Mr Derek

I raised the age-old distinction between "died directly due to Covid" vs "died when happened to have Covid" and will continue to raise it until the data we are being fed clearly separates these things out. The point is we have no idea whether deaths of people who happened to have Covid are fed (deliberately or carelessly?) into the daily Covid statistics. There is a qualitative judgement involved at both medical and administrative levels. Where is the line drawn? Do you know? If you have some medical insight on this, can you provide it to reassure us?

Most likely they do have underlying conditions but nobody knew. And can we be sure that some of those deaths were, say, in road accidents, where the victim happened to have Covid? I have no confidence in these figures. Seriously, how does someone die of omicron without underlying conditions? Their sniffles are that severe? I would like to hear details of particular cases and judge for myself.

You are seriously misinformed. Eastern Ukraine was never properly Ukrainian. It was the Russians who developed the industry in the Donbas - Ukrainians were mainly the peasantry in the countryside. Since independence the government has been trying to Ukrainianize and brutally de-Russify the east. The Donbas Russians are still the majority in the region and always have been. To assume it is historically Ukrainian is both false and to miss the entire point of the war. The attached article is a short, easy, and totally impartial read on the history of this region. See the bottom of p3 in particular. 1996-809-02-Kuromiya.pdf

Definitely real, but I doubt the same could be said for Jada's condition. She had some hair fall out, a thin line of it, but it's grown back. Look at pictures of people with proper alopecia - big difference. Her's was not worth mentioning. In any case, with a small bald patch like that, she could easily have covered it with her hair and no one would know anything about it - yet she actually shaved her head which would only show it off all the more! Hmmm. I suspect she may have pulled her hair out herself - trichotillomania - a common OCD in stressed-out women, and she shaved her head to prevent herself doing it again - and get some sympathy and attention to boot.

Not impressed. Sound like you are one of those who have allergy complications. Me too. Whenever I get colds/flu it's a case of allergic rhinitis + allergic sinusitis + allergic bronchitis - makes the condition a hundred times worse than for 'normal' people. I have always just lived with it and never make any fuss. And there was never any travel restrictions on account of that...

That green stripy sofa reminds me why I have never bought any of their furniture.

Is this article for real? Immigrants complaining about language difficulties? What on earth did they expect? Let's face it, we're talking about economic migrants here, not people "pursuing personal dreams" (I wonder what kind of visa covers that?). I take a dim view of Globohomo (globalist homogenisation). If one's country is no good, why not stay and work hard to make it better? Why is it the reflex nowadays to run off to someone else's country and appropriate it for themselves? Yeah, I know. They want more, now. The point I am making is all about decent behaviour, not xenophobia. And before someone asks what am I doing here - I'm not in Thailand for economic reasons, or in perpetuity. I am stateless, because my own country (the UK) has committed cultural suicide. By the way, "Xin Yimin" sounds like neo-colonialism.

Sorry, I meant the Silk Air crash off Sumatra. That was judged to be pilot suicide and I read somewhere that it had a similar near-vertical trajectory to the China crash. I mention it because there are people above discounting pilot suicide off hand as if they simply don't believe it can happen, and everybody else seems to be thinking that is was caused by something technical without any plausible explanation. Occam is not always right but should be applied first.

Inspect the planes by all means (though I would assume they are regularly inspected anyway) but try inspecting the mental health of pilots as well. In the circumstances, this was most likely a suicide mission. It happens... Lion Air in Indonesia, Germanwings in the Alps, MH370 into oblivion... why pretend it doesn't?

Smith needs to go down for this - I mean, be blacklisted for a few years as punishment. If he objected to the joke he should have walked out and made a suitable complaint later, not got up in front of millions - including children - hit a guy on live television then sat down hurling expletives. What kind of an example is that? There's no secret about his wife's condition - she has made videos about it in order to get attention. If anything, the joke was an ice-breaker to get people to ease up about a little-known condition. They should have just laughed.

Sure, but mask-wearing was always a contentious issue in the UK where people are more capable of critical thinking. Over here, conformity is the norm and it has been universally adopted without murmur. I reckon the government here would actually have to start prosecuting people for wearing masks in order to put an end to it.

My theory is that the bad drivers in Thailand learn their road skills on a motorbike first, most likely in a local neighbourhood where life is informal and road rules hardly matter (not wearing a helmet, riding the wrong direction at the edge of the road, not indicating, ignoring road signs and traffic lights, and generally being cavalier towards other road users). I don't believe it is possible to enforce proper road use on every dust road in every village right across Thailand, therefore it is not possible to eradicate entirely those bad habits and attitudes once they get onto the highway in cars. Rigorous testing that denies poor drivers a licence should have some effect, though many will still drive anyway. Rigorous policing should have some effect, but the problem is really more than they can handle. Education and public information films should have some effect, but really bad drivers won't care anyway. Darwin's law should have some effect, but the supply of bad drivers is too great. There must be a solution to this though. I'm still thinking...

Whatever the government puts out, many people will be wearing masks for at least another couple of years, and perhaps they will never stop as long as Covid is still around, and I think it is clear that Covid is not going to disappear completely. The quality of life is wrecked for the foreseeable future, I'm afraid.

The waifu says people in the north are friendlier than in the south. Never noticed myself.

Anyone who works on a streetfood stall. They all seem cheerful and friendly.

I reckon it will be another two years before people will stop wearing masks. They're like Linus and his security blanket.

I seem to be the only person on the planet to assert that it is logically and biologically impossible for a new variant to be both more transmissible AND more lethal, other than in localised and temporary pockets. Transmissibility necessarily trumps lethality. Lethality necessarily reduces transmissibility. Glad to be of assistance to the rest of mankind.

Can we start receiving these figures in the context of ordinary influenza figures? I mean, in addition to omicron cases, please report the actual daily number of hospitalised influenza cases (and provide the historically-expected number of the latter for comparison). We need to know how far omicron has replaced influenza in order to get any meaningful perspective on these figures which come out every day. If it turns out that omicron has largely (or completely) replaced influenza, then we need to compare the current number of omicron cases with the historically-expected number of influenza cases - and only then can we judge the situation.

I use it all the time, but it makes me feel like I'm living in E.M. Forster's story "The Machine Stops".

I think we've entered the age of mortality at 60. That's scary enough, but if you haven't done all the stuff you wanted to do by then, they you had better have a good excuse. I always thought that 66 was the age-at-which-you-couldn't-argue - as I took to be age that Hemingway had had enough. Then I discovered that Hem died aged 61. ????

I went there once and they wanted to keep my passport. Long argument ensued. Some time ago though. Things may have changed.

I never bother. It means you have to time your arrival, and if you have a long journey to make through unpredictable traffic then you have to allow plenty of time, which means you might get there early and end up waiting in any case, or you might be late in which case you look like a reprobate. CW is a great place to hang out in any case - plenty of facilities and can get some exercise walking round and round the track. Mileage will vary for other offices of course.

It should be obvious to anyone that these excess deaths (I don't dispute that they exist) are the result of the diversion of medical resources away from other illnesses over the last two years. There's plenty of existing evidence for that but I don't see these researchers factoring it in (I have looked at their paper). Screening for heart disease, cancer, and no doubt everything else have been massively affected. Personally speaking, I have avoided going to hospital or dentist for any kind of treatment since Covid started and we all know that is true of many people if not most people.

You didn't listen to a word I said, did you?

Very well, let's talk about the cities. Take Kharkiv, Ukraine's second biggest city. This was basically a Russian creation. A hundred years ago Russians were greatly in the majority. Then the Soviets, for reasons of SSR politics sufficient to their own purposes, decided to bring in Ukrainians and make the place capital of Ukraine SSR. Today the population is (as far as I recall - feel free to check) about 65% Ukrainian, 45% Russian. Given that history and current situation, and geographical location, I'm not sure that makes the place 'properly' Ukrainian, but let that pass. The fact is, there are a sizeable number of people in Kharkiv cheering the Russians on, though of course you won't hear anything about that in the western media. The point is that information like this should certainly influence anyone's understanding of the war and if anyone has come down on Ukraine's side in this war without being aware of the situation in Kharkiv, then their opinion is completely invalid.