Absolutely no reason to think that might be the case - in fact if you check you will see the number of UK tests is significantly up the last 3 weeks. Plus as that variant infects perhaps 70% more people, the absolute number of deaths will roughly double - currently perhaps 1.5% increasing to maybe 2.0% of a higher number of infections.

Although the truely worrying ones are the South African and Brazilian variants as both look to be natural immunity and (at least partially) vaccine break-outs.

Yes found out more since I posted. Seems like the organisers used pretty questionable 'loopholes'. Certainly not helping with the sentiments about what happened in Verbier and Wengen over Christmas. Tensions are very high- and sadly, anti-British sentiments, both in France and Switzerland.

That's about all schools, not primary schools. And the younger kids are not the ones who add a lot to mobility as they live close to their schools. And the masks do not influence mobility at all, by the way.

If all the fuss about schools is just the question of mobility there are plenty of other ways to reduce it like forbidding people to move away from home for more than 1 km without very important reason or to close finally all those ski resorts to which people rush on the weekends.

By the way, what do you all think about masks during sport lessons in school? I wonder if I have a right to keep my daughter at home during these lessons because I consider masks requirement for the kids during sport as some kind of crime against kids. Kids who stay together for 30 hours/week packed in a small classroom will definitely got virus from each other during 2 hours of sport in a big sport hall unless they wear masks.

Your risk. Mess with the immune system and you mess with fire. The risks are not just now but they are also the risks of future effects like in 1 2 or 5 years. And not to mention the risks for future unborn children!

Yes, coz nothing messes with your immune system like catching something that could kill you, or maybe pass it off to someone more vulnerable.

It’s dumb to think we, as a whole, do not take steps to protect ourselves from the environment, we were clothes to protect ourselves, build shelters, control our diets through agriculture, nothing we do is “natural” in the strictest sense, we mess with ourselves on a massive scale, and most of it is to our benefit. Vaccinations have caused nothing but untold good and saved millions of lives, and started well before we had the standards and technologies we have today.

Maybe we are weak and spoiled because because we can’t live naked in the winter feasting on nuts and berries, maybe that’s your idea of a perfect being, i think, mostly, we’re smarter than that and to say things like “playing with your immune system is playing with fire” is naive at best, we play with it all the damn time

Do you really know so little about "the immune system"? Vaccines are not about "messing" with anything; quite to the contrary the immune system creates its own defences, the vaccines just help it to create them before they're actually needed, is all.

Jesus Christ......... you've not been vaccinated against anything then?? You'd rather take a chance with Polio etc?

Hardly a loophole, anyone can spend 10 days in France then go to CH as France is a safe corridor.

Getting into France (when only essential travel from UK is allowed) on the basis of a gap course (not even planned for France) being education, could be seen as a loophole.

... and sadly and tragically, done massive damage to all British Ski instructors in France and Switzerland, and all British skiers- who are perceived as those who brought the 'British' variant to Switzerland. And after Andy Wigmore boasted about evading quarantine and being clever Wiggy Von Trapp- at Christmas- when the variant apparently arrived first.

Really really stupid and massivel destructive and insensitive in the extreme.

People don’t care about anyone but themselves. Sad but true.

I’m sure the skiers are always going to be blamed for bringing the ‘British’ variant to Switzerland but it was actually detected in Vaud in a sample taken in October 26th so it had been around for a while before the ski season kicked off.

Regardless it was a pretty stupid and selfish thing to do.

Well of course- but this in the background of massive protectionism in the Ski instructing sector, both in France and Switzerland- at a time when they are all unemployed in France with closed resorts, now it seems for the whole season, and very limited jobs in Switzerland.

they can't even trace close contacts properly

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...acts-than-ever


so no, number of tests doesn't say anything about the fraction of undetected cases

WTF. You know how vaccines work rigth? They aren't messsing with the immune system, they are "training dummies" for it.

Law of unintended consequences strikes again
The irony is that without the correct syringes one cannot draw six doses from one vial, availability of the correct syringes in the US is "limited".

Well, as if we didn't know that Trump is a scam... Now Pfizer just gets paid 20% more per vial. I wonder what they offered him in exchange for that.

It's the same with COVID itself old people do just die, yesterday the COVID deaths in Malta were 3 females aged 92, 93 & 100.

Ski instructing is not protected in CH, people with a very level Ski instructor qualification can & do teach in Switzerland, I don't believe there is even a legal; requirement to be qualified at all.
Trainee instructors in France can also have low level qualifications. Any top level instructor can work for themselves in France, plenty of Brits fall into this category, since they generally have not paid French tax or social contributions to date one wonders who was actually taking the piss!

You are forgetting that Brits invented downhill skiing, the Swiss even have a statue

Sort of. In essence you're either a qualified "professeur de sports de neige", with a full licence (aka Brevet or Patent) or you're not. That's the only actual qualification in the Swiss system; anything lower is not recognised except as an interim stage of training within the system. Similarly, any foreign qualification is not recognised, although most countries' top level qualification, including BASI 4, gives an automatic equivalence to the Swiss ticket, but it still needs to be applied for.

Most people, Swiss or otherwise, working as instructors don't have this, so it's entirely at the discretion of the ski school who they allow to work, and at what level they can teach. What is required, however, is a minimum ratio of qualified to unqualified instructors within a ski school. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's something like ten to one, so a school with thirty instructors in total would need to have at least three holding the qualification.

It's only within such a ski school that anyone unqualified is allowed to teach at all. so it's not really true to say that ski instructing is not protected.

Of course, the higher your BASI or other non-Swiss level, the better your chances of finding a job, and the higher level you'll be allowed (by the ski school) to teach at. There's also usually a higher pay level for more "qualified" instructors, but again it makes no difference whether you're training within the Swiss system or not.

Languages are also an important factor and in some places (where I work here in Morgins, for example) you'll get a slightly higher remuneration if you can teach in multiple languages, so in fact there is quite a demand for other nationalities.

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