jmak

The most believable figures I've seen suggest that only about 9,000 people out of the 150,000 (other figures are available) had no underlying health conditions and were under 65. It might be because I have a vested interest as someone who is considered to have an underlying health condition. My corrected life expectancy gives me another 46 years. My condition affects 1% of people. The same is true for people with diabetes and a myriad of conditions which modern medicine can completely control. Most people who make it to 65 can expect to live another 20 years. "Even" those who "bring it upon themselves" through lifestyle (5'10 and over 15 stone makes you obese and there are a lot of people in that category) aren't expecting to drop dead this year. The whole thing "if they have covid and then get hit by a bus 27 days later"? In 2019 there were 1752 road deaths in the UK. That's less than a week's worth of covid deaths at the minute. Pure mendacity trying to claim that covid deaths haven't been and aren't still "really" due to covid. Anyone trying to make that argument loses all credibility and doesn't contribute to "getting back to normal". My previous posts should show that I don't think we should stay locked down and that we should be considering the harm that has been caused by the restrictions. Pretending that we don't need to do anything won't get us any closer to that.

Unless you think it's bats or something else protected, just get poison bait stations.... Humane traps aren't all that humane if you don't check them every few hours. If it's birds, they won't get at poison in a bait station. Even if you think you don't mind having the odd mammal in the loft, that's not really sustainable - they tend to turn into a whole community of mammals!

I was going to mention this - but to say that even if the OP fixed the problem, it might be worth documenting who made the change and why. I have a feeling that "off-roling" will become something that's closely looked at and while SIMS' lack of auditing wouldn't show who made the change, it would show that the change was made. It might be helpful for the school to have an explanation of what went on. Owning up to a mistake is always nerve-wracking, but a good manager should definitely support an employee who is honest and learns from mistakes - especially if you go to them with a reason and a solution. Some managers do punish mistakes; then it's time to look for a new job (and be very careful in the mean time!).

I know some people who work in a hospital where they're still admitting increasing numbers of patients with covid every day and have cancelled all non-urgent theatre lists because staff absence due to covid means that theatre staff have been redeployed to care for covid patients who don't think it's a brilliant idea... They may be wrong, because their view isn't necessarily balanced by seeing the (undeniable) harm occurring in other areas for to the restrictions. That's probably because they've spent the last two years being unable to provide what they consider safe care for their patients due to the combined effects of the pandemic as well as watching a lot of patients become seriously ill and die from covid and haven't had time to participate in the test of society.

The chart shows expected viral load at day 5 (or 8 depending on how you count), but the rule is 5 full days after first positive test AND two negative LFTs, so if your viral load hasn't gone below the threshold, you still have to isolate. For now... Couldn't comment here on why I think they've made the change... Or why they're proposing completely dropping the requirement to isolate while hundreds of people per day are dying. But the risk of reducing isolation time the way they have currently isn't necessarily as bad as initial reading of the chart might suggest.

I had a Seat of a similar age. I looked at all of the options and eventually settled on a Bluetooth adaptor and running Android Auto on my phone. I always intended to mount an Android tablet (I had a Nexus 7 hanging around, so only needed to buy a mount) but the phone was good enough that I never bothered.

I think we should have a party [emoji12]

Prodigal

From the instructions in the latest pack of LFTs I have

In theory they're supposed to report positive LFT results, so they should be included [emoji854]

Useful though, as you can execute it when they leave.

Biggest issue for teachers is that when "it doesn't work", it usually happens in front of 30 kids who lose interest very quickly and then you lose the whole lesson. Even though I'll usually find out how to solve a problem for myself pretty quickly, it's different when you're trying to control a class. Having said that, this thread came from a teacher repeatedly asking how to save pupils' work. In the infant school I worked in, lesson one was how to log on and lesson two was how to save your work. All teachers should be completely competent in that, but do should all the pupils. OneDrive/Google Workspace has made saving much more straightforward. If you log in and create a document, it's saved. I always added the one that was being used to Windows Explorer, so anyone who's ever saved anything should be able to work it out.

I've always done this. Some staff complained about the idea of me having control over their phones. I told them that they weren't required to have school services on personal devices, but if they wanted it, that was the condition. My school was small enough that I knew all of the staff well. I was able to assure them that I wouldn't mess with their phone, but it could actually be useful for them if they lost their phone I would easily be able to wipe it for them.

You'd think they'd be able to either 1) write their own code or 2) pay to use someone else's but the final ruling by the US International Trade Commission has confirmed that Google infringed on five of Sonos’ patents. Google's response is to remove functionality from the affected devices. Essentially speaker groups don't work properly any more https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/Upcoming-Speaker-Group-changes/ba-p/77811 Best bit about that article is the tags people have added:

It's a few years since I last looked at a quote, but if that's SIMS support for a year, I'd say there's a missing zero. At least. We had 350 pupils FTE and were paying about 10 times the figure in your post.

There are still loads of destinations that require vaccinations and people have the choice to get vaccinated or not go. There hasn't been much fuss about that previously. Mandatory vaccinations for residents is slightly contentious; vaccinations for travel shouldn't even warrant a discussion. And it should apply to everyone, travelling for work (professional sports people, politicians, anyone else) or leisure.

The optical cables that caffrey mentioned look like a good option. I didn't find anything affordable when I was looking so I went with these Cat5 extenders (note that they use an "Ethernet cable" but it doesn't go anywhere near your network). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08316HNQ6/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_g_dl_TEVYREBAG2YA21HH3TX9 Connection has been rock solid, but I did find that when they were left on for several days some funky artefacts appeared. Reboot fixed that.

Showed this to a saxophone player. They said they'd rather play with themselves than use that level of protection [emoji57]

mRNA is a novel technique for producing vaccines, but in the end it's a substance injected to induce an immune response, just like any other vaccine, so a pretty well tested methodology. Arguably it's much more thoroughly tested than most vaccines released to market. It would normally take decades to test it on billions of subjects of all different ages, genders, ethnicity and medical histories. I know I'm preaching to the converted, just can't help myself. Had a conversation about this with an idiot family member today which has made me more irritated than normal.

Relevant to discussion above and more interesting/less sensationalist than the headline: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/07/the-rise-of-lateral-flow-tests-are-these-heroes-of-the-pandemic-here-to-stay?

Our local hospital issued instructions to staff before Christmas to prepare for a "covid rota" from 10th January. That means cancel all elective surgery and treatment, cancel all out patient clinics other than emergencies like cancer, fracture, cardiac. Redeploy junior doctors and nurses released by cancelling work to covid wards. It was a "be ready" instruction. They implemented it last Friday, which was a good decision as there weren't enough staff to cover planned work this week due to covid absence. Not entirely sure why it was news that Lincolnshire hospitals declared "internal critical incident". Hospitals near us have been in and out of internal critical incident for the last year (in between, red alert was good, black alert (worse) was normal). I really hope we don't need more stringent restrictions on daily life - it's detrimental to a lot of people's lives. But claiming the NHS is ok doesn't reflect reality.

I got them banned after our SENCo "lost" their USB with everything on it. When I asked which parents needed to be contacted and who would contact the ICO to report the breach, they looked harder and found it in the lining of their bag. Management was sufficiently scared to support my suggested policy. The other thing to do would be to try and find some people who use OneDrive (or Google Drive - pick your poison) and have them as advocates. There is usually a good number of users who actually like it and appreciate that it's better than having your life in a USB stick. I was told not to waste my time supporting staff who had caused trouble like this (losing work by using USB sticks when told not to and a practical alternative was provided) because they'd gone against instructions/school policy. Any solution will need SLT support.

Large cat. My sister had that issue in a London terrace. After several months of visits from pest control the agent took pity on them and told him all he could do was move them to a neighbour's house, then next month he would visit the neighbours and move them back again... [emoji17]

You can check what you had either in the NHS App (not the NHS covid App) or online here: https://www.coronavirus-record.service.nhs.uk/

Nope. Seems to be either Moderna or Pfizer depending on what they have most of. Most people are grateful. An annoying number turning down the opportunity, but I haven't heard not having a choice of manufacturer being given as a reason. Can't really see how an individual could make an informed choice....