around the point where Whitty referred to as a probability some time back, where we have the virus almost endemic, and just have to carry on with it.


I know some people may well logically think 30k positive tests or wherever it is around a day is bad news but this depends surely on who is getting ill, how much at risk they are from serious covid, and how ill they are, e.g. are they picked up asymptomatic, do they have a cough and that's it, or are they likely to end up on oxygen or a ventilator. If these are only going to get as severely ill as if they have flu, then whilst it sucks for that person to be ill, they will get over it and this shouldn't be too much of a concern.


But I don't recall that we have tested so extensively than for this, for anything else such as a cold, or flu, or norovirus, or anything else which is infectious which you can test for (which presumably is always possible with a PCR test and knowing the mRNA sequence). Or if you did, how the pattern would look when we did, and how it would look when we tested people who weren't ill, and what it would look like when real-world observations show it's settled down.

In other words, what figures equate to "it's over" - my guess would be this isn't zero.