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Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 09:32 AM

continue your discussion

Posted by: Popchartfreak 3rd April 2020, 12:48 PM

I'm telling my dad to stop watching news as it's affecting his well-being, I think. Comedy shows viewing preferably, or gentle tasks on the computer/youtube watching. I suggest anyone else finding it troubling in any way do the same. If watching the unfolding drama makes you feel helpless, and there's nothing you can do about it, find another focus.

I've heard from one of my friends with his mum (who suffers from dementia) in a care home. He can't go, obviously, but he's been told (and this is to a local Councillor, which he is) by the NHS that doctors will not be attending calls out to elderly care-home residents, nor admitting them to hospital. The staff has medical drugs they can choose to use to reduce pain, but that's the limit of any treatment.

We are now in a situation where people are being chosen to die to focus on others. I think I can say that Tory cuts are now provably literally killing people (which we knew anyway, but it was a trickle). These deaths won't be included in the figures I'm guessing. Priti Patel has kindly extended the visas of NHS staff who presumably were about to be booted out the country. She's all heart. Presumably all those good ol British people they are training up would have stepped in to cover for them.

If I could take any consolation from this, and I don't, it would be that the lying tosspots who promised the earth while stabbing people in the back are going to be spending the rest of their term in office trying to explain how they allowed important life-saving preparedness to wither on the vine. The rest of us can just say "herd immunity" to shut up any future PR BS they spout. They will never have an answer to that.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 12:51 PM

It really is pretty disgusting to see how other countries are pulling together to deal with this crisis while in the UK the government failed to prevent it, failed to do anything to mitigate it for the month headstart they had on Italy, and now are not even holding their hands up and saying anything about it."The science changed!"

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 12:54 PM

Nice to see Boris has been keeping up with the death rates and decided to stay in isolation a week longer. At least next week, self isolation will not be an excuse.

Posted by: Dobbo 3rd April 2020, 02:15 PM

UK has now overtaken Spain now in daily increases and won't be long until it surpasses Italy too to only sit behind USA...

Posted by: Social Hisstance 3rd April 2020, 03:06 PM

UK, Spain, USA, all late responses.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 3rd April 2020, 03:14 PM

It's nothing short of an utter disgrace for any developed country who were fortunate to get a later breakout to end up with steeper curves than the previous most effected countries, appalling governance completely failing to protect its citizens, surely its most basic task.

Posted by: Cameron 3rd April 2020, 03:17 PM

With the incapable Boris Johnston as the PM in a Tory-run country who shunned the NHS, I cannot say I am surprised. Get us a leader who knows what to do. At least Nicola Sturgeon isn't tuned to the moon for Scotland.

Posted by: Dobbo 3rd April 2020, 03:31 PM

That news about school grading is brutal. Certainly wouldn't have benefited me as I tended to pull it out the bag in the final exams!

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 03:42 PM

The Queen will address the Nation and the Commonwealth across most channels at 8pm on Sunday in a pre-recorded broadcast.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 03:44 PM

I read today that its not even that the UK doesn't have gloves, masks etc. for NHS workers. It has them in warehouses and factories in the country, it just doesn't have the supply chain correctly set up to be sending them where they're needed, or, shockingly, any kind of reserves in place IN the hospitals themselves.

So you get doctors and nurses working without masks and gloves, catching it, and getting ill and dying as a result.

And you also have doctors and nurses going home with it on their clothes because there's no washing machines in the hospitals. I used to work in a bloody music venue and even we had washing machines!

It bloody beggars belief that the Tory government for the last ten years has overseen and signed off on this state of affairs as fine - probably because to actually deal with any of this would have cost a little more MONEY and they'd rather give themselves a lofty pay rise to spaff away on privatising more services. Sickening.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:05 PM

Somebody on DS said that how come supermarkets are making deliveries 24 hours a day 7 days a week now and have much more stock when the NHS can't get what they need.

Posted by: LikeLeeIs 3rd April 2020, 04:07 PM

So my company closed on Tuesday but due to being agency staff we were told we were getting furlough but now they’re not so sure and we won’t find out until the end of April

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:11 PM

Must be awful not to know whether you'll have a job after all this or not.

Posted by: 🍆 3rd April 2020, 04:14 PM

"somebody on DS", "someone I know", "this neighbour of mine", "person on a forum".

CLEARLY you want to know the same so why do you keep hiding behind other people?

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 04:18 PM

Besides, it's not like food deliveries are some unimportant part of the economy, it's how people are getting fed.

But the reason the supply chains are better for supermarkets is because they're fully funded corporate entities with a mapped out infrastructure. Perhaps if public services had been funded better before now, there would be a supply chain for the health service to match its needs.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:24 PM

Oh I am sorry. What rattled your cage today?

Am sick of Boris and the Tories being blamed for the NHS not getting supplies. No-one could have predicted this would happen this year. There would still have been problems had Corbyn been PM today. It'll be sorted out.

Posted by: Queefantine 3rd April 2020, 04:28 PM

There would have been, and that's due to the immense DAMAGE the shitty evil tories have done to the nhs over 10 years. It needs more than a bandaid and a couple of months x

The nhs should neeever have been attacked like this. They wanted to privatise it. They were privatising it. They wanted it to fsil. This is on your beloved landed geñtry posh boys x

The only way it gets sorted out is under a Labour government, you clueless brainwashed swine!!

Posted by: *Tim 3rd April 2020, 04:32 PM

Gurl. Boris literally saw China, SK, Japan and all of Western Europe fall victim to the virus yet NO action was taken at all as precautions. This is ALL the governments fault. They could've prevented so much.

The NHS already struggles with flu season, don't you think that'd send some signals?!

Posted by: Suedehead2 3rd April 2020, 04:34 PM

Yes, because Corbyn couldn't have reversed ten years of cuts in one month. It was the Tories who decided not to buy any more ventilators despite being told there were nowhere near enough to cope with a major outbreak. It is the Tories who have dithered over ordering extra supplies of protective equipment despite companies queuing up to supply it. It is the Tories who have failed to step up testing and have lied about the numbers and the reasons for their failure.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:35 PM

Are you watching the live news conference? The Deputy Chief MO has just said we're nowhere near running out of ventilators and there's one for everyone who needs one and many more on the way next week.

Posted by: dhwe 3rd April 2020, 04:36 PM

the situation here in the US right now is what happens when you give medical and insurance companies free rein over your healthcare system. apparently our government ordered 40,000 extra ventilators in 2008, which the company scrapped in 2012 after a merger: https://prospect.org/health/men-and-women-who-shrank-the-us-ventilator-supply/

and here we are!

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 04:36 PM

Perhaps all the money they’ve shaken from the magic money tree in order to pay all these wages out (well they’ve promised to) would have been much better spent over the past ten years on our NHS who the could have been at least a little bit more prepared for something like this.

No, no one could have predicted this but that doesn’t mean we should have been thrifty with our health service. The fact is, we weren’t the first country affected and our government STILL out saving money above saving lives until they absolutely had to.

I’m sick of you sticking up for Boris, quite frankly. You’re either trolling, just as awful a person as he is, or both.

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 04:37 PM

Pretty much an indictment of underfunding the NHS at any point. Which brings us back to the last 10 years of Tory governance, which this government is a continuation of, which deserves the blame. And any other government that cut it instead of giving it the tools it needs.

Cause and effect is not limited to one year or indeed any short time period - the problems with public services (and not just health, the crisis has shown how transport, social security and essential services like broadband are all woefully inadequately provided for) have become systemic and in dire need of funding. State action is now holding the country together.

Posted by: Suedehead2 3rd April 2020, 04:38 PM

There may be enough at the moment but will there be enough next week? What about the week after? Don't be so naïve.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:40 PM

Are you referring to the current Sky BB fault? If so, Sky has just said it's nothing to do with increased demand but a main London exchange fault that could happen any time.

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 04:41 PM

It is so disheartening to see after so much American political talk has been about the dire necessity of healthcare security for all, that this comes along and truly screws them over. A long time coming, but I hope that anyone who defends the private insurance industry after this never sees public office again.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 3rd April 2020, 04:44 PM

Advert spotted on the Tube - just for Chris:

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 04:46 PM

The Tories in charge now are the same Tories who have been in charge now and who have decided ACTIVELY to under-fund the NHS and make it harder to bring nurses over and to incentivise people into nursing and medicine in the first place.

And no amount of clapping and banging on pan lids for the NHS is going to help that. Maybe people could organise some kind of a collection to buy gloves and masks from amazon, that would do more good than making a racket for five minutes every Thursday night and then going back to the telly.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:46 PM

I am not amused at the above. Boris has said over and over again that he has no plans to dismantle and sell-off the NHS.

Posted by: Queefantine 3rd April 2020, 04:46 PM

Chris id a troll. No one can be that f***ing dense.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 3rd April 2020, 04:47 PM

I think that was referring to the 2017 WannaCry cyber attack which did cripple the NHS because of their underfunded IT.

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 04:48 PM

I wasn't, I was referring to the idea that broadband is a necessity for modern life and therefore should be made a universal basic service that anyone can access, the same for any other basic necessity.

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 04:48 PM

Boris also lies ALL THE TIME.

He needs the NHS now to get him out of this mess.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 04:48 PM

The whole UK system is broken with the media just letting things slide. Bloody Piers Morgan seems to be one of the few not letting people get away with bullshitting. Ten years of "we're putting more money than ever into the NHS" with no journalist saying "is it more when taking into account inflation? or population growth? Is there enough to keep up with advances in technology? To offset the recession?" To which the answers would have been a sheepish no across the board.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:49 PM

Most people can access it. Do you mean it should be free?

Posted by: 🍆 3rd April 2020, 04:50 PM

I will never understand why American people don't want free healthcare for all there. Or at least they don't want it bad enough. It's literally everyone's right.

Even Russia has that and as much as there have been talks about trying to make the system stricter on unemployed people, nothing will change in the next many years.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:52 PM

Selling off the NHS would be political suicide. Boris apparently likes being PM. He's nor going to knowingly do anything to risk not being returned to power at the next election.

Posted by: 🍆 3rd April 2020, 04:53 PM

That's why he said "anyone", not "most". So yes, it should be free.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:54 PM

It's not essential though. Not like food and water. People not online can go to libraries and internet cafes to use the net.

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 04:56 PM

The problem is Boris only likes his job because it’s fun to say that he’s PM. He has been shirking a lot of responsibility and clearly isn’t up to the job. It’s why we’re all terrified.

Posted by: *Tim 3rd April 2020, 04:56 PM

He lowkey has when he failed to take measures against the virus to prevent in spreading and already crushing the NHS staff in the first 2 weeks

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 04:57 PM

Not during lockdown they can’t.

Posted by: dhwe 3rd April 2020, 04:58 PM

the idea of universal healthcare has become more popular here over the last few years. its just that anytime the idea even gets so much as a mention by sanders or ocasio-cortez in public spheres republicans and establishment democrats are quick to raise the "SOCIALISM!!!" alarm and it falls through, bc socialism is still a dirty word here.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 04:58 PM

Are we all terrified? Wouldn't say I am but maybe a bit apprehensive that I may get it. If you stay in though it's unlikely that you will.

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 04:59 PM

Can they do that now?

Ah yes, that's a point. The cost of food and water. And while we're at it, housing. We all need it, ergo, we should all have free access to it. Those that withhold it to sit on an 'investment' are parasites on our society and this crisis has thrown that into the spotlight.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 05:01 PM

How's that working out for them these days?

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 05:01 PM

In case anyone's interested, Boris still has "mild virus symptoms" so is still self-isolating.

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 05:01 PM

It’s not just the virus that terrifies people it’s the completely inept government we have too. It’s easy to say ‘stay inside, you’ll be fine’ when you are forced to go to a supermarket full of customers not following guidelines just so that you can eat. I’m terrified because I still don’t think they’re telling us everything because they care more about how they look than what they do.

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 05:03 PM

Translation: death rate still soaring so I’ll hide out another week and let someone else take the heat.

I wonder what the excuse will be next week.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 05:03 PM

The whole issue is that people can't stay in because everyone needs food. And selfish panic buyers have taken all the slots for food delivery.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 05:05 PM

No I think you'll find that it's virtually impossible now to get a delivery slot because of the sheer demand from people who are scared to go out or from those who are self-isolating or ill.

Posted by: Queefantine 3rd April 2020, 05:05 PM

That's why they do it by STEALTH. The tories always promise not to sell something off. And guess what? 10 years later, it's gone. Oops.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 3rd April 2020, 05:10 PM

Chris Chris Chris you're so naive. Mentally ill people killing themselves because there is no care available, depressed ditto, long waiting times for operations, hours waiting to get seen, hours more on trolleys in agony, these are all actual things I've seen I've been on first-name terms with the NHS over the last 10 years, virtually. Meanwhile private hospitals get to stuff their difficult cases onto the NHS so they can make shitloads of money dealing with more minor things and the taxpayer takes up the bulk of the very expensive ops.

Johnson promised 350m a week for the NHS. If it hadnt been for the coronavirus he'd have delivered bugger all. The Tories presided over doctor and nurse shortages, as you'll find out if you ever need hospital treatment. PS there is no after care. You go home, goodbye. Or you go to the cemetery.

Johnson is a shirker, always has been. It's not just the virus he has that is making him look so haggard after 3 months in power, it's the realisation that he's out of his depth, and reality has hit him squarely in the balls. He has killed people by being such a dick. It's on his conscience for the rest of his life, and nothing he claims to try and excuse it will change that fact. He thought it was just the flu and was more bothered about getting Brexit Done. Suddenly not such a priority for him, I'm guessing, given the people who voted for it are dying just as much as those who didn't.

I do agree though that the NHS is absolutely guaranteed to be safe for the next 20 or 30 years. Any politician who dares even talk about touching it will be crucified. Corvid-19 has seen to that. Not Boris.

Posted by: Dexton 3rd April 2020, 05:10 PM

I need to stop coming in here because it genuinely scares me now. Yesterday my grandma (76 with diabetes) and Aunty (58 with terminal ovarian cancer) got on their plane back to the UK from Australia... They’ve been isolated for the past 2 weeks over here, as have the rest of us for the most part bar work & essential shopping, but only just managed to sort out flights with the embassy and Emirates who seemingly forgot about them until the other day. The situation over there sounds dire and I just can’t think about all my family I have in the UK having to struggle through this

Luckily my grandma on the other side of my family has been self isolated for 3 weeks now. Groceries are delivered to her door via friends or family who leave it on the doorstep for her to collect once they’ve left. She’s thinking smart but living on her own in that huge house now my grandad isn’t there anymore worries me just as much as if she was still walking about in public

Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 05:21 PM

if there's anything the lounge mods can do to help make this a safer place, please let me know. this is a terrifying situation and i'm not sure all of the discussion here is completely appropriate (i find it a bit hard to read sometimes as well), what do you guys think about moving the nitty gritty parts of it to the politics forum?

Posted by: Calum 3rd April 2020, 05:27 PM

^ 100% all of what Lotti said.

If people would feel more comfortable with this thread (and its predecessors) being moved to the News & Politics forum, for the sake of your mental health, wellbeing, sanity, or just not having to see it in such a prominent section of the forum, then that's what we'll do.

The community thread can remain where it is in the Lounge though, as long as we all know what its purpose is.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 05:30 PM

Re the internet discussion I'm not sure why we bother responding because the valid points made are just pivoted away from on to another topic without so much as a "good point, you're right about that". Making this less a conversation or discussion and more a tract of one person posting their opinions and talking AT everyone else and not actually replying to anything they don't like the sound of or which challenges their established views.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 05:32 PM

I have replied to everything and all the points made and think we actually have a good discussion here. At least this place is not full of idiots like some other forums. I admit I was wrong as people can't go to Net cafes and libraries now.

Posted by: Queefantine 3rd April 2020, 05:33 PM

I think it should stay here. People don't have to come into the thread after all .

Posted by: PeteFromLeeds 3rd April 2020, 05:34 PM

The first two threads of this were fine, I'm not sure why this has suddenly turned into something reminiscent of the Politics forum (and basically the reason I stopped posting there). I do think if this is going to turn into what the first three pages have become then it really should go into Politics mainly for the sanity of people who use the Lounge.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 05:35 PM

I agree Michael. Bit like a TV show. You don't have to watch it. No-one's forcing anyone to open the thread regularly.

If you'd all like me to stop posting in this thread then I will do. Just read the first 3 pages and can't see anything I've posted that is wrong.

Posted by: Calum 3rd April 2020, 05:45 PM

You don't need to stop posting, you just need to get some perspective and show some compassion.

Both of you seem to be forgetting that a this is a major, developing, worldwide situation that is impacting everybody - so when people see that there's a lot of discussion going on in the thread, they're more likely to click and read (particularly being in the Lounge too).

Some of what's being posted in here though is becoming a bit too heavy, unnecessary and in some cases pretty insensitive. We're now at a point where members in the community are sadly losing people close to them or that they know. We should be able to give people the escape they need, and not a constant reminder of the scary place we're in right now.

Posted by: LikeLeeIs 3rd April 2020, 05:48 PM

No I do have a job to go back to As the company wants me back but because it’s through agency it makes it complicated and it makes the furlough a very complicated one

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 05:49 PM

I have compassion and resent the insinuation that I haven't.

With respect you don't come in to a Coronavirus thread for escapism as it's a very serious subject. Maybe shouldn't be in the Lounge then as that seems to be for more light-hearted threads. I was a bit surprised the first one started in here rather than N&P.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 05:57 PM

Moved now then eh...

I don't mind where it is. If I'm honest I think you guys are being a little precious saying that a global pandemic managed (however well or poorly) by govermments shouldn't have any elements of political discussion within it. These are things that affect everyone and shouldn't, in my view, be a reality that we hide ourselves away from. That pretends that nothing could have been done at any stage which is simply inaccurate.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 06:00 PM

On that point I don't get why people hide away from news & politics as if they were dirty words. God forbid one goes onto a forum to share their opinions of things going on in the world. Let's just all pretend to have no opinion on anything instead out of politeness in case we (gasp) *disagree* on something & have to acknowledge that.

Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 06:01 PM

political discussion belongs in the politics forum. We’ve had to move brexit discussions to here for similar reasons! The lounge is meant to be a place of escapism, not hardcore political discussion and if members are feeling uncomfortable coming in here then it can be moved

we all know there’s a particular reason this keeps going off course anyway and it keeps being fed 🙃

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 06:01 PM

I very much agree. It doesn’t matter to me where the thread is but wherever it is, this isn’t the kind of topic that should shy away from political discussion.

Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 06:02 PM

also for clarity I have a politics degree so please don’t accuse me of shielding myself from news and politics, I read the news around this and discuss it with people in real life. I come to this forum when I want to discuss politics, I go to the lounge when I want a break from my degree and studies!

Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 06:03 PM

now it’s here it can be more unfiltered political discussion

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 06:03 PM

Not challenging you lotti btw

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 06:05 PM

Wasnt including you in what i said. I meant rather, if politics is involved in the discussion, it should be. If that necessitates moving it, well and good. Xo

Posted by: Calum 3rd April 2020, 06:06 PM

Just to clarify: not trying to discourage anybody from political discussion; it's naturally going to come up in some threads covering issues like this. Up until now in the previous thread it hadn't been an issue at all, but I'm sure we all know why it has become one in the past few days.

Posted by: lotita 3rd April 2020, 06:07 PM

thank you!

Neither me and (I think but I don’t want to speak for them!) or the rest of the lounge mods want to stop all political discussion, we all recognise the importance surrounding the politics of this! we just want it to be in the best possible place. now I’ll try get my intellectual hat on when I come back in here

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 06:10 PM

Nw mods, you wouldn't be able to discourage me

Point taken. Tbf i did slightly wonder why it was where it was in the first place xo

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 06:12 PM

Been quite a while since there was ANY discussion in News & Politics with this taking over everything so I'm actually a little relieved, I am weird but in some ways reading useless online political arguments is comforting, and I don't have to worry that we're taking it too far towards the politics end.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 06:54 PM

From The Sun:

Emma Tarry, 26, is a mum-of-two from Lancaster and her stockpile includes 800 nappies, 14 boxes of cereal and 68 tins of dog food.

She is terrified of her family being stuck indoors without food so bought a BB gun in case anyone tries to nick her hoard.

“I researched how to legally buy a BB gun or air rifle and bought one from a local gun shop.

I’ve previously had shooting lessons on a local gun range, it’s legal and stored correctly and it gives me peace of mind.

Three weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and heard someone trying to break into my garden shed.

I stayed upstairs and pointed the BB gun out the window and told the man to ‘eat the dirt’.

I didn’t go downstairs - I was shaking and the dogs were barking.

I’m a single mum on a limited income and my kids come first.

When the coronavirus hit I made a list of supplies we needed to stay indoors and on lockdown for three months - my decision to prepare and stay indoors was correct and no one can tell me otherwise.

I used my savings to buy it all and had two trolleys at one supermarket - people were pointing and criticising.

I ignored them - if it’s raining you don’t go outdoors without an umbrella, so you don’t go into lockdown without enough food for your family.

I bought a double door freezer and stocked it with ten kilos of chicken, ten boxes of fish fingers, oven chips, frozen fruit and veg and five chocolate gateaux cheese cakes.

I have 800 nappies, 20 packets of kids wipes, seven tubs of vitamins, six bottles of calpol and paracetamol to last three months for myself.

I have 14 boxes of cereal, 12 litres of UHT milk and 15 Easter eggs.

And I got a pack of 200 gloves and five N95 masks for myself and the kids

I didn’t forget the pets either, with six tubs of fish food and 68 tins for my two dogs.

I steam clean everything before it comes inside and wash all the post, if it comes in plastic bags, with disinfectant."


No mention of loo rolls.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 07:14 PM

I wonder how Emma votes.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 3rd April 2020, 07:23 PM

It's odd that the message from government is that there are enough ventilators. My family has today been informed that if anyone in the nursing home my Nan currently resides in contracts COVID-19 they won't be admitted to hospital because they won't be enough ventilators and they won't be a priority case. If there are plenty of ventilators to go around there's surely no need for measures like this to be brought in?

Posted by: T Boy 3rd April 2020, 07:23 PM

That woman is unhinged.

Posted by: Oliver 3rd April 2020, 07:28 PM

Probably doesn’t know how to...

Posted by: I. :II: z 3rd April 2020, 07:37 PM

Stories from the S*n like that are obviously the exception and hardly newsworthy except to rags, there's no need to copy-paste them here, what are we going to say? 'ooh how terrible I bet everyone's such a terrible hoarder let's get all depressed at how terrible things are'.

People just need to stay inside and thankfully, as far as I can tell, most are pulling together in solidarity.

The lack of medical supplies is going to really hurt, I really worry that ventilators are going to become incredibly scarce. What you're describing is essentially triage and from what I can tell it's already well in place, I do hope your nan's nursing home and others like them can remain safe during this time.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 3rd April 2020, 07:56 PM

Thanks. It's been closed to visitors for at least three weeks now so is probably low risk. And from this decision making process it's not one I would disagree with. It's a dementia care home and some of the residents are quite late stage, if there has to be a prioritisation then yes, they're a low priority. But it's frustrating when the message from government is that everything is ok, when in reality that's far from the truth and the health service is already having to decide which patients they're going to try and keep alive. It's also frustrating when these government messages are just accepted as truth and that any critique is rejected.

Posted by: Social Hisstance 3rd April 2020, 08:08 PM

Good this has been moved to news and politics, it of course is 'news' and there is also some politics involved to do with how countries are dealing with the pandemic and so it fits here.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 08:13 PM

One thing that doesn't seem to be uniform nationwide is the fact that no visitors are allowed to Covid 19 patients. Our local hospital allows one visitor, usually next of kin, no children, no-one with cough or temperature and all in protective clothing and mask. Most hospitals aren't allowing anyone in though. If one can then surely others can too. There should be national guidelines on this.

Posted by: Social Hisstance 3rd April 2020, 08:27 PM

Tough decision. One the one hand allowing one visitor is good for the mental health of the patient which might speed up or increase the chances of their recovery. Not everyone has video message technology. One the other hand there is always a chance the visitor might catch the disease there even with protective equipment.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 08:30 PM

Should be a national decision by the Health Department though and not left up to each NHS Trust or even hospital to decide. This was brought up on QT last night. It's not fair that some can see their dying relative but someone in the next town can't.

Posted by: Suedehead2 3rd April 2020, 08:49 PM

Except that there's a shortage of protective clothing for NHS staff, let alone visitors.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 08:50 PM

Yes I know that.

Posted by: J00ps 3rd April 2020, 09:01 PM

So I don't know if this has been posted before but the triage thing is actually not how its being made out by these articles. Its not that they're rationing the ventilators from badness or mercenary. They're just applying principles of palliative care to people who won't otherwise survive, rather than forcing them to stay alive in pain until the virus actively kills them.

Its a whole medical ethics thing to do with patient care & not prolonging life in suffering for the sake of it.

Obv this doesn't absolve the gov of the supply chain issues & shortages mind.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 3rd April 2020, 10:25 PM

The Daily Mirror says that the present restrictions will last until at least June 14th, according to their government sources.

Posted by: Steve201 4th April 2020, 12:07 AM

They can't really judge that far ahead, it'll be reassessed every 2/3 weeks imo!

Posted by: Crazy Chris 4th April 2020, 06:26 AM

Exactly what I thought Steve. They can't say then as things may improve before then. It'll be extended 3 weeks imo, taking us to 3rd May.

Posted by: Quarantilas 4th April 2020, 07:06 AM

Putting an end date on anything, even if it’s just via Doms whispers to select mouthpieces, is reckless. They last as long as is required to keep as many people safe and well as is possible and to keep our healthcare system from having a meltdown. The US is a prime example of what happens when you don’t have lockdown measures and the shit healthcare system is overwhelmed.

My restrictions here, that have a 93% approval rating, are extended for 2 weeks at a time. We’ve been told measure in place until 19th but further extensions are likely. I think for historical reasons were only going a short period at a time, but everyone has got the message that we’re here for the long haul.

Posted by: Quarantilas 4th April 2020, 07:46 AM

https://www.berlin.de/sen/inneres/presse/pressemitteilungen/2020/pressemitteilung.915948.php

The demonic sweet potato has stolen, literally stolen, a shipment of 200.000 masks from 3M (so the good ones) in Bangkok that were on their way to the state of Berlin for our public sector workers (mainly the Police). What kind of dirty c**t does that in a pandemic.

Defend this Chris. I DARE you.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 4th April 2020, 10:31 AM

Went to Asda in Barking and had to direct the bus driver lol. He said it's his first time here as he's usually in West London, at Wimbledon depot. Very quiet with most things in stock and no queues. Only limit is 1 pack of loo rolls and 3 baby milk. Oh no broccoli.

Sorry meant that to be in the Community thread.

Posted by: *Tim 4th April 2020, 10:48 AM

He did the same for France and Canada it seems, even his own states apparantly
Turkey stole from Spain as well

Posted by: Crazy Chris 4th April 2020, 10:56 AM

Sun article: BRITS are flouting lockdown rules to go for bike rides in the sun and exercise together as the UK enjoys a mini heatwave. Pictures taken today show people failing to socially distance - despite the UK's chief nurse begging Brits to stay at home in memory of two hero nurses who lost their lives fighting the bug.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 4th April 2020, 10:59 AM

The US has banned export of all masks made there now as they need them too but I agree that as these were in transit they should have allowed them to proceed to Germany. Doubt Trump himself knew anything about them though.

Posted by: *Tim 4th April 2020, 11:05 AM

LMAO I CANNOT

His people are hijacking them, ofcourse he knew about it! They were seized in bangkok as well.

Canada has threatened to close their border for all traffic, which means the US won't have the one product needed to produce their own masks. I hope Trudeau pulls through. NATO my arse

Edit: Got my facts messed up. Turkey seized medical ventilators from China to Spain

Posted by: I. :II: z 4th April 2020, 11:12 AM

Love to absolve the leader of a country of responsibility for his country's foreign policy offenses.

Posted by: Steve201 4th April 2020, 11:18 AM

Reminds me of that scene in titanic when Billy Zane was pushing everyone off he last lifeboat for fear of being swamped!

Posted by: Mart!n 4th April 2020, 11:42 AM

Its getting warmer during the week especially down the South East, so people are going to venture out more, tougher restrictions might come into play.

Posted by: Suedehead2 4th April 2020, 11:52 AM

The government's muddled message isn't helping. I'm sure there are a lot of people still uncertain whether the government is issuing instructions, enforceable by the police, or advice.

It started with the initial announcement last week which was portrayed as strong advice rather than an instruction. The legal status and police powers weren't really unveiled until the legislation was published and that got rather less coverage. Even the message about this weekend has been depicted as advice and instruction at different times. Getting that part of the message right should be the easy bit.

Posted by: Mart!n 4th April 2020, 12:10 PM

VE Day 9 May is a bit of a dull affair now, after all the hoo ha moving the Bank Holiday to a Friday, mind you they didn't see this coming.

Posted by: Dobbo 4th April 2020, 12:14 PM

This country is full of idiots. Shouldn't even need a government instruction to know not to go down the park for f*** all reason.

Then there's the brainwashed fools setting fire to 5G masts because some airhead celebrities are spreading fake conspiracy theories. They should be banned from using social media if they've no idea what they're talking about.

Posted by: Quarantilas 4th April 2020, 12:30 PM

He could literally come up to you and like murder you and you’d use your dying breath to defend him.


There’s no point in even trying to have a discussion with you. The man is a vile c**t literally stealing and hoarding the worlds supplies in a pandemic because he was a lazy c**t and was so slow to react to it that other countries placed orders first that need to be fulfilled and he is demanded they are physically seized and taken back to the us. The state of Berlin literally names and shames the US gov as being wholly responsible


I got an additional bank holiday for it in addition to the mayday one so no complaining here looking forward to my three days off in May


Honestly the number of people actually believing this garbage is horrifying.

Posted by: Klaus 4th April 2020, 01:52 PM

The amount of new cases is starting to flatten in the UK as the effects of the lockdown start to show!

Posted by: Queefantine 4th April 2020, 02:26 PM

Turkey has stolen a shipment of ventilators to Spain as well.

Posted by: Euphorique 4th April 2020, 05:09 PM

Tests per 1 million pop in Europe:

1 - Iceland - 69,276
2 - Luxembourg - 34,287
3 - Liechtenstein - 23,605
4 - Malta - 21,975
5 - Norway - 19,528
6 - Switzerland - 17,729
7 - San Marino - 17,270
8 - Estonia - 14,392
9 - Slovenia - 13,040
10 - Austria - 11,562
11 - Germany - 10,962
12 - Latvia - 10,275
13 - Italy - 10,252
14 - Portugal - 7,952
15 - Lithuania - 7,852
16 - Cyprus - 7,825
17 - Spain - 7,593
18 - Denmark - 7,055
19 - Czechia - 6,926
20 - Ireland - 6,119
21 - Belgium - 5,424
22 - Finland - 5,234
23 - Netherlands - 4,401
24 - Russia - 4,379
25 - Sweden - 3,654
26 - France - 3,436
27 - Belarus - 3,386
28 - UK - 2,698
29 - Slovakia - 2,497
30 - Croatia - 2,395
31 - Macedonia - 2,362
32 - Greece - 2,153
33 - Hungary - 2,011
34 - Poland - 1,926
35 - Montenegro - 1,899
36 - Romania - 1,876
37 - Turkey - 1,680
38 - Bosnia & Herz. - 1,431
39 - Albania - 781
40 - Serbia - 733
41 - Ukraine - 115
42 - Bulgaria - 81
43 - Moldova - 42

Bonus

Hong Kong - 12,005
Australia - 11,203
South Korea - 8,875
Canada - 8,021
Singapore - 6,666
USA - 4,172
Iran - 952
South Africa - 849
Ecuador - 585
Thailand - 339
Japan - 312 (stopped releasing data)
Brazil - 258
Egypt - 244
Mexico - 122
Morroco - 109
India - 84
Venezuela - 63
Kenya - 41
Indonesia - 26
Rwanda - 16
Bangladesh - 13
Mozambique - 11

China hasn't revealed it's data

Posted by: Suedehead2 5th April 2020, 08:19 AM

The Guy's and St Thomas's research project has reported some of its findings. They have 1.2 million people (including me) reporting daily on whether they are showing any of the symptoms of Covid-19.

Their latest https://covid.joinzoe.com/datais very interesting.

Take a look at Scotland. There is a belt across from Edinburgh to Glasgow with a higher concentration of cases. This is not particularly surprising. The virus can spread a lot faster in densely-populated areas. Then look further south. In particular, look at where a low concentration of cases across the map suddenly becomes a much higher concentration immediately to the south. That just happens to be the Scotland-England border. There is no major difference in population density, so what is the reason? Some possibilities...

1) All respondents are self-selected and the project is dependent on them being honest. It is possible that there is a bias in the population of respondents, but I can't think a reason why it would cause such a sharp contrast.

2) The Scottish government introduced measures to stop the spread before the UK government.

3) Nicola Sturgeon's messages were clearer than the ones coming from Downing Street meaning that Scots acted before people in England.

4) Nicola Sturgeon is more trusted than Boris Johnson so more people took her seriously when she called on people to change their behaviour.

5) There is no reason. It's just a coincidence.

Posted by: Quarantilas 5th April 2020, 08:40 AM

Ironically the Scottish Borders is the one part of the country more likely to listen to Boris. They get their news from England as they’re in an ITV region and not an STV region.


I think that 3 is the biggest contributor personally. My parents can’t stand the FM but have stopped complaining during this crisis and are more critical of the UK gov than the Scottish gov at the moment. The message is clear and there is less flip flopping in approach. They’re not over promising and then pretending they never said that 15 minutes later.

Posted by: Suedehead2 5th April 2020, 09:28 AM

Meanwhile, Trump's lies get even more ridiculous. His latest excuse for a lack of testing is that his administration inherited an obsolete test from the Obama administration. As this is a new virus, known about for just a few months, one wonders how he thinks a test for it had been developed over three years ago.

Posted by: Klaus 5th April 2020, 09:59 AM

He's panicking because this is one situation where it's more difficult than ever to shift blame onto others which is what his whole life is based on. I mean he'll still do it and he'll still have his rabid supporters believing him but it's nice to watch him squirm over his own failings.

Posted by: 🍆 5th April 2020, 10:32 AM

He could always put someone in charge of the Federal response and blame it on them afterwards which is what will probably happen knowing that's what he does literally all the time

Posted by: J00ps 5th April 2020, 11:05 AM

I would hazrad that Nicola Sturgeon might be the most trusted politician in the United Kingdom, by Scots assuredly, and probably by a lot of English and others as well.

(There will remain always of course, a minority of English people like my grandmother who distrusts Nicola inherently because she *is* Scottish and for reasons like that she is a short haired woman, etc.)

Posted by: Mart!n 5th April 2020, 11:24 AM

Apparently Boris's partner has got it, she has been tested.

And Hancock has reported public sunbathing is banned during lockdown

Posted by: Klaus 5th April 2020, 11:27 AM

Yet the Scottish Chief Medical Officer drove her family to their second home an hour away from where they live

Posted by: Mack. 5th April 2020, 01:31 PM

A total of 4,934 patients have died in hospital after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Saturday, the Department of Health has said, up by 621 from 4,313 the day before.

Posted by: Social Hisstance 5th April 2020, 03:18 PM

The only slight positive thing is the daily death rate is less than yesterday, hopefully tomorrow we can see a reduction too.

Posted by: *Tim 5th April 2020, 04:41 PM

I'm lowkey fearing for a weekend effect as we've seen in the past few weeks in other countries. Fingers crossed

Posted by: lewistgreen 5th April 2020, 08:24 PM

Boris has gone into hospital voluntarily for testing following medical advice

Posted by: T Boy 5th April 2020, 08:48 PM

Has he now?

Yesterday he was feeling better but still had a temperature.

Posted by: Steve201 6th April 2020, 12:54 AM

I doubt he has gone voluntarily he would have been advised to.

It can't be good if he's had it for 10 days and still is have trouble enough to have to go to hospital. Hope he gets well soon.

Posted by: Quarantilas 6th April 2020, 06:09 AM

She has now resigned after it was admitted it wasn’t the first time 🤦🏼‍♂️

Posted by: T Boy 6th April 2020, 08:42 AM

What are these ‘routine tests’ he’s gone in for? I think they’re playing it down and he’s seriously unwell.

Posted by: Steve201 6th April 2020, 10:16 AM

I would say it's to check why the virus is persisting after 10 days and checking how his other organs are coping with the virus and lack of oxygen.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 6th April 2020, 03:02 PM

Being PM is a very stressful job, it ages you at the best of times. Stress slows recovery. If only he'd taken his own revised advice about safe procedures, rather then the initial "everything's fine" laissez-faire attitude. Fabulous how some people who wanted pubs to stay open and life to continue as normal are suddenly concerned about one man, having not shown much in the way of sympathy for the tens of thousands who have already died, and those still getting ill.

Bet he hasnt had a "get-well soon" card from Trump. I can't possibly repeat a lengthy personal post to Trump by Tommy Lee, nor link to it, and it would be wrong of me to suggest it's in any way hilarious, but since Motely Crue's Tommy had "that" bedroom tape sneak out it's been obvious that he can recognise a huge cock when he sees one.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 6th April 2020, 03:20 PM

Meanwhile Easter is looking forward to be a mass-slaughter of Evangelists in the USA as religious gatherings remain open in 8 States. Some Pastors are calling the coronavirus God's punishment for Man's sin, in a flagrant attempt to get more followers using fear. I'd suggest it was, if anything, punishment for mistreating the natural world, but to each their own.

One Pastor has died from the virus after pooh-poohing it's existence and carrying on as normal.

Presumably all hoping to assist their flocks into heaven that bit sooner and underline how science is an actual thing to everyone else. It's like Jonestown never happened at all and everyone has forgotten about it or learned anything about manipulating egotists.

Posted by: *Tim 6th April 2020, 07:17 PM

Bojo is in the ICU now

Posted by: Klaus 6th April 2020, 07:18 PM

oh shit

Posted by: Brett-Butler 6th April 2020, 07:27 PM

Things got real. This virus doesn't discriminate. If this doesn't show the importance of staying at home, only leaving the house if you need to and wearing a mask and social distancing whilst doing it, this is it.

Posted by: Rooney 6th April 2020, 07:53 PM

Let's hope he pulls through, not sure the country could take the PM dying personally. He could just be in ICU as it's easier to manage - Russia State TV called him as on a ventilator earlier but Downing Street called it as fake news..

Posted by: Gerald 6th April 2020, 08:18 PM

Quite scary news. Best wishes to Boris!!!

Posted by: dandruff* 6th April 2020, 08:24 PM

Yes I hope he recovers quickly, it is indeed scary news that he is in intensive care now.

Posted by: Bré 6th April 2020, 09:50 PM

I've read a lot that 10 days of symptoms is a significant turning point where people either get better, or they think they're getting better but then it suddenly gets much worse (consistent with Boris' message the other day about 'feeling better'). :x

Posted by: Chez Wombat 6th April 2020, 10:23 PM

Much as I disapprove of him, I really hope Boris can make a recovery, we certainly can't be losing a prime minister right now. Just goes to show that even those with the best access to healthcare can't avoid it entirely D:

Posted by: I. :II: z 7th April 2020, 02:32 AM

It was bad the minute he was rushed to hospital on a Sunday night with an announcement coming alongside the Queen's speech. I really hope he recovers but their downplaying throughout is frustratingly transparent.

Posted by: Suedehead2 7th April 2020, 06:19 AM

For him to have been taken to hospital on a Sunday night, his condition was clearly worse than they were letting on. The claim that he remained in charge was, therefore, probably not entirely true.

Posted by: T Boy 7th April 2020, 07:10 AM

I too wish Boris the speediest recovery but I am fearing the worst as each update is revealing more and more. Number 10 need to just be completely honest with us from this point on and should have been the whole time. We’ve gone from ‘Boris is fine folks, really’ to being in intensive care within a day. We don’t need reassuring if there isn’t anything reassuring to say, it’ll only make things worse in the long run.

Posted by: J00ps* 7th April 2020, 07:13 AM

Sympathies from me to any of you stressed out by this. Keep your mental health in mind & don't go too deep. Xo

Posted by: Klaus 7th April 2020, 08:19 AM

So Trump’s been pushing Hydroxychloroquine as the miracle cure. A report by the New York Times states “he has a "small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine".

The report also suggests that several other pharmaceutical companies also stand to profit - including those with shareholders that have connections to Trump.”

Profit over people’s actual lives. Wow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-malaria-drug.html

Posted by: *Tim 7th April 2020, 08:27 AM

Corona has been known for this though. Not saying they're 100% honest but it has been known that patients experience mild conditions, start feeling better only for them to crash in record time. I thought this was because the immune system could go into overdrive in something called a cytokine storm

Posted by: I. :II: z 7th April 2020, 08:30 AM

Always been the driving force of the worst sorts of rich elites, profit over people's lives is how they got into their positions. And indeed the same types of people were advocating a few weeks back to keep the economy open in spite of the deaths doing so would cause, just this crisis is making it more starkly apparent.

Posted by: StayatHaus* 7th April 2020, 08:34 AM

No new cases in China today for the first time since January!

Also, the genuine fear I have that we're going to receive breaking news about Boris passing is so real. I pray he makes a speedy recovery!

Posted by: Quarantilas 7th April 2020, 08:43 AM

There are quite a few countries in Europe looking at easing restrictions. Denmark and Norway have been quick off the mark to announce. Leaked documents suggest that Germany is looking likely to start easing from the 19th of April.

Social distancing will be the new normal, with Germany expecting some form of restrictions for the rest of the year, but we (as in the world at large) should be able to go back to restaurants and start seeing friends again in the near future which is great for all of us. Unless of course people act like arseholes and we end up with a giant second wave

Posted by: conderella* 7th April 2020, 08:46 AM

You just KNOW that if (let’s hope it’s a when though!) he gets better they will downplay the events and make it seem like they had everything under control which is obviously not true.

Posted by: Steve201 7th April 2020, 11:59 AM

I would say that restaurants and bars may be the last places to open if restrictions are reduced it'll be important business and the civil srvice that'll start working in offices again and it'll go from there I would imagine.

Posted by: Jαsє 7th April 2020, 12:12 PM

Amazing news

Posted by: Jacob :O 8th April 2020, 02:35 AM

Yeah the constant updates alone made me think it was worse than it sounded.

Posted by: Klaus 8th April 2020, 07:38 AM

I see Trump is shifting the blame onto WHO as he’s withdrawing funding! He continues to still astound me after all these years

Posted by: Suedehead2 8th April 2020, 08:40 AM

He has also said, just days after blaming Obama for not procuring tests for a virus that didn't exist, that testing policy is nothing to do with him. He can't even make up his mind whether something is the president's responsibility or not.

Meanwhile, Dominic Raab (acting PM, God help us) won't say whether the lockdown measures will be extended beyond next week, insisting it is too early to decide. Surely almost nobody ever expected them to end after three weeks. The only decision must be whether to extend them for a further three weeks (the most likely outcome IMO) or for a shorter period. Why try and hold out hope of them being abandoned (or relaxed) when, realistically, there is no chance?

Posted by: Popchartfreak 8th April 2020, 11:32 AM

Several more key posts in government in the US are now also vacant, Trump still using every opportunity to dismantle government entirely as per Brannon's intention, followed by the usual "blame those who warned about anything" to continue to make himself appear the victim rather than the murderer. Metaphorically speaking. Except where his actions have led to deaths.

Wasn't Raab the one who was surprised Dover was a main link to France for goods? Fills me with confidence. Apparently good at advising on legal documents. Presumably as long as they have no plans attached. I think we are all hoping Boris gets well soon.

Posted by: Suedehead2 8th April 2020, 12:51 PM

I think that was the reason for putting Rasb in charge - make people actually want the liar back.

Posted by: Gerald 8th April 2020, 01:42 PM

Unfortunately it has been announced that 936 people have died overnight due to Coronavirus pushing the death toll to 7,095 in the UK . Seems like the prediction that death toll here would be over 1,000 over the Easter period is coming true.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 8th April 2020, 02:13 PM

Yes, I'm now getting confirmations from friends in London of people they know dying from it. It's hard to ignore when local people suddenly die from it. The USA equivalent for population will be around 4 or 5,000 a day. Anything less and they are doing better than the UK, anything more and they are doing worse. A lot of the US are isolated communities, a lot of them are big cities. The cities will be the ones with the huge death tolls, especially poverty-stricken areas with no health care. Or, "democrats" as Trump might call them, ahead of the election coming up where his fanbase is rural or small town..

Posted by: Mart!n 8th April 2020, 02:33 PM

I'm finding it hard to believe those numbers are related to Coronavirus though. Love to see the numbers of the World Population before this outbreak happened, and compare that data to now. Are the government telling us porky pies.

Posted by: Dobbo 8th April 2020, 02:46 PM

Also there are some blurred lines as to whether the figures represent those who have died directly from the virus itself or those who have died from other complications but just had the virus at the time.

Posted by: Rooney 8th April 2020, 02:59 PM

This 100%. Lots of people are being reported in the coronavirus offical figures when they either probably going to die already or were in pallative care. Plus if the death is recorded as coronavirus the body is released quicker etc.

Posted by: Suedehead2 8th April 2020, 03:57 PM

A death certificate can contain any number of causes of death. If one of the causes listed is Covid-19, it is added to the figures even if it may well have made little or no difference to the time of death. OTOH, it is suspected that some deaths occurring away from hospitals are not being included as they will not have been tested for the virus. As I understand it, the same applies in many other countries.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 8th April 2020, 04:22 PM

It should be fairly easy to find the true figures worldwide as there will be average numbers of deaths for months of the year on record. If anyone wants to strip out those who would have died anyway, but just happened to catch Covid-19 while in hospital to finish them off a bit quicker, it should be a theoretical exercise that can be done.

I don;t believe that that many people who are dying of coronavirus just co-incidentally would have died anyway at the same time, so unless they caught the disease while sent to hospital for something terminal and unrelated, then they are actual covid-19 deaths and everything else is speculation.

Deaths in the community are not being reported, especially care homes. I hear from a Councillor that one part of London is "rife" with it as he has already been told his mother will only be coming out in a box if she gets ill for any reason. No doctors, no NHS. So as far as I'm concerned the death rate is actually more likely to be far higher than is reported, not only directly from Covid-19, but also from indirect deaths that wouldn't have happened had doctors and the NHS been doing their regular jobs saving lives for other conditions. Don;t forget you can die in 2 days. Another friend's neighbour was in a meeting 3 weeks ago, looking a bit grey last week and off colour, found by a friend checking up on him at the weekend, hospital, and dead yesterday. So he made the figures for yesterday but wouldn't have if he'd been found dead at home.

I bet they never test most of the elderly who have died at home, as a shoulder-shrug, never mind, eh, old anyway, as they'll want to get on with testing the alive and burying the dead asap.

Happy times.

Posted by: Mart!n 8th April 2020, 05:03 PM

I just got that letter from UK Government, straight into the recycle bin more paper to wipe my bum with

Posted by: J00ps* 8th April 2020, 05:05 PM

Worth noting that https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/quarterlymortalityreports/januarytomarch2019 in England alone.

Think the media are not always putting the deaths we are seeing in the country/worldwide in context with a 'normal' year to keep a slight edge of panic in the populace so that they keep taking quarantine seriously.

But I think it is important for those of us who already do, to keep it in mind. In any normal year thousands of people die in the country every month anyway.

Posted by: Steve201 8th April 2020, 05:44 PM

The 'rust belt' areas like Detroit and Michigan are getting it bad, especially in black communities for some reason are being hit hard. But then again these people are the people trump will Try and prevent voting!

Posted by: Harve 9th April 2020, 06:27 AM

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52219930

Seems like some in the UK gov are still willing to sacrifice lives.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 9th April 2020, 07:29 AM

Everybody dies. The only question is when do you die. There will be a lower death rate after covid because it will have already killed people who wouldnt otherwise have died. At what point does people dying in numbers become acceptable to society? 7,000 a month? If that's acceptable then why do we make such a fuss about 60 people getting blown up on the tube or a few people at a concert, and rush to say that's a terrible tragedy while we see people dying slowly drowning in their own lungs as something that we can say, oh well, carry on as normal then?

If those numbers of people were being killed by 3 planeloads of people crashing each day then we would all demand action about it and stop flying. I don;t see any difference. The end result of all this is that covid-19 has to be eradicated from the world because if it isn't then based on current reported rates of death vs surviving it will total 77 million dead, mostly the poor and elderly, and all we are doing is spreading it out over a longer period so that the hospital system doesnt get swamped and politicians dont get the blame for inaction. Doctors and nurses don;t usually die from caring for their patients, bus drivers don't usually die just for being at work. This is not normal.

If some countries can contain it and get to the point where there are no deaths then that suggests we can do something about it, even if that means quarantining people entering the country from infection-prone countries then we have to just give our holidays until it's been defeated (and I really need my holidays, so it pains me to say it!)....

Posted by: Doctor Blind 9th April 2020, 08:28 AM

I hope you washed your hands Martin, it seems that there is a really bad community spread in Westminster/Whitehall - which makes it really bloody odd that they'd decide to send EVERYONE IN THE COUNTRY a letter.

Posted by: Steve201 10th April 2020, 12:07 AM

People in my estate have taped their letterboxes up 😂, I pick up the post and make sure to wash my hands afterwards.

Posted by: blacksquare 10th April 2020, 12:59 PM

I just hope the people that think, 'well, they were going to die anyway' realise that hundreds — per day — are dying alone and their families are now grieving without the opportunity of seeing their loves ones one last time. Families can't be together. That was preventable.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 10th April 2020, 01:14 PM

I find the whole 'they'd have died anyway' a really bizarre take. The Health & Social Care system is completely overwhelmed and is causing treatments for other things to be cancelled or delayed, yes many people dying have 'underlying conditions' that make their lives shorter than people without them, but they are treatable things and they weren't all going to die this Spring. I don't see the amount of deaths as anything other than a sad tragedy, and a total that could (should!) have been far less.

Posted by: blacksquare 10th April 2020, 01:17 PM

Exactly.

There is a lack of humanity, and understanding, when we focus solely on statistics.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 10th April 2020, 02:09 PM

Another 953 deaths announced in the UK today pushing the total above 9,000. There's usually a delay in reporting deaths because of registrations, which is why they fall every weekend before shooting up on Tuesday, so most of these 953 will have been before yesterday. The average time from first contracting the virus to death is over 20 days, so the majority of deaths up to this weekend will have been cases contracted before lockdown.

That'll make it in excess of 12,000 deaths before the government put in any kind of real measures. The pubs only closed 20 days ago. It really shows just how badly wrong they got it. Nothing at all learned from countries that got it right, or wrong. A true scandal which I hope that this government will be held properly to account for, but I don't hold out much hope of that!

Still, I got my letter from Boris yesterday saying we'll fight the virus with British spirit. Let me go and hang my union flag and salute the Queen, that'll show it!

Posted by: Suedehead2 10th April 2020, 02:41 PM

I didn't bother reading mine. If I had done, I might have had to fight back the vomit at the "British spirit" bit. Perhaps he means that we should all douse ourselves in meths to fight it off.

Posted by: Brenda 💋 10th April 2020, 02:41 PM

I think it's worth noting that without the measures taken it would be the biggest catastrophe seen in recent ages. If this isn't yet.
It's not a bad thing to scare people a bit and inform them that if this would've spread, they'd be dying by the thousands a day, even the youngsters

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 10th April 2020, 04:37 PM

I didn’t read my letter either but I did note they’d bothered to translate it into Welsh as well. But even that wasn’t tempting enough to make me read it.

Posted by: Suedehead2 10th April 2020, 05:00 PM

The one thing I did notice about the letter was that I have apparently become PM without knowing it. The words "The Prime Minister" were printed where the addressee's name should be.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 10th April 2020, 05:15 PM

If only that were more than just Boris’ attempt to remind us he’s the prime minister as much as he possibly can.

Posted by: Harve 10th April 2020, 06:12 PM

3 weeks ago, France had recorded 8 times more hospital deaths than Britain. Britain now has 15% more and that gap will only grow further.

At this rate, Britain could become the country with the most deaths per capita in the world (excluding San Marino).

Posted by: Suedehead2 10th April 2020, 06:31 PM

Naturally, anyone pointing this out if it happens will be accused of being a traitor by the Tories and their friends in the press.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 11th April 2020, 08:55 AM

I havent read it either, just as well by the sounds of it. This is a man who had information at his fingertips about what was coming, what caused it, how to avoid it, and he was still so thick he managed to catch it himself and pass it on to his pregnant partner (most likely). That's what you get when you theoretically hire underlings who are nutjobs who scurry away like frightened rabbits when they realise the bullshit they are spouting isnt killing just ancient plebs, it might actually kill your own job prospects and yourself, arrogantly assuming it's just the flu and since you'd never died of the flu you'd be alright Jack.

On a completely unrelated matter I note Cummings hasn't yet taken The Sunday Times to court about their claims about him re: "herd immunity" and "letting the old people die". I bloody well would if it was me and I hadn't said that. Perhaps he's waiting in his country mansion till he's had the all-clear from Covid-19, after all metaphorically closely kissing the PM's arse must put him in the risk group.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 11th April 2020, 09:41 AM

in more fun news...


Twitter:
FUN FACT: Ivanka Trump, who’ll serve on the White House’s new economy-focused coronavirus task force, was granted a trademark on coffins.

Bit of fact checking - this was in China 2 years ago. So Donald is not the only Trump making a bit of a killing out of covid-19 then, presumably. Her dad has had previous financial interests from the company he keeps pushing drugs from as a "cure". It's not a cure. There's money to be made in death. A bit like Rees-Mogg's shares in investor-advice bigging-up the boom-possibilities while also having interests in companies selling fags which will have helped thousands have those very same "underlying conditions" that are carrying them off in huge numbers right now.

The Filthy Rich in power: no morals at all. It's all about cash.

Posted by: Rooney 11th April 2020, 11:03 AM

Cummings has gone completely off the rail since he was said to have the virus according to The Guardian. Wonder if he will be the inevitable fall guy for the herd immunity strategy in the public.

Anyway I am a big critque of the government- I think it's hard to criticse adopting a herd immunity strategy if that is what the science was telling at the time. It is OK to follow the leaf of South Korea/China, but they are completely different setups to the Western world socially. Pretty much all of the West has suffered horrendously. The big negligence of the government is their lack of planning for a pandemic. I'm sure when all this is over it will get out that the government ignored all the from the report and not having a stockpile of PPE for the NHS is gross negligence.

There's so many reports out there about covid-19 that it's hard to know what is and what isn't true. There's loads of stuff I'm reading at the monent which makes it sound like the virus is more contagious but less aggressive if you are only prolonged to it for a very small time. So chances are 5-15% of us have already built up an immunity to it, but we won't know until there's more widespread testing.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 11th April 2020, 11:16 AM

The thing is, herd immunity is a callous strategy whatever the science says, it allows the death rate to happen at whatever percentage it actually is at, and it overloads the health service whatever. I find it hard to believe that it was really the best scientific option either, when you compare to the other two options. South Korea was having great success at controlling what was a much earlier outbreak over there than it should have been by putting in a test and trace (which sorely needs to be adopted by Western governments when they can move into the phase of returning to normality) that has seen them come out of this probably in the best shape on the planet, and the lockdown strategy for other European countries was known to slow it.

Hard to say the British government have done anything other than caused thousands of deaths by their negligence, and their methods to solve it are lacking.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 11th April 2020, 11:33 AM

Even then, they only moved away from it because they were essentially forced. They were happy for places to be open and events to go ahead, but sport started cancelling everything, councils shutting down leisure centres and closing outdoor events because they realised it was too dangerous to the public. How much worse would we be if those 45 professional football matches, as well as all other cancelled sport, had taken place that weekend?

Posted by: Steve201 11th April 2020, 11:37 AM

Indeed it was at this time the ROI closed schools and schools in the north were left open creating a ridiculous 2 tier structure in the island. People actually began to take things into their own hands.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 11th April 2020, 11:40 AM

And this hesitation to act MUST be remembered. The government must be held to account even when this is all over. Boris going to hospital will not make me forget.

Posted by: Rooney 11th April 2020, 12:17 PM

Comparing us to South Korea is like comparing apples to oranges though. It's why the West has sucked compared to the East. Absolutelyminimal people would allow the goverment or whoever to track our movements in the day way, rightly or wrongly. This is where the goverment can't win at all, as not sure anyone at the time would have agreed to a big brother style utopia, especially with all the nutter conspiracy theorists out there...

Right now we are doing no worse than the rest of the Western world. The biggest problem is we failed to prepare a proper strategy, hence we are entirely reactive until we get everything under control.



Surely the fallout we are seeing right now in terms of admissions and spread is from when everyone decided one last wild night out would be a great idea..

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 11th April 2020, 12:34 PM

To say we're doing no worse is very generous, overall the numbers aren't worse but we did have a head start which wasn't taken advantage of. When Madrid was in almost total lockdown because it had spread so far, 3000 people were allowed to fly from there to the UK unchecked and go happily about their business for 2-3 days, watch a football match and fly home. That felt daft at the time, now it looks absolutely appalling. We were always about 2 weeks behind Italy in terms of deaths and cases, we've taken the same sort of measures here roughly 2 weeks after when Italy did. Unsurprisingly, we have very similar curves.

You'll be right about the last night the pubs were open, it was daft and common sense to not do it, but it was also common sense to shut them sooner. People will do stuff if they're allowed to. The best way to stop people doing something is to stop them being able to. Senior officials and scientists spent most of the first half of March doing things like dismissing the chances of being able to catch it outside and saying it's no worse than most other forms of flu. You can't blame pockets of the population for not taking it seriously enough when the people in charge didn't take it seriously enough.

Posted by: Harve 11th April 2020, 12:39 PM

But that's not true? Germany, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Norway, Canada, Australia, NZ, every country in the east of the EU, they've had far fewer people die than in Britain, whether you adjust for population or not. And the situation in Britain is worsening faster than anywhere else in Europe. Even the US has half as many deaths per capita.

Posted by: Suedehead2 11th April 2020, 01:06 PM

And, of course, the press continue on their merry way pretending that things are going really well. Yesterday's death toll in the UK was higher than that seen in any other country in Europe since this began - even higher than Italy's worst figure. How many papers led with this story? How many decided it was more important to report that Boris Johnson had been doing a Sudoku puzzle?

Just a few weeks ago, the rising death toll in Italy was being reported in a way that portrayed the Italian government as a bunch of incompetent idiots. Somehow, the British government are apparently doing brilliantly by being worse than Italy.

It cannot be said too many times that a Labour government that had done exactly the same as this one, in exactly the same timescale and with exactly the same results would have been crucified by the press.

Posted by: Rooney 11th April 2020, 01:20 PM

We are still letting people come back unchecked (I was one of them!) to the country. My own understanding of the situation is the country does not have the resources or the capital to enforce everyone to stay in the country for 2 weeks like a lot of smaller countries have done with a smaller population. That certainly would have been wise, but for whatever reason the government chose not to do it. Just like the also chose not to work collabartively with EU countries to repatriate citizens (again, this won't be picked up in the media but I know for a fact the UK could have worked with Germany at a cost and they would have got thousands of stranded Brits back to Frankfurt at least).

Feel it's hard to criticise what the government are doing now and I also don't think what some countries seem to be planning to do is a great idea either, but totally agree there was a complete lack of thorough planning before the event. The pubs should have been shut full stop rather than allowing everyone one last big blowout.



Some countries reacted differently, noticeably more liberal ones and also far more rural in their landscapes. Plus a lot of these countries also realised the root cause of most cases was international travel, stop tnat and you can get a handle on the spread. It's why I don't think anyone is going on holiday until this is all sorted.. no country will let you in.

I think the interesting model to follow right now is Sweden as they are trying to attempt what the UK originally planned for.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 11th April 2020, 01:56 PM

I'm not sure it's right to say the government can't win. They can, they could insist on a greater surveillance system because of the clear and present danger to public health, they can say we are following the example of country A which has had good results tackling the virus in this way, they can encourage rather than DISCOURAGE the use of PPE in the health service to stop medical knowledge being lost because doctors and nurses die.

The media can help too, if they can disseminate the idea of ritualistic clapping they can do the same for the idea that we are now having it worse than Italy, and there needs to be solutions fast, so government initiatives that might in normal times be disrupting civil liberties are imperative. Use the power of the media to control people for good, rather than let it be an insight into how our lords and masters are that obscures the near a thousand dying every day.

Posted by: Brenda 💋 11th April 2020, 02:18 PM

Also the UK only counts the deaths in hospitals

Spain, France, Belgium and Germany count all, The netherlands are trying to I think

Posted by: Rooney 11th April 2020, 03:38 PM

The greater surveillance thing would work OK now, but it was never going to work in the early stages. People handing over their whereabouts all the time to the state? Absolutely no chance. It works differently in other countries, but it would never ever have worked in most of the Western world in the early stages. We have been well banged in to 1974 mode and there is absolutely no way it would have worked in our country. Flash forward to today, and yes I suspect more people would buy in to it because of the good it would do.

Regardless of the government, we still need people to stop flouting the rules. Seen so much happen mainly because people think as it's been 2 weeks now no-one has the virus.

Posted by: Quarantilas 11th April 2020, 03:57 PM

Disagree quite strongly. a strong track & trace form of surveillance is behind a lot of nations not suffering to anywhere near the extent of the lazy US and UK. Frequently mentioned as one of the reasons why Germany has a significantly lower death rate, why Greece and a lot of the Eastern Bloc has got a grip to it. It is perfectly possible in the "west".

When the notoriously anti-surveillance and privacy focused Germans are overwhelmingly in favour of a government backed surveillance app to track and trace cases, some serious questions need to be asked of the UK government.

Posted by: fl00zy* 11th April 2020, 04:05 PM

Can we clarify please what a herd immunity is??

As I understand it its being bandied about as some kind of miracle cure when actually its just not resisting the virus and letting all of those vulnerable to it die off, isn't it? If we're honest and upfront about it.

The only immunity achieved in herd immunity is better genes passed down the line to those children born from parents who've had it and survived. Its not in any way a solution for anyone except those who would definitely have lived through the pandemic anyway.

Posted by: Quarantilas 11th April 2020, 04:18 PM

Immunity wouldn't pass from parent to child. Herd Immunity is a concept most commonly used in vaccinations, the primary idea being that when a significant proportion of the population has the anti-bodies from a vaccine then the virus has no way to spread from person to person. Heard immunity is supposed to protect those who are immunocompromised, sick or too young to be vaccinated.

Heard immunity without a vaccine involves infecting that high number of the population and is a bit too close to eugenics for anyone with a moral compass to be comfortable. Its only outcome is a ruined healthcare system and the avoidable deaths of millions of vulnerable people that the entire concept of heard immunity is designed to protect. Its a sick and twisted path.

Posted by: Envoirment 11th April 2020, 04:25 PM

Whilst I agree that the UK government and the media could've done a better job, there is one thing that differs in the UK compared to a lot of other countries - the population. There are so many idiots in this country who don't take this seriously. I've had massive rows with family members over this. You only have to look at the recent news stories about the amount of house parties the police have been shutting down in Manchester alone. I believe Scotland has issued over 500 fines regarding house parties so far too.

The people in countries like Germany are more likely to take this more seriously, as well as follow measures to prevent the spread. Whereas this country is full of people who don't take notice of the warnings and there are quite a few people in this country who think of the virus as a conspiracy. It's honesty sickening to see people being selfish and disregarding what's going on.

Posted by: blacksquare 11th April 2020, 05:29 PM

Of course, different countries have different mentalities, and there is a lot of distrust in the government here — but that is exactly why the response needed to be concise. There was no strong messaging from the beginning, it wasn't treated as the threat it is, and there was flip-flopping for weeks. They, with the help of the media, created and allowed confusion to permeate.



This is spot-on. All that time critical time wasted despite there being examples of what other countries were getting right and wrong.

Posted by: Suedehead2 11th April 2020, 06:11 PM

That is where the identity of the people at the top of government are part of the problem. A large number of people think of Johnson as a big fat liar. Thankfully, they are often the sort of people who follow the news closely. Therefore, they had enough information to reach their own conclusions over how seriously to take this.

Then there are the people who don't follow the news as much. A lot of them think of Johnson as a clown and that's why so many of them like him. However, they don't take him particularly seriously. They may also have got the message delivered relentlessly by the likes of Johnson and Gove that we shouldn't take too much notice of experts.

The government added to this by sowing confusion. They told people not to go to the pub but refused to order them to be closed. They started advising people about things like social distancing but didn't make it clear when it went from advice to an instruction. They didn't make it sufficiently clear why we should all avoid getting it, even those of us not in a vulnerable group. They should have been helped in getting that last message across by the press but that didn't happen. Of course, it didn't help that they changed their strategy and then denied doing so.

I've read lots of comments from people who have seen the UK government press conferences and similar events in other countries. They all say that the other versions are much clearer, led by scientists and free of any political spin. The intention is to get across vital information, not to try and make ministers look good.

Posted by: dandruff* 11th April 2020, 06:23 PM

Thankfully its not too bad in NI compared to the rest of the UK although we have sadly had our worst day today with 15 deaths but yes we and the rest of the UK should have locked down a week earlier.

Posted by: Mart!n 11th April 2020, 07:42 PM

Another thing that gets me with some people, husband, wife, and their two kids want to go in the shop together. As one of them is doing shopping for a neighbour, while other people are waiting outside to get in. They let all 4 into the shop, when only one member per family are allowed in. And they won't let anyone else in, until 4 people leave the shop, just because they let 4 members of the same family inside, after a customer had a blew with the manager over it. The decent thing to do, if someone was doing shopping for a neighbour give the money to their partner, or get back to the end of the queue and await their turn. Some people are just ignorant and playing dumb as they didn't know the rules when its been on TV/newspapers/social media 24/7 for the past 3 weeks, how can you miss it.

Sorry rant over

Posted by: Popchartfreak 11th April 2020, 07:55 PM

The people in power must take the brunt of the blame. they had the info, they failed to follow their own advice re their own safety, they put the economy ahead of common sense and decency, they failed to produce short information films for all TV to broadcast, and the PM's own father was bragging about going down the bleeding pub as it was an infringement of his rights or some other shite even as his own emotionally-challenged son was doing a complete about face on what he'd been saying the weeks before. Now he's all "oh no-one is immune to this disease, no-one is safe" when the pair of them were ignoring that very message.

My own response offline to family and friends was much more volatile than I have been online. Some people who loved the Brexit message are now very much of the "serves the self-serving *%$£ right" view right now. The USA is the same for anyone with any brains. No-one can listen to Trumps' incoherent ramblings and self-contradicting without realising that he is personally responsible for huge numbers of people dying. He has failed every single test expected of a President in every way, and still is only concerned about how everything impacts himself and his equally self-serving and corrupt family. He is utterly incapable of showing remorse unless someone has written it for him, because he has clearly psychopathic tendencies.

Most people forget early faux pas' in a new government by the time of elections. When you've had people die that you know you won't forget if you think they handled it badly. Some fans will remember even if some will support them no matter what. I once jokingly quipped to my Tory-loving long-termer that the Tories could kill half the people in the country and he'd still vote for them. Today, I had to chastise him on the phone to stop trying to defend Dominic Cummings behaviour as if he's just a poor victim of the horrid press (NB The Sunday Times is a Murdoch Tory-loving newspaper, not a loonie-leftie propaganda-pushing horrid press). Cos if there's one thing that really bugs me it's choosing to distort reality to fit one's own biased or cult-pushing world-view. Facts are stubborn things, they tend not to go away even if you hate them.

Posted by: Suedehead2 11th April 2020, 08:20 PM

That would be the father who skedaddled off to his second home in defiance of the regulations.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 12th April 2020, 10:28 AM

Priti Patel has told us that 300,034,974,000 people have been tested in the UK for coronavirus excluding Northern Ireland.

I haven’t been tested so where did these extra 93 billion people come from?

Posted by: Popchartfreak 12th April 2020, 11:58 AM

Priti Patel is useless, she hates experts telling her why things can't be done her way. How unsurprising she has no answers as to why medical staff still have no PPE when only a few weeks back Boris Johnson was telling us that sadly a lot of us were going to lose loved ones as we dealt with the herd immunity getting to 60%. Assuming they knew the NHS pressures coming from adopting this strategy then why were they not pre-ordering everything that would be needed for massive numbers of people dying?

Oh hang on, they hadnt a f***ing clue, did f*** all, still can't do enough to keep medical staff safe, still can't provide medical equipment theyve bunged millions away on Dyson to provide, and keep having press conferences where they are so out of their depth they are shitting bricks at how incompetent they look, how vague platitudes don't save lives, and trying to self-congratulate themselves for taking the necessary action that they should have taken in the first place when any blithering idiot could see what was coming. The economy is going to be more f***ed-up because they hadn't a clue than it would if they'd put their-own arrogant self-belief propaganda on one side and acted responsibly. Making excuses like "other countries were just as shit as us" doesn't work when it's your job not to be killing 10,000 citizens out of sheer arrogant "i know what's best for you" stupidity.

That's what you get when put complete twats in charge and they put other twats in places where they can do the most damage.

It's a good thing I'm biting my lip and not saying what I REALLY think!

Posted by: Rooney 12th April 2020, 12:10 PM

If you want some good news I'd suspect that Priti Patel will probably lose her job when all this is over. I hated her before this, she was wheeled away out of the spotlight, but honestly I don't think there is a more unionising figure of dislike between the nation than her smug face!!

Posted by: Suedehead2 12th April 2020, 12:20 PM

Note that Pritti Hopeless didn't apologise for the lack of PPE. She apologised for the fact that some people might think there was a shortage.

Posted by: Condebola* 12th April 2020, 12:26 PM

That awkward moment when there's no Common Sense to tell us "it was a mistake she's just a human!!1".

Good GOD this woman is as incompetent as one can be. Too bad this will be swept under the rug and no one already remembers the counter terrorism thing.

Posted by: fl00zy* 12th April 2020, 12:29 PM

She made a mistake & she's a Tory so she should be given 98 more chances before we judge her at all.

If she was Labour ofc we should throw her down the well now.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 12th April 2020, 12:32 PM

Great thread that compares the UK and Ireland's responses, where they started from a pretty similar point and scale aside should be facing similar issues and obstacles. It really highlights how bad the UK has been at this (though if any Irish posters wish to correct that go ahead).

Posted by: Liam* 12th April 2020, 12:32 PM

She just gets more and more disgusting by the day, she's always been so cold and smug so even amongst the totally incompetent current government, they could not pick a worse person to speak about the current situation.

Imagine this being Diane Abbott and the slaughtering she'd get!

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 12th April 2020, 12:33 PM

Patel, Hancock, Johnson, if there were any justice the whole lot of them would never see any responsibility again. Their poor responses are responsible for deaths that could have been prevented.

Posted by: fl00zy* 12th April 2020, 12:40 PM

I tend to assume Ireland handles most things better by virtue of having politicians who actually do their jobs & take their jobs seriously instead of spending 90% of time posturing & preening for the media and their existing voters and trying to then cram everything they actually need to do in the other 10% - and naturally dropping things & missing things.

The UK has the absolute wrong kind of people in charge. The fact that your MPs started getting it and kept coming into work - where they all sit together on BENCHES, not even chairs, in a small and sealed room - is just jawdroppingly negligent & tempting fate.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 12th April 2020, 03:29 PM

So today I heard a relative of mine has succumbed to the virus. My mum’s cousin died on Friday. I didn’t know her, I’m not sure if we even met but my Nan has been very upset because my Nan was her godmother and it was also my Nan’s 83rd birthday on Friday so it really wasn’t the best Birthday for her despite the press insisting what an amazing Good Friday it was because Boris was getting better.

Well my Mum’s cousin had been on a ventilator but had been out of hospital for a few days seemingly recovered before she passed away. So Boris has better be careful because though he’s left hospital, he’s far from out of the woods.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 12th April 2020, 04:01 PM

So sorry to hear that I hope your nan is OK.

That's good advice generally, though. Getting over being very ill isn't a quick fix, not physically and not mentally, and the ventilator can cause problems in itself.

Posted by: Suedehead2 12th April 2020, 07:21 PM

Some schools in Denmark ar due to reopen on Wednesday. If all goes well, that should provide some guide to how we might start to come out of this.

Denmark started its lockdown policy 11 days before the UK. I will say with confidence that UK schools will not start to reopen 11 days after those in Denmark.

Posted by: Rooney 13th April 2020, 11:55 AM

Not a massive Boris fan at all, but have to admit that Twitter video he put up is the nost heartfelt I've ever seen him in my life. I can't remember whether it was this forum or another one, but someone said that despite the government being about as right-wing as possible they would end up being the most social in generations. And I actually think that will be true now, can see a whole shift in idelogy around healthcare at least. If they don't start offering grants/free studies etc. after all this is over then they are missing out on a huge trick...

Looks like the biggest industry hit will be travel as well. Infections in China are growing and that's through the backdoor entry via China. I know loads of people still hold hope about going on holiday later in the year, but I just don't see a way how it is possible until there is a vaccine.

Posted by: Steve201 13th April 2020, 01:16 PM

I think this Tory government already was moving to the left economically before this crisis following the election victory in red wall seats. In this respect at least the financial crisis and Corbyns leadership have moved the debate leftward in the last decade.

Posted by: Steve201 13th April 2020, 01:19 PM

One of my favourite tweets of this period was from Frankie Boyle when he said I wondered what it would take for proper media scrutiny of this government and clearly 1000 deaths per day is t it.

Posted by: Tawdry Hepburn 13th April 2020, 04:57 PM

Priti Patel saying "I'm sorry if people feel there have been failings over PPE" is like a killer saying to a victim's family "I'm sorry for your perceived inconvenience".

No acknowledgement. No ownership. No remorse. No empathy.

Posted by: Jesty Cough* 13th April 2020, 05:25 PM

Priti Patel is a f***ing disgrace of a human being. End of.

Her incompetence and lack of feeling is mind-blowing.

Posted by: Steve201 13th April 2020, 11:32 PM

800 further infections in china, the biggest jump in weeks due to people coming into the country mainly from Russia!

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 14th April 2020, 05:18 AM

^ I can't find anything official that supports that. There's approx 800 active imported cases in the country but not all on the same day. 108 was the number for yesterday with 98 imported.

The border regions with Russia, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang (but not Jilin), seem to have had most of that, let's hope it stays there but you know, there is a risk of it coming back again even with inter-province travel being checked.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 14th April 2020, 07:09 AM

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52275823

The media finally reporting the scandal that I've been talking about. How has this been allowed to happen and what has been the causes?

Why weren't care homes immediately told by the government as soon as they were aware it was spreading that staff should take extra precautions, and visitors should stay away. Oh that's right, they'd already sort of apologised that our elderly relatives were sadly going to die as they pursued their policy of inaction.....

Apology not accepted.

Posted by: Quarantilas 14th April 2020, 07:36 AM

BBC reporting yesterday that Scotland is struggling to get PPE for anyone other than NHS Scotland because the UK Government has mandated that England is the priority instead of allowing all 4 nations of the UK to get a share. Wales has reported the same tale so this isn’t Scotland trying to cause an issue or something

Posted by: Rooney 14th April 2020, 09:14 AM

Just goes to prove international travel is not happening again until there is a cure imo. I cannot see a way people are allowed to move freely between country to country.



Not that there might be an element of truth in this, but it could also be because of NHS procurement contracts.

My next prediction is mask wearing is going to be advised in public as an advisory before it becomes mandatory when things start to resemble a small form of normality..

Posted by: Quarantilas 14th April 2020, 09:41 AM

The NHS contracts arent the issue, it’s what supplies the care sector can obtain after the NHS contracts are fulfilled. The UKs four largest producers of PPE have been directed by the UK Government to starve the devolved nations of supply and direct all produced materials to English care homes after NHS contracts have been fulfilled. This is a new directive and as a result Scotland and Wales have seen their previously healthy supply lines to their care sectors dry up. It’s cold and callous and will kill people in Scotland and Wales.

So much for “better together”.

Posted by: Dobbo 14th April 2020, 09:44 AM

If that's going to happen they're gonna have to provide a better supply. If they can't even get enough masks to those working on the frontline there's not a hope in hell Joe Public is gonna be wearing one...

Posted by: Quarantilas 14th April 2020, 09:47 AM

Some countries are recommending Scarfs or homemade cloth masks where they haven’t been able to distribute any of the usual masks that you see.

Posted by: fl00zy* 14th April 2020, 11:22 AM

I remain appalled that the UK government actively discouraged people from wearing masks or scarves and spread around that they were unhelpful. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Besides that, I was struck by the most recent reporting of deaths - 700 in a day for the UK. Buried deep in the article was the expansion that of the 700, 670 were in England with the remainder split between Scotland, Wales and NI.

If the difference between figures is so stark it begs the question of why the entire UK is having the same lockdown applied.

Posted by: Rooney 14th April 2020, 11:31 AM

It's going to happen it's only a matter of time, if only as it will prevent people with no symptoms spreading it rather than stopping you from catching it.

Assuming it won't be manatory until some restrictions are lifted.

Posted by: *Tim 14th April 2020, 11:48 AM

If anything the lockdown in the SWNI parts have prevented ithe situation from.getting as out of hand as England is

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 14th April 2020, 11:53 AM

Yeah I don’t think lockdown should just be based on how many cases are in your area, it’s should be prevention before solution without a vaccine. Just look at how well New Zealand are coping and that is down to a fast moving and assertive government.

Posted by: blacksquare 14th April 2020, 12:28 PM

I'm finding everything absolutely infuriating.




'The UK government has previously said it was unable to join the EU’s procurement schemes as it had not received an email of invitation.'

Ideology being the priority rather than saving lives — it's all so disgusting.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 14th April 2020, 12:33 PM

Those ONS stats will hopefully put paid to those 'they'd die anyway' comments, that highest ever weekly figure is soon going to be the 4th/5th highest ever weekly figure.

Posted by: Rooney 14th April 2020, 03:04 PM

While I agree they were fast and assertive, it also helps a lot that their outbreaks were largely contained to 3/4 clusters so the goverment had a hand on it. It also helps that the country is split in two and is largely quite rural in it's makeup.

Just why I find the figures in the UK very active, seems like it is beginning to stablise , but then places which are largely urban and dominated by a few big-medium urban cities are not flattening quite as thick (Midlands, Yorkshire & North East).

Posted by: Popchartfreak 14th April 2020, 04:39 PM

that breakdown of total deaths is a good indicator (because I don;t believe it's just coincidentally massively higher than the average) that the number of deaths extra to "normal" times is about one-third higher than the figures quoted.

It's scandalous. I'd be willing to bet a hell of a lot of countries are massively under-reporting deaths and it's almost certain to be double the quoted figure. If you can't trust many democracies to be open and honest, then it's a sure thing IMO.

Posted by: Rooney 14th April 2020, 06:19 PM

My assumption from the latest press conference is the goverment and the advisors have pretty much admitted they got things wrong, without actually saying they got things wrong. Also sounds like while the economy will be in a bad place, they have obviously learned we massively screwed up so I'm expecting a very slow and steady lifting of the lockdown restrictions.

Looks like while we got things wrong, there is an attempt to mitigate risk and try to make things right. Could be worse, could be the States I suppose.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 14th April 2020, 10:21 PM

What, seriously. It ain't gonna bring back doctors and nurses who have died from it because of lack of PPE.

Posted by: Rooney 14th April 2020, 11:03 PM

Trump absolutely lost it now and gone on the warpath and withdrawn funding from the WHO.

Not saying I don’t agree he’s trying his best to affect blame but also of the view point personally he’s right about WHO and the role of China. I think most people agree China’s official numbers aren’t entirely correct, so either we are all wrong or China and WHO have pulled the wool under our eyes as WHO praised China for being so open. The thing is if it was any other official leader is would be taken half-seriously!

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 06:43 AM

No matter how valid Trump’s criticisms (I’m going with “not very” for now), this is not the time to be withholding funding. This moron is endangering people’s lives.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 15th April 2020, 07:22 AM

Trump, of course, doesnt care about lives, he has no ability to empathise, he has shown this throughout his life, he genuinely is a sociopath incapable of remorse or offering even the slightest bit of support to other human beings. He's one of the most dangrous people who could have been elected to that office because his lifelong reaction to criticism is to attack and shift blame. If anyone can be called evil, it's a politician who plays fast and loose with peoples lives and well-being and always deflects blame elsewhere. I'm going to repeat what one Trump's former wives said: the only book she saw him read, and which was on his bedside table, was Hitler's "How To..." guide. How to manipulate and lie to people to gain power, and how to keep lying no matter what, especially about those that try to provide fact-based opposition. Because they have to keep not-lying or you just have a battle between two sets of liars and nobody believes anyone anymore. Bannon & Trump have achieved most of their aims - the only problem with getting what they wanted is that they have been unlucky enough to face the ultimate test of a pandemic to see exactly what they have done. It's hard to hide facts and lie about 25,000 dead Americans (so far) when every lie you have been telling is on videotape and it affects everyone in the country. You also cant hide the blatantly obvious fact that you are a blithering moron when you are ranting incoherently day after day to the extent that even Fox News can't save you as they get ready for an avalanche of claims from families of dead relatives who may have died due to their denial of reality lies.

The WHO, whatever it's failings, is still dependant on information provided by countries and whatever medical information it can get hold of. If that information is being with-held (and let's be honest, China's local politicians refused to recognise the problem and tried to hush it up and shut up whistle-blowers who were also dying from it) then their ability to make accurate assessments is also reduced until it's too late. Politicians who's gut instinct is to dismiss experts as moaning Cassandras wouldnt have acted any differently, and that's been borne out by delayed actions even when it's happening on camera right in front of their eyes.

Posted by: Quarantilas 15th April 2020, 11:02 AM

It’s hard for WHO because they are in a real tight spot. If they’d gone in heavy on China for a cover up then China would close ranks and throw them out or starve them of information. Time and time again we have been given endless amounts of evidence that this is how the Chinese state operates. WHO has to walk a narrow tight rope in order to function as best that it can. There is legitimate complaints to be had over how it handled the outset of this outbreak but now is very much not the time for that introspective review and defunding is never the bloody answer.

Trump is a giant manbaby and such a major threat to the world

Posted by: Steve201 15th April 2020, 11:19 AM

Given the European and American figures now the Chinese figures look quite suspect!

Posted by: Rooney 15th April 2020, 11:25 AM

I guess we might never know, but something is very suspect and I don't believe for one second it's because China handled the impact initially. It's why I find the criticism of the WHO quite valid as while they are definitely cosying up to China and doing the best they can now, in the initial offset they made some grave mistakes. Mind boggling at the rate it spread here compared to China, especially since nobody confirmed human to human transmission until the back end of January. It does aid a lot of credidence to the theory that most people are asympohtomatic.

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 11:57 AM

Yes, the Chinese figures do look suspect, Their record for supressing news that portrays them in a bad light inevitably leads to scepticism. However, the asymptomatic cases could be part of that. We have no way of knowing (for now, at least) whether the proportion of asymptomatic cases has remained roughly the same throughout all this. If the proportion has been rising steadily, that could be why it has spread more rapidly in Europe and the US than in China. Perhaps the Chinese were able to slow the spread there while the virus was spreading undetected in Europe.

Posted by: blacksquare 15th April 2020, 12:50 PM

Especially worrying when you see a graph like this.





This is great analysis — if only more people were open to understanding the intricacies of ongoing situations like this. I have been reading too many conspiracy theories about WHO being solely in the pocket of the Chinese government.

Early mistakes were made, of course, but defunding them is just unbelievably reckless. Trump is so desperate to deflect blame.

Unrelated — Chris and Vidcapper have disappeared?

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 15th April 2020, 12:59 PM

I buy that it was worse than the official numbers in Hubei for a while. There were a number of changes in how they were reporting figures at first and clear they wanted a narrative of winning the battle against the virus. Definitely considering the asymptomatic cases as a part of it though, because originally it was all about symptoms and outside of Hubei those without symptoms were relatively free to move before a 14-day quarantine was required for anyone who had been travelling at all (which is still very easily enforced if anything is suspect about the health of yourself or anyone you've been near).

The big thing I'm concerned about with the figures is whether the relative lack of new cases is actually true now, although with it being the first country affected, strict controls for anyone moving about, an easy way to test and trace if anything suspect emerges, based on observance and what I've heard from other foreigners in China, there's much less of a concern than there was at its height and while still vigilant, the Chinese are in the phase of having 'beaten the virus'.

Regardless of all of that, it still wouldn't be a reason for Trump to pull funding from WHO. It's zero-sum geopolitics and this is not the time to be playing 'the global system is anarchic and America needs to look strong' because it really isn't.

The latter is permanently banned, the former is serving one of many series of increasing temporary suspensions, and if he continues being a promoter of Britain's worst newspapers and winding everyone up, those will continue to get longer and longer.

Posted by: Dobbo 15th April 2020, 01:15 PM

Vid must have seriously overstepped the mark Regina-style to get perma-banned.

Posted by: fl00zy* 15th April 2020, 03:16 PM

My friend works in a hospital & has worries about the number of people unable to take cancer drugs right now as it will make them immunocompromised & thus ripe for corona.

That means for now they have to either go untreated or go straight to radiotherapy.

So something like that applied across multiple illnesses will no doubt be upping death rates tangentially. As well as people avoiding hospitals from fear of getting it.

Our priority NEEDS to be ability to judge risk level of getting it. If it turns out less fatal than thought then many people will have over-avoided it & possibly damned themselves for lack of treatment.

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 03:30 PM

One of the things reported in the last couple days has been that the reduction in visitors to A&E has been a lot greater than expected. We can assume that there has been a big fall in the number of people pursuing activities that might result in an accident needing hospital treatment, including relatively mundane activities such as driving. It is also likely that there are fewer people going to A&E for something trivial. That, of course, is to be welcomed and it would be great if it continues after all this is over.

However, there is a fear that people who do need to go to A&E are not doing so, either because they "don't want to be a burden" or because they are worried about contracting the virus in hospital. Some of those cases could lead to the patient becoming more seriously ill because of the delay, hence the concern.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 15th April 2020, 04:33 PM

current death rates of those known to have Covid-19 is about 3 or 4% - now that's not necessarily the overall death rate because no-one knows how many have had it. About 20% of those known to have it get very ill, I've read some of the experiences people are going through and it's much worse than anything I've gone through (and I've been bed-ridden for quite a while when I was younger feeling like death-warmed-up).

So it's not necessarily what the risk is that you'll die (but which is probably at least 1 in a 100 on average, much more for some people, much less for healthy younger people) but how incapacitated it's going to make you and for how long, and 1 in a 5 is quite a high risk (or even if it's a more likely 1 in 20) that you wouldnt want to take if you are unwell anyway. It's a terrible choice to have to make, especially given people are catching it in hospital and that must increase your risks quite a bit. I've had to consider what happens to my parents if one gets ill - both of them needed medical attention in December and January, and dad had hospital operations in Jan/Feb, so in one sense we were lucky with the timing. For mum, I've decided the hospital is out of the question anymore, she's too frail to cope with the stress of being somewhere she doesnt recognise, cut off from family and TV which keeps her going, so even when she has a fall I deal with it and the problems it causes myself, and call doctors only for medication needs like antibiotics. Being in A&E is worse for her than staying at home. For dad, only if the alternative is dying through not going in hospital.

That's how we are having to think of life for a lot of people now.

Posted by: Envoirment 15th April 2020, 05:10 PM

There could also be an increase in the amount of suicides/accidental overdoses happening? Last year had the highest suicide rate since 2001 and given everything that's going on I wouldn't be surprised if there's been a spike in suicides over the last few weeks or so.

Posted by: Rooney 15th April 2020, 05:33 PM

Who knows, but the danger the goverment have is the longer the country is shutdown, the harder the immediate effect on the economy. I mean what the economists modelled the other day was scary, never mind a recession we're heading for the Great Depression II. So with that will become a large increase in mental health problems, redundancies, addictions etc. - so plenty of social problems will be intensified. I think we will lockdown for another 3 weeks, but after that I suspect is everything goes OK in the other European countries we will start to see maybe junior schools re-open and some businesses as a pilot.

Otherwise I just don't see how we recover. It's sad but there's got to be a trade-off somewhere between saving lives and stopping a great depression.

Posted by: Quarantilas 15th April 2020, 05:40 PM

Germany is coming out of lockdown!! A lot of restrictions are extended but we have a back to school date and the reopening of smaller stores which is great for a lot of the vulnerable SMEs.

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 05:49 PM

The one consolation is that the depression should be short-lived and followed by a sharp recovery. Of course, if the government did something really stupid such as not extending the transition period, that recovery might not be so rapid.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 15th April 2020, 05:52 PM

But if you reopen in a situation where people are still scared of going out, then the economy won't recover, there'll be no consumer confidence, and any further outbreaks will send everything right back into lockdown.

The other thing is that right now, there's a bit of solidarity for those who are already unfortunate enough to be out of work due to this, because it is knowingly completely out of their control. If there's a rush to reopen the economy without an exit strategy for regrowing it, then you send a lot of people into the point where their unemployment is now their personal responsibility again that they can do nothing about, and that's not going to be good for mental health either.

Basically the system is not going to go back to normal anytime soon and none of the options are particularly appealing. That's why Starmer's call for thinking about an exit strategy is the right way of thinking, there needs to be a steady and staged plan for getting out of this that isn't rushed because of the need for capitalism to get back on its feet no matter the human cost.

As such tentative steps like Germany's above are the right thing, slow, careful and don't rush for the sake of "the economy".

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 06:04 PM

I don't understand why the government keep insisting that this isn't the time to be thinking about an exit strategy. Nobody is yet calling for a firm strategy with specific dates attached, but a rough idea of how they expect things to go would be helpful. At the very least, it might give us some confidence that the eventual strategy has been considered carefully rather than thrown together in a ten-minute Zoom conference.

Yes, we know that the initial version might undergo changes in the light of experience elsewhere but, again, that might lead to more confidence that it has been thought through properly.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 15th April 2020, 07:08 PM

...and boost confidence in the economy recovering, give people a light at the end of the tunnel, and reassure those that are still gravely concerned....

Posted by: Mateja 15th April 2020, 08:05 PM

I'm sure the UK government is making quarantine exit plans, just like any other government. But at the moment the country is so deep in the Covid-19 hole, there is no real light at the end of the tunnel yet. Once the number of new infections and deaths drops significantly (Let's say, 50, 60%), they might become more open about their plans and even offer some tentative dates.

Patience. At the moment, the UK citizens need to be patient and follow the social distancing rules as much as possible. The examples of Italy and Spain can show you how long it takes before the situation gets better. And Italy and Spain are still in a very bad shape and will take their time with re-opening.

Posted by: Rooney 15th April 2020, 08:07 PM

Oh yes totally 100%, it would be crazy to go from zero to one hundred. It will be a steady re-opening, which is the right thing to do. Agree with Merkel that unfortunately until there is a vaccine we can't all just hide inside forever, but at least now people know the threat is real and we have the right infastructure in place (which should have been done in February).



I think talking about an exit strategy in the open is the wrong idea when we are still yet to hit the peak. Now I am not the biggest fan of the goverment and I know many people in here also aren't as well, but talking about an exit strategy in the open immediately tells people we are over the worst (when we are not) and secondly even giving a vague idea, journalists will press for dates. I've a friend who works for PHE and there's definitely a strategy out there (he can't/won't share) but either it's not been signed off yet by the government or they don't want to say anything just yet.

Posted by: Suedehead2 15th April 2020, 09:24 PM

Which means they are lying - again. They refuse even to acknowledge that a strategy is being discussed, thereby leaving people to fear that we could be months away from even starting to come out of this.

Journalists have shown no inclination to press for answers on anything so far. Why would they suddenly start to get more insistent on the matter of specific dates?

Posted by: Rooney 15th April 2020, 10:20 PM

Politicians lie all the time. I think even mentioning an exit plan right now is premature- it needs to be timed after we are inevitably put in to lockdown further. I think until we reach this magical peak I don’t think we’re going to see anything in the media about an exit plan. I also imagine they are watching what other countries do too, so you’d think they would have a similar strategy.

Posted by: Quarantilas 16th April 2020, 12:31 AM

Merkel gave a really fab press conference today where she explained in detail the impact of the reproductive factor of the virus. It’s had English subs added to it and is well worth a watch.

It’s really reassuring to have her guiding me through this.

Posted by: Suedehead2 16th April 2020, 06:40 AM

They don’t lie all the time. Cummings and co. have exploited the fact that many people think that and have been getting away with it.

Germany is about to start lifting its restrictions. They introduced theirs just a few days before the UK. How, then, does it make us look when our government won’t even tell us they have got as far as a piece of paper with the words “Exit Plan” at the top?

If I was, for example, a restaurant owner and the government didn’t expect restaurants to open until three months after the start of the exit process, I would want to know that now. I would want to know that I can expect my business to remain closed for at least another four months.

Posted by: Rooney 16th April 2020, 09:31 AM

But Germany was also far greater prepared and used their resources better. Their government is far more experienced and most of us called it at the time, the Cabinet Boris put together was largely full of people who were overpromoted for their ideologies rather than their political skills.

I just don't think putting even an idea of an exit strategy is the right thing as immeditately it spells the message that this thing is over to a lot of people, when the unfortunate reality is it's not going to over until there is a vaccine or we have some sort of herd immunity.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 16th April 2020, 10:43 AM

But seeing other countries easing restrictions is also going to make people think it's fine to do more here too. There needs to be some clear communications about some form of plan to allow people to prepare properly, but also knowing that the plan is far from set in stone and would change to respond with changing situations and what we've learned from other countries who ease restrictions earlier. A vague date of when things might start to be lifted what type of things will be eased back in first, it's not difficult.

It was only earlier this week that apparently 10 members of the cabinet wanted to end lockdown restrictions soon, we need to know there is some form of plan for this and it's not going to be rushed and make us worse off again.

Posted by: Mateja 16th April 2020, 11:39 AM

Look, you can't compare the UK to Germany. It doesn't matter when Germany introduced their restrictions in comparison to the UK - the situation in Germany never got as bad as it is now in the UK. There is no point in talking about lifting of the restrictions right now, you are so deep in the hole.

If anyone needs a vague idea of how the country will re-open, you can look at the exit plans of the other countries. You don't need anyothing more right now. Once the numbers of new infections and deaths significantly drop and there is an established trend of decline, expect the government to start talking about their exit plans and tentative dates.

Posted by: Rooney 16th April 2020, 11:52 AM

But did Germany, Spain, Denmark, Austria etc. all share their exit plans while in lockdown with the general public.. I have no idea, but I would assume the answer is no. I just don't think it is a very good idea, I mean what benefit does it bring? All it brings right now is fale hope and sends the wrong message that we are out of the worst of it. It's the same mentality of the budget airlines starting to offer flights again in a few months, so they can take people's money for their cashflow and offer people credits.

A 3 week lockdown gets us to 8th May iirc, which is the day before the Bank Holiday. I'd expect any changes to be announced as taking effect that following Monday and used as some form of nationalism.

Posted by: Dobbo 16th April 2020, 11:59 AM

I'm also in the mindset that they should definitely be preparing some form of exit strategy but that it must be kept tightly under wraps for now. Lesser of 2 evils imo. The public knowing a potential date is certainly good for those who have vested interests in their businesses etc. but we all know there are far too many idiots who would take it as an opportunity to begin flouting the rules prematurely.

Posted by: *Tim 16th April 2020, 11:59 AM

Belgium shared the rough order in which sectors would open
The Netherlands have asked alls ectors to come up with their plan on how they're gonna handle the 1.5m social distancing if they get to reopen.

I'm sure Germany has always said that schools would open first.

The people need something to look forward to. I mean Belgium just reopened DIY stores to make sure people have shit to do while being at home cause the strict lockdown rules caused people to bend those rules and go out anyway

Posted by: Quarantilas 16th April 2020, 12:00 PM

Yes. They all announced before the lockdown ended what restrictions would be lifted and when.

I posted Germany’s Exit Plan literally yesterday. It had been drafted internally a while before that and then constantly refined. Difference being that Germany has a federal government that has more intelligence and competence in their finger nail cuttings than exists in Whitehall and the UK Gov.

Posted by: Rooney 16th April 2020, 12:13 PM

Ah okay then I stand corrected. But I still don't think it's a great idea for the UK at least. All the examples of countries who have shared their plans so far are less severely hit (although slightly surprised about Belgium as I thought they were hit pretty hard too). I am just of the view point that no plan should be public knowledge until we are over the worst of it and have got testing at a competent level or these famous antibody tests that are actually reliable.

Posted by: *Tim 16th April 2020, 12:35 PM

They appear to be hit hard but they are over reporting. All deaths in carecenters are reported as coronacases, even if it was just a heart attack. They are past their peak though. There is a day on day decline in ICU cases and active cases

Posted by: Quarantilas 16th April 2020, 01:03 PM

Germany has been hard hit but has performed almost 2m tests and has hit that plateau where the curve has been flattened. There was a tweet yesterday that really summed up why germany is at a relaxing stage and the UK isn’t. The capacity in the healthcare system is astronomical.

Germany has never been close to that tipping point where the healthcare system collapses but that doesn’t mean it’s not been hit by a landslide of cases.


I think the uk should be open about it’s exit strategy. Even if it is what Germany indicated a week ago that when we come out it’d be small shops first and it’d take longer for most large stores and restaurants to open. That alone helps and gives some clarity to business. It also gives people the assurance that the gov is planning and is thinking about where we go next

Posted by: Rooney 16th April 2020, 01:35 PM

But this is the big difference between what other countries are doing and where we are with the UK - we are 3 weeks away (minimum) before any lockdown is going to be restricted. Giving an idea now sends out totally the wrong message. Fair enough if the situation appears to have reached a peak and levelling off. In two weeks if there is no sudden increase then yes, totally announce as much as you want, but right now in terms of what I know about communications strategy in general there is no benefit for announcing in public the post-lockdown plan.

New Zealand announced the plan for moving from Level 4 to Level 3 today IF things don't get any worse, which would take effect this coming Monday. An approach like that would be sensible. Manage expectations 5-7 days before, rather than 21 days minimum.

Posted by: Suedehead2 16th April 2020, 02:42 PM

The trouble is our government won't even say that they are considering an exit strategy. If they are actually telling the truth, they are even more useless than I thought.

Perhaps they could explain their lack of a plan like this

"Yes, some countries are starting to announce their plans to come out of this. Some have even started to implement those plans. The difference is that some countries have a government run by grown-ups. We have one led by Boris Johnson, the Dominics Raab and Cummings and a Home Secretary who can't read numbers from a piece of paper. Tough."

Posted by: Popchartfreak 16th April 2020, 03:10 PM

OTOH we do have governments announcing scalebacks based on these facts:

Reported coronavirus deaths:

Feb. 15: 0 deaths
Mar. 15: 65 deaths
Apr. 15: 30,844 deaths

Anyone care to guess what May 15 totals will be?

Can you guess who thinks he has absolute power over other politicians and States and when they reduce lockdown?

Hint: Orange. Wannabe Dictator. Loves suck-ups. Hates anyone who fails to suck-up. Adores fellow dictators. Is a moron, a serial cheater, liar, has his own family in key government posts, has many sexual abuse cases pending, and is selling ventilators to Russia because it's not his job to make sure States in his country have enough of them or anything else. Except that he says he has absolute power over them all. Except when he contradicts himself. Which is always. Cos he's a f***ing moron.

Posted by: Suedehead2 16th April 2020, 03:13 PM

Don't you feel nostalgic for the days when we could find Trump's idiocy and hypocrisy faintly amusing occasionally? Now it's mostly frightening.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 16th April 2020, 03:34 PM

Yes it's like a satirical dystopian Hollywood movie starring unbelievably unrealistic extreme characters that would have to be made up. Only it's worse than that.

If anyone is not angry enough about the way our beloved government has handled this crisis I suggest they read this abbreviated timeline:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1249979116302012418.html

which is a cut-down version of this more in-depth referenced article:

https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/11/a-national-scandal-a-timeline-of-the-uk-governments-woeful-response-to-the-coronavirus-crisis/

and then post your thoughts after reading.

My initial thought was, "how many people in hospital did Boris Johnson personally kill by insisting on shaking hands with everyone?"

We know he came close to successfully killing himself and making his pregnant wife ill, so chances are he killed a hell of a lot of others too. Actual killer of sick people who knew the risks and ignored the advice of experts.

Posted by: Mateja 16th April 2020, 03:38 PM

So, the UK reported 4617 new infections and 861 deaths due to Covid 19 in the last 24 hours. I think it's pretty clear it's way too early to talk about any plans of re-opening in public right now. You need to flatten the curve and then bend it. It will be a while before you get the virus under control.

Posted by: Suedehead2 16th April 2020, 03:59 PM

Nobody is asking for a plan with specific dates attached. All we are suggesting is that there should be a rough outline of the order in which things will happen and a rough timescale. A summary of what needs to happen before the first restrictions are lifted would also be helpful.

Posted by: blacksquare 16th April 2020, 04:12 PM

This. Even the most simple outline can help businesses and let people understand and plan their finances better. I'm sure there is a mental health benefit too with having something to work towards.



The least surprising news of the week.

Posted by: Rooney 16th April 2020, 06:05 PM

But I still don't see what this achieves right now at this moment in time. What might be good news for some it might be bad news for others. While I totally agree there should be a detailed plan in place that is clear and transparent, that should be in 2 weeks time if we see a pattern of improvement. All you have to see from the news conference today is journalists hammered home the exact same question multiple times. People want to know when we are coming out of it when we haven't even fully stopped transmission yet!

I hate this government, the cabinet are complete morons but for once I actually totally agree with the strategy of communication they are taking. I'll trust that they have a plan in place, because if they don't they're more idiotic than I thought! Can't see that happening after the complete failure at the start. And at least we got a summary today of what needs to happen, which sounded well thought-out even if the delivery was not great from Raab.

Posted by: Mart!n 16th April 2020, 07:00 PM

Medway Maritime Hospital have announced today 154 people have recovered from Coronavirus. (Medway, Kent, my hometown)

https://www.kentlive.news/

Posted by: dandruff* 16th April 2020, 07:29 PM

On the one hand Trump is right I think in saying the WHO was wrong in not advising ceasing flights from China earlier, I certainly think if flights would have been stopped from the big three sources at the start, China, Iran and Italy, the case numbers and death rate would have been lower, I mean it wouldn't have stopped it completely from reaching the UK and US but it would have delayed it.

However unfortunately Trump and/or his medical advisors did not take it seriously enough at the start in America, comparing it with the flu.

Posted by: Suedehead2 16th April 2020, 07:48 PM

Trump even accused the WHO of scaremongering when they started issuing warnings in January. Therefore, it is safe to assume that he would have ignored any advice about banning flights. I suspect the virus had already reached the UK by then but would agree that banning flights would almost certainly have reduced the number of cases. Banning the racing at Cheltenham would have helped too.

Posted by: dandruff* 16th April 2020, 08:01 PM

Yep I agree, he may not have followed the advice, it may have depended on what the US government medical experts I assume he was getting advice from would have advised him if the WHO had of taken a more hardline approach to banning flights early.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 17th April 2020, 07:06 AM

All nations had access to the same information - whatever China had decided to tell in the early stages. Given they have belatedly just officially doubled the number of reported deaths, it's fairly safe to say they weren't open and honest with themsleves, never mind the rest of the world. Given there is chitchat in Italy of the spread being at least partly due to the numbers of Chinese people flying back from Wuhan after abandoned plans from New Year (China, of course, has fingers in businesses worldwide, in Northern Italy the fashion/clothes trade) it kind of underlines the importance of not allowing foreign investors to buy up local businesses when the nation they come from can't be trusted to be open and transparent enough to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people die as a result of their denials and unhelpfulness. It took a bunch of doctors in China to publish vital information in late January in The Lancet. Had we known the full facts there would have been a total ban of flights from the affected areas earlier in most countries with a sensible government.

Trump and Johnson may well have just ignored the information anyway, given both are total suck-ups to Chinese buy-outs and contracts due to their own biased self-interest: one cos he and his family has huge money interests in China, the other because he politically boxed himself into an anti-EU pro-China/USA flag-waver.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 17th April 2020, 07:22 AM

Flights were ceased first in Italy, on 31st January. It made zero difference.

Germany at no point banned flights from China and yet appears to have this crisis under control, certainly much more under control than the UK which has a smaller population and around 3 times the total deaths (reported in hospitals) and therefore around 4 times as many per capita. When the UK government decided to cease community testing on 12th March they made it a lot harder for us to come out of lockdown unlike our European neighbours who are already starting to relax measures (having acted much sooner also).

Posted by: Quarantilas 17th April 2020, 08:31 AM

Helps that testing here is 350k per week, which is more than the UK has done total. Presser today with health minister and RKI confirmed they’re making steps to double testing to 700k per week.

Replication is down to 0,7 in Germany which is where it needs to stay to remain manageable. Focus here is now on controlling that rate to ensure it remains under 1 for as long as there is no vaccination or treatment. Hopefully the UK can get it’s testing act together so they can move in the same direction. It seems to me that without an effective test/track/trace set up there can be no effective and sustainable route out of lockdown.

Posted by: *Tim 17th April 2020, 08:45 AM

Nobody knows if it'd have made a difference. As far as we know many more infections clusters could've broken out had flights not been seized. The south and Rome have been relatively safe, but trust and believe had the flights remained incoming there'd have been more clusters.

Posted by: Rooney 17th April 2020, 10:26 AM

There needs to be thorough testing as it does appear the best way to control any second major outbreak is to contain through testing/tracing. Only problem is I'm not sure we will have all the infastructure in place in 3 weeks time..! But the big thing is the reliability of the anti-body tests and even tests in general. Heard stories where people are getting tested 2-3 times before it's showing as positive for Covid. Also it does appear that a lot of people are asymptomatic for whatever reason, from some of the articles I've read.

I wonder what the total Chinese figure will get to? Clear as mud any figures they report back should be in all probability be disregarded.

Posted by: Suedehead2 17th April 2020, 11:19 AM

Yes, some people are being tested more than once. The number of people tested seems to be about 70% of the number of tests. All I have read is that there are “clinical reasons” but I haven’t seen any attempt to explain what those reasons are or whether there is any prospect of a better test that doesn’t require as much repetition.

Posted by: Quarantilas 17th April 2020, 11:56 AM

Yeah I’ve also seen those stories. I understand someone being retested to establish if the virus has left their system but it’s really worrying that there is a lot of false negative cases and talks of antibody tests that are useless.

It’s quite concerning that a lot of rigour has been abandoned in favour of speed. There’s no point in having the first antibody test in the world if a) it’s not effective and b) there’s no documented evidence that antibodies are detectable after infection.



The fact that there’s a lot of contradictions in the scientific community about how long immunity lasts or even if there is immunity is extremely concerning. Until we know more I don’t think we’re going to get an effective antibody test or an effective vaccination. So social distancing and on/off lockdowns will be reality for a while yet.

Posted by: Suedehead2 17th April 2020, 12:42 PM

The last figures I saw (a couple days ago) showed that the current antibody tests were a very long way from being accurate enough. The very best tests had a failure rate of around 30% which renders them utterly useless. Of course, that could change fairly rapidly.

There does indeed seem to be a lot of uncertainty over how long immunity lasts. However, as this virus has only existed for a few months, I suppose that is to be expected. In the absence of a vaccine (probably at least a year away before you even begin to think about how to deploy it effectively), the emphasis has to be on slowing its spread and how to do that without causing such catastrophic damage to the economy that people wonder whether it was worth it.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 17th April 2020, 03:22 PM

We do- the UK has kept flights coming in and has fewer cases than Italy.

The US banned flights in early February and has many more cases (per capita). Once the virus was in the community it was able to spread quite easily with the most and only effective strategy for slowing the spread being social distancing.

Posted by: Andrew. 17th April 2020, 03:55 PM

This isn't about party politics but I don't get how the government's approval ratings are so high? 66% in a poll a few days ago. Anyone can see that they closed the schools and put us in lockdown way too late and that combined with the damage done the health service, lack of testing, Priti hopeless etc why are people so supportive? What will it take for people not to support these people.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 17th April 2020, 04:02 PM

But Boris is just like you and me! He can get the deadly virus too! And isn’t he such a fighter? They’re all working so hard to help us out and Boris has beaten the disease and given us hope! The NHS will cope fine whilst everyone keeps clapping for it! And then when this over we can forget about it and carry on voting Tory!

That’s probably why. People are stupid. They won’t remember that our government were ill prepared and bumbled through the whole thing. They’ll remember that the government ‘did their best’ and that ‘no one could have known this was going to happen’.

It actually makes me feel sick.

Posted by: Andrew. 17th April 2020, 04:10 PM

This is what happens when you have a press like this country. There's MANY problems with the American media but at least there's lots of outlets holding Trump to account. We don't have that here, we have Tory mouthpieces bar a few newspapers.

I can't even say thank f*** Scotland's getting out of here because Boris won't give us permission lol

Posted by: Oliver 17th April 2020, 04:46 PM

Has anyone seen the Westminster bridge video? Shocking!

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 17th April 2020, 04:48 PM

I saw it on Twitter. People appear to have missed the whole point.

Posted by: *Tim 17th April 2020, 05:46 PM

You also did only a 4th of the tests italy did, or 1/3rd of their tests per million inhabitants.

Italy has also peaked, as opposed to the UK. You cannot compare the 2 as the UK is behind italy's curve right now

The US has New York as their major cluster and a total incompetent government and healthcare system, let's not get started on that one

Posted by: Doctor Blind 17th April 2020, 06:01 PM

The examples were slightly facetious, but my point was really that community spread overwhelms any apparent reduction in numbers you get from banning flights. It's like shutting the door once the horse has bolted - if it's already in the community it is too late, banning flights only works before cases arrive. Ultimately it makes little difference once you've had a few - which is why you cannot find any examples where banning travel actually significantly helped reduce spread of the virus.

Posted by: *Tim 17th April 2020, 06:06 PM

And my point was that with banning travel you reduce the risk of introducing new clusters outnof nowhere

Posted by: Doctor Blind 17th April 2020, 06:07 PM

No, because social distancing is *already* stopping the spread of new clusters. Therefore banning flights = Pointless.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 17th April 2020, 06:29 PM

Doing their bit for the NHS by making sure they continue to get more patients.

Or, making sure they get on telly so everyone can see how caring they are, me, me, me, me..

A better way of supporting the NHS is to give cash donations, and you dont have to even tell anyone how caring you are or go around showing the receipts to prove how caring you are.

On other topics:

Boris at 66%. large number of people dont think too deeply about anything, or notice chains of events and links and causes, they just superficially accept whatever is being said at any given moment, especially if Vera Lynn is busy singing "We'll Meet Again" to invoke the wartime spirit for those who weren't actually born when WW2 was on, as if staying indoors to avoid people dying is in anyway like fighting Nazis, bombs dropping, rations, disease and working in factories for the war effort. That he has actually proven himself to be a complete dick by ignoring his own advice and catching Covid-19 has been corrupted by his spinners to "see, even the PM can catch this terrible disease, so brave battling it and winning, he's just like us all" sympathy hanky time.

banning travel: does prevent disease spreading. All the new cases in China are from citizens RETURNING to China and starting the ball rolling again. Clearly it spread round the world from international travel to and from China, it didn't just magically materialise. This is not news. We knew this back in the 70's (see BBC's Survivors series). It terms of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, it still helps because if people are travelling from countries which have coronavirus then they will 100% for sure be spreading even more pockets of it.


There can be no safe international travel until:

There's a vaccine

OR

people are tested before flying, with a certificate to prove they are safe

OR

the departure nation has zero cases of Covid-19.


We went from zero cases in the world to 2.25 million in the space of 4 months. To have any other approach is irresponsible and it will just happen all over again. There's still another 7.5 billion or so still waiting to catch it......

Posted by: dandruff* 17th April 2020, 06:39 PM

Yes Italy were just very unlucky in that they got the virus very early before they banned flights from China. Therefore the example of Italy for the reason why supposedly banning flights is pointless is not a good example in my opinion.

If they wouldn't have banned flights from China when they did, the outbreak could have been even worse there.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 18th April 2020, 08:32 AM

the ever-blunt Marina tells it like it t-i-i-s:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/17/matt-hancock-dominic-raab-ppe-care-badges?CMP=share_btn_tw

Posted by: Popchartfreak 18th April 2020, 09:03 AM

....and just to keep the upbeat mood going, many reputable broadsheets are reporting on people who have had Covid-19 testing positive a 2nd time, hundreds in South Korea and Japan, many with symptoms returning. Suggestions are that it's harder to shake off with full immunity than thought, possibly due to mutations by the virus keeping ahead of the body's ability to develop immunity. If this is true (and it's still "If" fingers-crossed) the whole "herd immunity" theory is dead in the water. If there's one thing we know about viruses it's their ability to mutate and not be wiped out no matter how hard you try. Or as Trump puts it "They are smart. Really smart." A virus is clearly smarter than Trump, who has announced he is winning the war against the "smart" virus despite increasingly mounting death tolls. Trump: less brain cells than a virus. Official.

PS Trump is tweeting that the States need liberating from lockdown and is inciting rioting and civil disorder as he has always wanted (see previous pre-election quotations).

Posted by: Rooney 18th April 2020, 09:40 AM

I would find the first line really, really unlikely. It's a possibility but from most things I have read it seems the virus has barely mutated. Surely the bigger likelihood is the testing is not right. Otherwise it goes against pretty much every virus going that your body does not form some sort of natural immunity (even for a temporary time). If anything probably adds to the conspiracy that the virus was man-made.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 18th April 2020, 07:13 PM

Pretty scathing report in the Times tonight highlighting the failings of the UK government to handle this crisis.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

Key quote though:

Posted by: Suedehead2 18th April 2020, 07:59 PM

Here, from the government website, is a transcript of a speech made by Johnson in February. He was literally floating the idea of doing nothing about coronavirus and hoping we’d be able to exploit economic collapse elsewhere.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

Posted by: Rooney 18th April 2020, 08:01 PM

While I am not surprised about Boris at all (I mean it's clearly obvious he does minimal work) and in no way am I fan of the government, didn't pretty much the entire Western world not take the threat seriously in January. We contained the cases (as did the rest of the world) in January fairly easily. It was only after the outbreak in Austria that the world got hot badly. I am not a fan of this government at all, but nobody really took this seriously until Italy started crumbling after a few weeks. I mean even the WHO were late with their severity of the virus as well.

Posted by: Doctor Blind 18th April 2020, 08:11 PM

You are not surprised that the PM does a half-arsed job in a crisis that could economically cripple the country worse than all of the Great Depression, World War II and the Financial Crisis of 2008. I love your relaxed attitude to this.

UK deaths are four times higher per capita than Germany, where the initial European outbreak is thought to have originated. That looks like some governments were a lot more PREPARED than others to me.

Not sure what you mean about Austria, it was Italy (specifically the northern Lombardy region) where community spread first became widespread.

Posted by: Rooney 18th April 2020, 09:10 PM

No, I'm not surprised at all because he is a lazy and everything about his political career history today shows this- he's a showman. What can I do by getting wound up about it? What happened has already happened. All we can do is get through this mess, learn for the future and hold those to accounability when it's all over. His whole attitude about it was wrong, but then again so many people's attitudes were because clearly the reports coming out at the time, did not account for how quickly it spread or how lethal it could be. The whole 'it only affects old people' linre rightly or wronly was spread. As I've already mentioned we were under prepared. I don't think the Government will get away with this when it's all over, someone will quite rightly take the flack, but it will probably be the wrong person.

I know Lombardy was the initial hotspot in Italy, but aren't a lot of the original cases in Europe linked not to Italy, but to Austria? At least that's where a lot of cases are linked to from the end of February which seemingly caused the spread to a lot of countries.

Posted by: *Tim 18th April 2020, 09:40 PM

Most initial cases are actually linked to returning tourists from Italy or Iran as well as chinese tourists

The tirol cluster did infect a lot of skiers, but those were later on in the timeline

Posted by: Suedehead2 18th April 2020, 10:02 PM

We can learn that it is not a good idea to have a Prime Minister whose only skill is that of self-promotion. We might even learn (although I'm not optimistic) that having a press that is overwhelmingly on the side of the governing party is not a good idea.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 19th April 2020, 10:21 AM

That's the most-likely explanation - however, if the testing is showing false positives and the symptoms of some people are from other diseases then that's a worry in itself. That it's in the broadsheets rather than the rags means I'm inclined to consider it as a possibility.

I'm not a glass-half-full person by nature because optimists are dangerously inclined to ignore warnings and generally prone to not preparing for the worst, and history shows the results can be disastrous. Viruses clearly mutate all the time or else flu would die out as opposed to the annual battle to keep up with the latest strains, and they come and go in swathes over decades - one of the reasons the 1918 pandemic killed so many young people was that strain of viruses had been a bit quiet for 2 or 3 decades, while older people had a degree of inbuilt immunity from older strains. Basically, if they didn't mutate we wouldnt need annual flu jabs.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 19th April 2020, 10:37 AM

Which conclusively proves that electing morons is bad for your health. In pandemics time is of the essence. Delaying a few weeks is the difference between 100 dead and 15,000 dead, A few weeks longer and it'll be 100,000+ dead, and so on.

Latest news suggests Trump knew about how serious the virus was in November, he informed Israel and NATO. So he took 2 months to ban flights from China (except he didn't really ban flights from China completely at all). As leader of the free world it was his duty to pass on the CIA reports to allow the rest of the world time to make preparations. Judging by Obama's swift reaction to Ebola, I'm suggesting he would have done a very different job.

BTW It very much IS time to point the finger (to anyone suggesting otherwise) because stupidity isn't something you grow out of and Trump and Johnson are in the situation they are in because they are dumb dumb dumb and our dire situation is more dire than it needed be thanks to them, and it's ongoing for the foreseeable future. And because it gives them time to try and weazel their way out of blame using tried and trusted campaigns of truth-bending.

Posted by: Steve201 19th April 2020, 11:03 AM

It was rich business men who came from China to ski resorts in France if I remember rightly, remember the super spreader!

Posted by: Quarantilas 19th April 2020, 11:55 AM

At one point (~300 cases) one third of all corona cases in Berlin were traced to a single person who’d been skiing in Italy and then came back with it and went on a single night out at a small bar.



This thing is such a nasty spreader. It’s why travel bans are useless. By the time they’re implemented the virus is already running rife through the city. Social distancing to keep the R value under 1 is the only effective tool we have

Posted by: Rooney 19th April 2020, 12:18 PM

I thought travel bans were useless at first, but not so sure I agree wholly now. Obviously it would not be the case for every country as the makeup and location obviously plays a part, but Greece have checked everything and they appear to be doing ok compared to a lot of Europe, New Zealand are doing something very similar and so are Australia. Think if you do this, then start the contact tracing and testing it really helps.

Posted by: *Tim 19th April 2020, 12:40 PM

Looking at the European nations only from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Europe
Shows the vast majority of first cases are from citizens that went to Italy to ski. Given the fact that they were contagious long before they were tested, its safe to say they infected quite a few people

That superspreader infected 11 brits in 3 countries (singapore, france and britain).

Posted by: Harve 19th April 2020, 01:07 PM

Some of the friends the British guy was staying with in the French Alps then immediately went on a second holiday and spread in Mallorca, too.

Posted by: *Tim 19th April 2020, 01:38 PM

Rich people 🙄

Posted by: Andrew. 19th April 2020, 02:03 PM

I know this isn’t all brand new information, but Boris Johnson refusing to turn up to corona meetings until MARCH is actually insulting!

Posted by: blacksquare 19th April 2020, 02:06 PM

That Sunday Times article would have taken down a government in the past — I'm sure it'll barely make a dent on the public now.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 19th April 2020, 02:17 PM

Sadly, more of the social media conversation is of journalists getting up in their tits about people copy-pasting paywalled articles than looking like they're going to pen more articles to speak truth to power, and the head political editors of the broadcast media (Kuenssberg) are pretty silent or downplaying it (Peston) on the whole thing - because it's not favourable to the government so they're going to ignore it.

The government's strategy has turned out to cost thousands of lives. That should lead to resignations.

Posted by: *Tim 19th April 2020, 02:17 PM

The fact that it is behind a paywall is kinda worrying as well :')

Posted by: fl00zy* 19th April 2020, 02:52 PM

Text of the Times article if interested:

Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives

On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world. Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies. The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee. But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.

This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people. Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister. Johnson had found time that day, however, to join in a lunar new year dragon eyes ritual as part of Downing Street’s reception for the Chinese community, led by the country’s ambassador.

It was a big day for Johnson and there was a triumphal mood in Downing Street because the withdrawal treaty from the European Union was being signed in the late afternoon. It could have been the defining moment of his premiership — but that was before the world changed. That afternoon his spokesman played down the looming threat from the east and reassured the nation that we were “well prepared for any new diseases”. The confident, almost nonchalant, attitude displayed that day in January would continue for more than a month.

Johnson went on to miss four further Cobra meetings on the virus. As Britain was hit by unprecedented flooding, he completed the EU withdrawal, reshuffled his cabinet and then went away to the grace-and-favour country retreat at Chevening where he spent most of the two weeks over half-term with his pregnant fiancée, Carrie Symonds. It would not be until March 2 — another five weeks — that Johnson would attend a Cobra meeting about the coronavirus. But by then it was almost certainly too late. The virus had sneaked into our airports, our trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the worst infections of the most deadly virus to have hit the world in more than a century.

Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime minister was singled out. "There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

One day there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny. Among the key points likely to be explored will be why it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection. Any inquiry may also ask whether the government’s failure to get to grips with the scale of the crisis in those early days had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.

An investigation has talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing. They told us that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.

This made it doubly important that the government hit the ground running in late January and early February. Scientists said the threat from the coming storm was clear. Indeed, one of the government’s key advisory committees was given a dire warning a month earlier than has previously been admitted about the prospect of having to deal with mass casualties. It was a message repeated throughout February but the warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The need, for example, to boost emergency supplies of protective masks and gowns for health workers was pressing, but little progress was made in obtaining the items from the manufacturers, mainly in China. Instead, the government sent supplies the other way — shipping 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China during this period, following a request for help from the authorities there.

The prime minister had been sunning himself with his girlfriend in the millionaires’ Caribbean resort of Mustique when China first alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) on December 31 that several cases of an unusual pneumonia had been recorded in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province. In the days that followed China initially claimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, which should have been reassuring. But this did not ring true to Britain’s public health academics and epidemiologists who were texting each other, eager for more information, in early January.

Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, had predicted in a talk two years earlier that a virus might jump species from an animal in China and spread quickly to become a human pandemic. So the news from Wuhan set her on high alert. “In early January a lot of my global health colleagues and I were kind of discussing ‘What’s going on?’” she recalled. “China still hadn’t confirmed the virus was human-to-human. A lot of us were suspecting it was because it was a respiratory pathogen and you wouldn’t see the numbers of cases that we were seeing out of China if it was not human-to-human. So that was disturbing.”

By as early as January 16 the professor was on Twitter calling for swift action to prepare for the virus. “Been asked by journalists how serious #WuhanPneumonia outbreak is,” she wrote. “My answer: take it seriously because of cross-border spread (planes means bugs travel far & fast), likely human-to-human transmission and previous outbreaks have taught overresponding is better than delaying action.” Events were now moving fast. Four hundred miles away in London, from its campus next to the Royal Albert Hall, a team at Imperial College’s School of Public Health led by Professor Neil Ferguson produced its first modelling assessment of the likely impact of the virus. On Friday, January 17, its report noted the “worrying” news that three cases of the virus had been discovered outside China — two in Thailand and one in Japan. While acknowledging many unknowns, researchers calculated that there could already be as many as 4,000 cases. The report warned: “The magnitude of these numbers suggests substantial human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. Heightened surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are recommended.”

By now the mystery bug had been identified as a type of coronavirus — a large family of viruses that can cause infections ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). There had been two reported deaths from the virus and 41 patients had been taken ill. The following Wednesday, January 22, the government convened its first meeting of its scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus. Its membership is secret but it is usually chaired by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty. Downing Street advisers are also present.

There were new findings that day with Chinese scientists warning that the virus had an unusually high infectivity rate of up to 3.0, which meant each person with the virus would typically infect up to three more people. One of those present was Imperial’s Ferguson, who was already working on his own estimate — putting infectivity at 2.6 and possibly as high as 3.5 — which he sent to ministers and officials in a report on the day of the Cobra meeting on January 24. The Spanish flu had an estimated infectivity rate of between 2.0 and 3.0, so Ferguson’s finding was shocking.


“Cobra met today to discuss the situation in Wuhan, China,” said Whitty. “We have global experts monitoring the situation around the clock and have a strong track record of managing new forms of infectious disease . . . there are no confirmed cases in the UK to date.” However, by then there had been 1,000 cases worldwide and 41 deaths, mostly in Wuhan. A Lancet report that day presented a study of 41 coronavirus patients admitted to hospital in Wuhan which found that more than half had severe breathing problems, a third required intensive care and six had died. And there was now little doubt that the UK would be hit by the virus. A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.

Sure enough, five days later on Wednesday, January 29, the first coronavirus cases on British soil were found when two Chinese nationals from the same family fell ill at a hotel in York. The next day, the government raised the threat level from low to moderate. The pandemic plan On January 31 — or Brexit day as it had become known — there was a rousing 11pm speech by the prime minister promising that the withdrawal from the European Union would be the dawn of a new era unleashing the British people who would “grow in confidence” month by month.

By this time, there was good reason for the government’s top scientific advisers to feel creeping unease about the virus. The WHO had declared the coronavirus a global emergency just the day before and scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had confirmed to Whitty in a private meeting of the Nervtag advisory committee on respiratory illness that the virus’s infectivity could be as bad as Ferguson’s worst estimate several days earlier.

The official scientific advisers were willing to concede in public that there might be several cases of the coronavirus in the UK. But they had faith that the country’s plans for a pandemic would prove robust. This was probably a big mistake. An adviser to Downing Street with extensive knowledge of Britain’s emergency preparations — speaking off the record — says their confidence in “the plan” was misplaced. While a possible pandemic had been listed as the No 1 threat to the nation for many years, the source says that in reality it had long since stopped being treated as such.

Several emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a pandemic had once been a top priority and had been well-funded for a decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But then austerity cuts struck. “We were the envy of the world,” the source said, “but pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years when there were more pressing needs.” The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators. But an equally lengthy list of recommendations to address the deficiencies was never implemented. The source said preparations for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning” in the following years.

In the year leading up to the coronavirus outbreak key government committee meetings on pandemic planning were repeatedly “bumped” off the diary to make way for discussions about more pressing issues such as the beds crisis in the NHS. Training for NHS staff with protective equipment and respirators was also neglected, the source alleges. Members of the government advisory group on pandemics are said to have felt powerless. “They would joke between themselves, ‘Haha let’s hope we don’t get a pandemic,’ because there wasn’t a single area of practice that was being nurtured in order for us to meet basic requirements for pandemic, never mind do it well,” said the source. “If you were with senior NHS managers at all during the last two years, you were aware that their biggest fear, their sweatiest nightmare, was a pandemic because they weren’t prepared for it.”

It meant that the government had much catching up to do when it was becoming clear that this “nightmare” was becoming a distinct possibility in February. But the source says there was little urgency. “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,” the source said. One deviation from the plan, for example, was a failure to give an early warning to firms that there might be a lockdown so they could start contingency planning. “There was a duty to get them to start thinking about their cashflow and their business continuity arrangements,” the source said.

A central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine. That involves testing and the UK initially seemed to be ahead of the game. In early February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus. “Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford,” he said. So when Steve Walsh, a 53-year-old businessman from Hove, East Sussex, was identified as the source of the second UK outbreak on February 6 all his contacts were followed up with tests. Walsh’s case was a warning of the rampant infectivity of the virus as he is believed to have passed it to five people in the UK after returning from a conference in Singapore as well as six overseas. But Public Health England failed to take advantage of our early breakthroughs with tests and lost early opportunities to step up production to the levels that would later be needed.

This was in part because the government was planning for the virus using its blueprint for fighting the flu. Once a flu pandemic has found its way into the population and there is no vaccine, then the virus is allowed to take its course until “herd immunity” is acquired. Such a plan does not require mass testing.

A senior politician told this newspaper: “I had conversations with Chris Whitty at the end of January and they were absolutely focused on herd immunity. The reason is that with flu, herd immunity is the right response if you haven’t got a vaccine. “All of our planning was for pandemic flu. There has basically been a divide between scientists in Asia who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu.”

The prime minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings is said to have had initial enthusiasm for the herd immunity concept, which may have played a part in the government’s early approach to managing the virus. The Department of Health firmly denies that “herd immunity” was ever its aim and rejects suggestions that Whitty supported it. Cummings also denies backing the concept. The failure to obtain large amounts of testing equipment was another big error of judgment, according to the Downing Street source. It would later be one of the big scandals of the coronavirus crisis that the considerable capacity of Britain’s private laboratories to mass-produce tests was not harnessed during those crucial weeks of February. “We should have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer to become part of the government’s testing regime but that didn’t happen,” said the source.

The lack of action was confirmed by Doris-Ann Williams, chief executive of the British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most of the UK’s testing sector. Amazingly, she says her organisation did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1 — the night before Hancock bowed to pressure and announced a belated and ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month. There was also a failure to replenish supplies of gowns and masks for health and care workers in the early weeks of February — despite NHS England declaring the virus its first “level four critical incident” at the end of January. It was a key part of the pandemic plan — the NHS’s Operating Framework for Managing the Response to Pandemic Influenza dated December 2017 — that the NHS would be able to draw on “just in case” stockpiles of PPE. But many of the “just in case” stockpiles had dwindled, and equipment was out of date. As not enough money was being spent on replenishing stockpiles, this shortfall was supposed to be filled by activating “just in time” contracts which had been arranged with equipment suppliers in recent years to deal with an emergency. The first order for equipment under the “just in time” protocol was made on January 30.

However, the source said that attempts to call in these “just in time” contracts immediately ran into difficulties in February because they were mostly with Chinese manufacturers who were facing unprecedented demand from the country’s own health service and elsewhere. This was another nail in the coffin for the pandemic plan. “It was a massive spider’s web of failing, every domino has fallen,” said the source. The NHS could have contacted UK-based suppliers. The British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA) was ready to help supply PPE in February — and throughout March — but it was only on April 1 that its offer of help was accepted. Dr Simon Festing, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “Orders undoubtedly went overseas instead of to the NHS because of the missed opportunities in the procurement process.”

Downing Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. A senior department of health insider described the sense of drift witnessed during those crucial weeks in February: “We missed the boat on testing and PPE . . . I remember being called into some of the meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’ “I had watched Wuhan but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity.”

In the Far East the threat was being treated more seriously in the early weeks of February. Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was in a unique position to compare the UK’s response with Singapore, where he had advised in the past. “Singapore realised, as soon as Wuhan reported it, that cases were going to turn up in Singapore. And so they prepared for that. I looked at the UK and I can see a different strategy and approach.
“The interesting thing for me is, I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and basically they copied the UK pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is they actually implemented it.”

Towards the end of the second week of February, the prime minister was demob happy. After sacking five cabinet ministers and saying everyone “should be confident and calm” about Britain’s response to the virus, Johnson vacated Downing Street after the half-term recess began on February 13. He headed to the country for a “working” holiday at Chevening with Symonds and would be out of the public eye for 12 days. His aides were thankful for the rest, as they had been working flat out since the summer as the Brexit power struggle had played out.

The Sunday newspapers that weekend would not have made comfortable reading. The Sunday Times reported on a briefing from a risk specialist which said that Public Health England would be overrun during a pandemic as it could test only 1,000 people a day. Johnson may well have been distracted by matters in his personal life during his stay in the countryside. Aides were told to keep their briefing papers short and cut the number of memos in his red box if they wanted them to be read.

His family needed to be prepared for the announcement that Symonds, who turned 32 in March, was pregnant and that they had been secretly engaged for some time. Relations with his children had been fraught since his separation from his estranged wife Marina Wheeler and the rift deepened when she had been diagnosed with cancer last year. The divorce also had to be finalised. Midway through the break it was announced in the High Court that the couple had reached a settlement, leaving Wheeler free to apply for divorce.

There were murmurings of frustration from some ministers and their aides at the time that Johnson was not taking more of a lead. But Johnson’s aides are understood to have felt relaxed: he was getting updates and they claim the scientists were saying everything was under control. By the time Johnson departed for the countryside, however, there was mounting unease among scientists about the exceptional nature of the threat. Sir Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease specialist who is a key government adviser, made this clear in a recent BBC interview. “I think from the early days in February, if not in late January, it was obvious this infection was going to be very serious and it was going to affect more than just the region of Asia ,” he said. “I think it was very clear that this was going to be an unprecedented event.”

By February 21, the virus had already infected 76,000 people, had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless Nervtag, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”. Its members may well regret that decision with hindsight and it was certainly not unanimous. John Edmunds, one of the country’s top infectious disease modellers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was participating in the meeting by video link but his technology failed him at the crucial moment.

Edmunds wanted the threat level to be increased to high but could not make his view known as the link was glitchy. He sent an email later making his view clear. “JE believes that the risk to the UK population [in the PHE risk assessment] should be high, as there is evidence of ongoing transmission in Korea, Japan and Singapore, as well as in China,” the meeting’s minutes state. But the decision had already been taken.

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College, was in America at the time of the meeting but would also have recommended increasing the threat to high. Three days earlier he had given an address to a seminar in which he estimated that 60% of the world’s population would probably become infected if no action was taken and 400,000 people would die in the UK.

By February 26, there were 13 known cases in the UK. That day — almost four weeks before a full lockdown would be announced — ministers were warned through another advisory committee that the country was facing a catastrophic loss of life unless drastic action was taken. Having been thwarted from sounding the alarm, Edmunds and his team presented their latest “worst scenario” predictions to the scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M) which directly advises the country’s scientific decision-makers on Sage. It warned that 27 million people could be infected and 220,000 intensive care beds would be needed if no action were taken to reduce infection rates. The predicted death toll was 380,000. Edmunds’s colleague Nick Davies, who led the research, says the report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown almost four weeks before it was imposed. The team modelled the effects of a 12-week lockdown involving school and work closures, shielding the elderly, social distancing and self-isolation. It estimated this would delay the impact of the pandemic but there still might be 280,000 deaths over the year.

The previous night Johnson had returned to London for the Conservatives’ big fundraising ball, the Winter Party, at which one donor pledged £60,000 for the privilege of playing a game of tennis with him. By this time the prime minister had missed five Cobra meetings on the preparations to combat the looming pandemic, which he left to be chaired by Hancock. Johnson was an easy target for the opposition when he returned to the Commons the following day with the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, labelling him a “part-time” prime minister for his failure to lead on the virus crisis or visit the areas of the UK badly hit by floods.

By Friday, February 28, the virus had taken root in the UK with reported cases rising to 19 and the stock markets were plunging. It was finally time for Johnson to act. He summoned a TV reporter into Downing Street to say he was on top of the coronavirus crisis. “The issue of coronavirus is something that is now the government’s top priority,” he said. “I have just had a meeting with the chief medical officer and secretary of state for health talking about the preparations that we need to make.” It was finally announced that he would be attending a meeting of Cobra — after a weekend at Chequers with Symonds where the couple would publicly release news of the engagement and their baby.

On the Sunday, there was a meeting between Sage committee members and officials from the Department of Health and NHS which was a game changer, according to a Whitehall source. The meeting was shown fresh modelling based on figures from Italy suggesting that 8% of infected people might need hospital treatment in a worst-case scenario. The previous estimate had been 4%-5%. “The risk to the NHS had effectively doubled in an instant. It set alarm bells ringing across government,” said the Whitehall source. “I think that meeting focused minds. You realise it’s time to pull the trigger on the starting gun.” At the Cobra meeting the next day with Johnson in the chair a full “battle plan” was finally signed off to contain, delay and mitigate the spread of the virus. This was on March 2 — five weeks after the first Cobra meeting on the virus.

The new push would have some positive benefits such as the creation of new Nightingale hospitals, which greatly increased the number of intensive care beds. But there was a further delay that month of nine days in introducing the lockdown as Johnson and his senior advisers debated what measures were required. Later the government would be left rudderless again after Johnson himself contracted the virus. As the number of infections grew daily, some things were impossible to retrieve. There was a worldwide shortage of PPE and the prime minister would have to personally ring manufacturers of ventilators and testing kits in a desperate effort to boost supplies.

The result was that the NHS and care home workers would be left without proper protection and insufficient numbers of tests to find out whether they had been infected. To date 50 doctors, nurses and NHS workers have died. More than 100,000 people have been confirmed as infected in Britain and 15,000 have died. A Downing Street spokesman said: “Our response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing protection to businesses and reassurance to workers. The prime minister has been at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this hugely challenging period for the whole nation.”

Posted by: Rooney 19th April 2020, 03:31 PM

I'd be shocked if anyone resigned, but there will be a fallout. I think Witty/Vallace will probably get the flack for Herd Immunity, but my own personal view point is every country probably has to adopt a herd immunity strategy in the short term until there is a vaccine. The issue here is whoever made this strategy public.. and all eyes lead to Dominic Cummings. No real surprise he goes AWOL and then Brexit stories start appearing again when he's back to Downing Street.

Ministers are going to start throwing each under buses in order to be able to survive and the Government are hiding behind the scientists.

Posted by: Karen 🥂 19th April 2020, 03:39 PM

It feels the strategy is still herd immunity, only this time by stealth what with the guidelines issued this week that people are able to drive for exercise and the order that parks should be opened amongst the general more relaxed approach to lockdown than other countries.

Still a looong way to go for the 100,000 tests by the end of April

Posted by: Popchartfreak 19th April 2020, 04:58 PM

Herd Immunity is saying we accept the deaths of most old people and all unlucky people with problems and many without problems. Any politician that dares suggest they are doing nothing is going to get rightly crucified. I'm sorry to everyone losing their job, I was on the dole for 2 years when I was young and know it's soul destroying and causes all sorts of mental and emotional problems - but if it had meant saving my grandparents lives I would put up with it for 5 years if necessary and would have voted against any government that caused their deaths for the rest of my life.

My friend, the one who I said had described the social care catastrophe in Care Homes in London before the media got onto it, has emailed his mum has just died and tested positive for Covid-19 along with over 20 other residents of the care home who have died. He couldnt visit her and the best the staff could do was give end of life drugs. PPE continues to be major problem not just in the NHS but in the Care Sector. I have a procession of carers still coming to help mum. They have rubber gloves. There is a shortage of anything else and they refuse to visit homes that don't have a Lockdown in place in order to avoid spreading it amongst the people they care for and themselves.

This is Boris Johnson's fault. He has killed so many people by being "oh well never mind it'll all work out" about everything. He's like King Midas In Reverse: everything he touches turns to shit. A lot of people who have lost loved ones will never forgive him for the ongoing disastrous lack of preparedness, nor the Tory Party for decimating the NHS and putting all eggs in foreign-cheap-labour baskets that suddenly dry up when they are in turmoil and you have no back-up for production of anything in your own economy except services. Guess what? In pandemics you need actual things to keep you alive not "Let's Get Brexit Done" meaningless slogans as you sleepwalk into mass death.

Posted by: blacksquare 19th April 2020, 05:35 PM

I'm glad someone has some sense.

I can't help but roll my eyes at the herd immunity arguments — only suggested by people who think the economy is more important than human lives and see deaths as statistics rather than actual people. I'm semi-convinced at this point that herd immunity was only the initial strategy because the government knew they were completely unprepared and ill-equipped for anything else — sacrificing vulnerable people was, and perhaps still is, the easiest option.

Posted by: Rooney 19th April 2020, 05:41 PM

The thing is, every country right now is pursuing a herd immunity strategy, just not the one you read about in books and journals. We can't keep everyone locked up for 18 months for a vaccine. The only thing we can do is try to mitigate as much risk as possible, protect vulnerable people and hopefully that way we can beat the virus and it slows down its lethalality. There's mass risk involved in opening even small parts of the country up again and with how badly the government screwed up before you would expect them to massively air on the side of caution, hence why I suspect we will have another 3 weeks of lockdown.

Our government messed up because they announced it to the general public and they took for granted how ill-prepared we were.

Posted by: Steve201 19th April 2020, 06:38 PM

You believed in the herd immunity strategy in early March from memory Rooney?

Posted by: Rooney 19th April 2020, 06:53 PM

Yeah and I still do, just not the aggressive form which treats us like we are off to some sort of chickenpox party. I am totally against the idea of encouraging people to purposely get the virus, hence why I also think the immunity passports which has been randed around as an idea is totally ridiculous.

I also didn't want the country to get locked down (selfishly) before I saw firsthand how lethal it could be or get stuck aborad. But both things happened.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 20th April 2020, 08:51 AM

I agree, though I don't see that as "herd immunity" (ie do nothing) the key part is "mitigating risk". They singularly failed to do that until forced to by circumstances they could no longer ignore (which would have been dead bodies piled up in the street had they done nothing). Want to see what Covid-19 mass -death looks like? Africa is heading that way, they dont have the infrastructure to support the poor and vulnerable who have no choice but to try and find food any way they can.

Councils have strategies for pandemics, as I've said before. The strategy is what to do with all the dead bodies and sending out advice on how to avoid becoming one of the dead bodies. Government responsibility is to make sure Councils have enough funding to deal with the latter issue first before the former becomes the only strategy in town. They have failed abysmally. An extra 1.6b in cash doesnt in any way make up for the slash and cut funding they have forced onto Councils. I'm living with the fall-out of that at work right now, backlogs are enormous and it's fire-fighting.

We have to take sensible precautions as much as possible to pop down Tesco. I don;t see why that couldnt have been the policy from day one, and I dont see why all shops cant do the same for the next few months/years. If we are in this for long haul, then the government needs a strategy for vulnerable people over that period. It's not just Covid-19 that is the ongoing problem, it's the loss of medical staff, the backing-up of procedures for other things, the likelihood that serious medical problems become fatal because the system isn't working properly. Until we have the correct equipment generally available for a planned long-term response we ain't goin' nowhere notime soon. Any opening up will just lead to headlines of a thousand dying every day again and the Tories will look even more incompetent and heartless than they already do. People who voted Tory for Brexit weren't agreeing for being killed by a vicious infectious disease any more than idiot Boris was planning on having a bout of anything more than a week in bed with flu. Priorities have changed absolutely for the world, politicians who fail to recognise that are delusional and will be kicked out at the first opportunity one way or another, democratically or otherwise. Piss off the people enough and they respond, and not always pleasantly.

Posted by: fl00zy* 20th April 2020, 10:59 AM

I still don't understand why the idea of releasing strict lockdown for those at lowest risk and maintaining it for those at highest risk draws such ire. If its literally protecting people from a high chance of death if they break it.

Posted by: Rooney 20th April 2020, 02:57 PM

It draws up way too many blurred lines, e.g you might have a really healthy 70 years old who is not allowed to enter outside, but then you may have a 69 year old who is as vulnerable as they come. The bigger problem though then comes with managing who interacts with who, as it's pretty much confirmed there are a lot of people who carry the virus without displaying any symptoms so it just creates more problems than it actually solves. I also don't think we understand enough about the virus yet.

The best way imo, is buying time then gradually re-opening the country so people gradually get the virus in cases where it cannot be avoided and then hopefully there will be as little loss to life as possible.

Posted by: Envoirment 20th April 2020, 03:28 PM

Because it's difficult to classify who is lowest risk - as there would still a significant amount of people who will require hospitalisation who are lowest risk/healthy. There's also the fact there are many peope with underlying health conditions who don't realise they have them. Additionally, having a lockdown for some but not others will increase the likelihood of people breaking the lockdown.

Posted by: Rooney 20th April 2020, 03:45 PM

Death total today is 449. Whether there's a weekend lag (100% there will be) or not that's still quite a drop in hospital recorded deaths, which even though the number is still high it just shows what an amazing job everyone is doing by staying indoors and of course the NHS as well.

Posted by: fl00zy* 20th April 2020, 05:19 PM

Haven't we already identified that by far the biggest risk factor IS age?

Idk, just keeping the whole population under strict lockdown when you could be keeping just a percentage under strict lockdown for the same net result seems counterproductive to me.

Posted by: Suedehead2 20th April 2020, 05:44 PM

It's a tough decision. You might have thought the phrase "We're all in this together" had been discredited by its constant (and rather dishonest) use by George Osborne but it seems to be working quite well at the moment because it is seen as largely true. Any deviation from that could lead to resentment. It may be that it's the right way to go (there are some strong arguments for it) but they need to tread carefully. Rules that are largely ignored (as could be the case if there is a lot of resentment) would be utterly useless.

Posted by: fl00zy* 20th April 2020, 06:00 PM

You have a point, but I feel there's already resentment. It's hard to deny that we already live in an incredibly divided society.

Even now with how we are experiencing lockdown, with a vast majority of retired homeowners experiencing it in a large and comfortable space with a garden and little change to their existing routine, while workers living in shared flats in the inner city are having a completely different experience.

The argument currently sits that the latter should continue indefinitely to live as such in service of the former - otherwise the former will feel it's unfair. I feel like that will hold as an argument for a time, but won't forever, unless some kind of leeway or middle ground is found.

Posted by: Rooney 20th April 2020, 06:59 PM

This is the problem, age certainly is a factor, in a regular flu season normally it is the old that are the most vulnerable. Naturally there are more health problems there so it can lead to a greater risk when contracting the virus.

There’s a worrying theory at the moment that ethnic minorities might be at greater risk. I’m sure I read in the UK 1/4 of deaths have been from BAME which is massively disproportionate when balanced against the U.K. population. But then what they don’t know is whether this is because more BAME are classed as key workers so their exposure to the virus is greater or whether it could be something to do with genetics. There’s all sorts of theories and tests, but I just don’t think we know enough yet.

Posted by: *Tim 20th April 2020, 07:04 PM

Its not just age though.
Anyone with a compromised immune system, cancer patients, diabetics, heart patients etc all have a higher risk

Posted by: Nancy 🍾 20th April 2020, 07:06 PM

Did I read that Germany is opening small business this week or something like that?

Posted by: fl00zy* 20th April 2020, 07:20 PM

Yes: but age is the most common factor that may go co-morbid with the above - or may be more likely to.

Re BAME people, wasn't there rumblings that it was due to Vitamin D deficiency which was more common in people from those social groups in the UK?

Posted by: Rooney 20th April 2020, 09:22 PM

That’s the problem though- nobody really knows. Lots of theories but no concrete proof. The lockdown is just a way to bide time to prepare for the next 6-12 months. The nightingale hospitals are up and running and we at least know a little bit more about the virus.

I just can’t see an age-controlled model to lifting the lockdown, no other country is doing that yet and I don’t think they will.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 20th April 2020, 10:20 PM

Why is there a delay in distributing PPE to hospitals?

Posted by: Rooney 20th April 2020, 11:29 PM

I don't think they have the supply and nobody knows what the hold-up with Turkey is. I suspect Turkey made a promise but probably told a few white lies and now it seems we have sent an RAF plane to pick the supplies up.

News from the Telegraph tonight that "Downing Street sources" (aka Dominic Cummings and his team) think the figure of 100,000 tests is unachievable. Hanock obviously been set up as the fall guy once all this is out of crisis mode..

Posted by: Quarantilas 21st April 2020, 06:35 AM

A report on Sky overnight that the "delayed" PPE was delayed because they didn't order it until Sunday.

When this is over, there needs to be some serious headrollings in the corridors of the UK Gov and it needs to start with the PM.


The PPE crisis isn't impacting the devolved nations, just England. NI is sharing resources and purchases with Ireland. Scotland said f*** it and chartered a 747 flew it to China and rammed it full of PPE and medical equipment and brought it back to Prestwick. I dunno what Wales is up to but I've heard they're fairing better than England.

Yes. Retail stores under 800 sq m (8160 sq ft) were allowed to reopen from Monday with a few exceptions. As Germany is a federal country, the states have applied this slightly differently. Some states are allowing larger stores to reopen if they block off parts of their store so the active sales space is under 800 sq m, NRW appears to have allowed everything to open and Berlin has allowed nothing to reopen - but may do so from later this week.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 21st April 2020, 08:02 AM

According to Sky News and several newspapers today, the Government wants to ban the words EXIT STRATEGY. They don't like it now and prefer people to refer to the NEXT PHASE. There's a small group of 4 senior cabinet ministers meeting twice a day 7 days a week, morning and early evening at present. They are Sunak, Gove, Raab and Hancock, chosen by Boris. Apparently Priti Patel is angry that she isn't present as she's in charge of the police who have to enforce the lockdown. Wonder if he's starting to sideline her a bit and will move her eventually.

Posted by: Rooney 21st April 2020, 08:20 AM

Well I'd like to think there was probably a lot of truth in both those statements - the lexis of exit strategy implies that this is all over, so next phase would be the right thing to go with (and you would expect there would be 2/3/4 phases.. although who knows with this government).

Priti Patel has appeared once to the media, got absolutely slaughtered and she has an unfair dismissal against her, which despite best efforts is probably going to be difficult to bury in the media, despite most news being about Covid-19. I'd say she's pretty much toast.

Posted by: jonny 21st April 2020, 01:46 PM

I think that there has been a general sense of ineptness which has permeated the Government's response. The fallout, once the dust has settled (so to speak), will be huge, and it will probably provide the Labour party and Keir Starmer with their best opportunity to persuade millions of voters to move back to their party. The saving grace for the Tories has been that their most enigmatic figure has been absent during the period where a lot of the shit has hit the fan. Nevertheless, it speaks volumes about his judgement that he surrounded himself with cabinet ministers who have little backbone, credibility or authenticity - undoubtedly, this strategy helped [i]him[/] look better, but when he isn't there... well, they're not exactly men for a crisis.

Speaking of Patel, here's a rare video she once did for That Mitchell and Webb Look:

Posted by: Janet 🙅🏼‍& 21st April 2020, 01:46 PM

Spain is starting in 9 days

Posted by: fl00zy* 21st April 2020, 01:53 PM

The UK gov has been staggeringly inept

The only reason more of the public aren't up in arms is bc they still have most of the media onside to downplay or bury bad news.

Posted by: Janet 🙅🏼‍& 21st April 2020, 01:58 PM

One party state media. There are actual Bojo cult groups out there online now, albeit filled with bots. The government can do anything and get away with it.

Posted by: Andrew. 21st April 2020, 03:01 PM

The sad thing is people KNOW the tory failures (on this and other things), but we've reached the point where they don't even care

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 21st April 2020, 03:31 PM

Well the Spanish government have lost their marbles

Children 14 and under are allowed out with an adult but ONLY for essentials (food, medicine, banking) but NOT to exercise.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 21st April 2020, 05:30 PM

Ironically a 60 year-old Ohio man who was vehemently against the lockdown and kept going out and said the virus was "a load of bullsh*t" and "a political ploy" has caught it and died from it. Not much else to say really about that except he'll have passed it on to others.

Posted by: Rooney 21st April 2020, 05:47 PM

What are they doing exactly? I can't find anything on a quick Google or BBC News search

Posted by: fl00zy* 21st April 2020, 06:03 PM

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-uk-only-formally-asked-turkey-for-ppe-shipment-after-it-said-it-was-already-on-its-way-11976238

Posted by: fl00zy* 21st April 2020, 06:25 PM

Also: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-uk-eu-medical-equipment-ventilators-boris-johnson-brexit-latest-a9476811.html

Confirmation that UK deliberately chose not to take EU ventilators because of Brexit, & then lied to the British population about it.

Posted by: Rooney 21st April 2020, 06:30 PM

Didn't most people guess this anyway? Fairly clear it was a political and ideological choice which was short sighted and dumb. Hopefully it comes back to bite them on their arses. It's why a cabinet full of Brexit nutjobs is a disaster, most of them worried about their future career rather than what is good for the country.

Posted by: Suedehead2 21st April 2020, 06:32 PM

Meanwhile, the latest minister to stick up his hand and shout "Look at me, I'm a complete moron" is the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. He was asked why the government allowed the Cheltenham race meeting to go ahead at a time when lots of other sporting events had been called off. He said that a race meeting or a football match was the same as a pub or a restaurant. I'd love to know about the restaurant where you have to pass by several complete strangers at close range in order to get to your seat, let alone any restaurant where tens of thousands of people are leaving at the same time.

Posted by: Steve201 21st April 2020, 06:36 PM

Think we need to be very careful about coming out of lockdown to soon, Singapore had a increase in cases over the last 24 hours and lockdown has been reinforced again.

Spain is mad to change too quickly 454 died there yday!

Posted by: Suedehead2 21st April 2020, 06:39 PM

There was certainly no doubt in my mind that they had lied. There are lots of aspects of this whole crisis that should be the subject of an enquiry. The number of blatant lies told by ministers is one of them.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 21st April 2020, 06:46 PM

So either the Permanent Secretary at the FO is lying or Hancock's lying. One of them must be.

Posted by: Suedehead2 21st April 2020, 07:54 PM

It would hardly be the first lie Hancock has told in the last few weeks.

Posted by: Quarantilas 21st April 2020, 09:42 PM

Deaths are a poor yardstick as they lag about four weeks behind what is actually happening. New ICU admissions are a better picture along with the Reproduction rate.



Germany has started easing and our R-Rate has bounced back up to 0,9 from 0,7 according to the RKI. Merkel has us all under strict warning to behave but people are dumb as f*** and I could quite easily and realistically see us back on lockdown before mid-May with a proper scolding from Angela

Posted by: Janet 🙅🏼‍& 21st April 2020, 11:01 PM

Spain has clarified what it is going to do following the reports of it slackening the rules on young people:

https://www.vozpopuli.com/espana/Gobierno-aprueba-ninos-salgan-salir-calle-estado-alarma-coronavirus_0_1348065773.html?fbclid=IwAR0pXOQuhelI2AiTbqam1_tn0z9V0NPeDe7nQEfNS-5gWdQbcWboeoL9lgw

So! They are only allowing children under 14 to leave the house when accompanied by an adult and only when they are going to the shops.

Posted by: fl00zy* 21st April 2020, 11:49 PM

Seems a very odd approach. I can't see that lasting long. Is it in response to a lot of children breaking the rules or something?

Posted by: Crazy Chris 22nd April 2020, 06:26 AM

So Simon MacDonald has written to the chair of the committee and said that he was wrong and "due to a misunderstanding I inadvertently and wrongly told the committee..."

So Hancock didn't lie then unless Simon's covering up and taking the blame. Case closed then.

Posted by: Suedehead2 22nd April 2020, 06:29 AM

No, Cummings has applied the thumbscrews. McDonald merely confirmed what we already knew.

Posted by: Crazy Chris 22nd April 2020, 06:36 AM

I know Piers isn't liked, well hated mostly, but fair play, this is damn good of him. The Government should write off all these fines instead though . Some NHS staff have to stay longer than their shift so are receiving parking fines for overstaying on top of normal tickets. ALL NHS PARKING SHOULD BE FREE TO ALL STAFF. Come on Boris and Hancock and see to this urgently.


"Piers Morgan was left fuming on Good Morning Britain yesterday as he revealed the dozens of parking tickets he’s received from NHS staff asking for help to pay them off as they continue fight against coronavirus. On 25 March, Piers vowed to pay off all health workers car parking bills as he slammed hospitals for their extortionate fees for car parking and fines for overstaying especially given the current climate."

Right now Piers is having a go at the Government over PPE, testing etc and Tony Blair's actually defending them and saying they're doing their best, working every hour of every day in very difficult circumstances.

Posted by: *Tim 22nd April 2020, 06:41 AM

Research has pointed towards children not passing this on very easoly. Whereas with the flu they are the motor of the epidemic, with covid it seems young adults are the motor

Posted by: fl00zy* 22nd April 2020, 01:03 PM

Yes I agree Piers is doing well lately. I guess enough is enough for him.

Posted by: Janet 🙅🏼‍& 22nd April 2020, 01:16 PM

Well, people do break the rules there like anywhere, but the police give our fines and question a lot of people when out. I'd say the UK, being more lax, has more people ignoring social distancing.

Posted by: Steve201 22nd April 2020, 09:32 PM

Surely that would be Angela's or the federal governments fault if lockdown returns to Germany in may 😁

Posted by: Euphorique 23rd April 2020, 04:23 PM

Tests per 1 million pop. in Europe:

01 Iceland - 132,143
02 Malta - 60,721
03 Luxembourg - 58,933
04 Estonia - 34,059
05 Lithuania - 30,706
06 Portugal - 29,473
07 Norway - 28,055
08 Switzerland - 26,293
09 Italy - 25,028
10 Germany - 24,738
11 Liechtenstein - 23,605
12 Austria - 22,854
13 Ireland - 22,598
14 Slovenia - 21,984
15 Latvia - 21,759
16 Andorra - 21,653
17 Denmark - 20,134
18 Spain - 19,896
19 Czechia - 18,277
20 Russia - 16,457
21 Belgium - 15,502
22 Belarus - 12,968
23 Finland - 12,814
24 Netherlands - 10,913
25 Slovakia - 10,517
26 Sweden - 10,092
27 Turkey - 8,904
28 UK - 8,595
29 Montenegro - 8,096
30 France - 7,103
31 Croatia - 7,028
32 Poland - 6,625
33 Macedonia - 6,551
34 Bosnia - 6,533
35 Romania - 5,891
36 Serbia - 5,874
37 Hungary - 5,734
38 Greece - 5,684
39 Bulgaria - 3,886
40 Moldova - 2,916
41 Albania - 2,262
42 Ukraine - 1,653

Posted by: Quarantilas 23rd April 2020, 05:35 PM

Not even slightly. The states are all relaxing at different rates and in different ways. She can’t control people acting like utter fannies.


If I remember rightly, NRW opened all shops regardless of size on Monday and Berlin point blank refused to let anything open until today

Posted by: dandruff* 23rd April 2020, 06:43 PM

Germany is not so much different to the US states such as South Carolina and Georgia in this case. In both cases I think its much too early to ease lockdowns in these places.

Speaking of America, unlucky Oklahoma and Texas now have tornadoes and damaging hail at the same time as the coronavirus.

Posted by: Harve 23rd April 2020, 07:43 PM

VIVE LA FRANCE

Did not realise we were the only Western country to have less testing than Britain oops

Posted by: dandruff* 23rd April 2020, 08:09 PM

But the death rate in France although still high seems to be thankfully going down now.

Posted by: Andrew. 23rd April 2020, 08:42 PM

I’m glad Sturgeon has laid out some of her plans of ending lockdown, I haven’t been too impressed with everything the SNP have done so far although the standard of NHS Scotland which is better funded because of the SNP has made a huge difference.

The fact it takes Piers bloody Morgan to hold the government to account says a lot though :’( (the state of our media)

Posted by: Steve201 23rd April 2020, 10:24 PM

Seen a clip of Angela saying that she is worried about the states opening up too quickly!

Posted by: fl00zy* 23rd April 2020, 11:56 PM

Nicola is a gift from god. The UK is a disaster putting pride before everything. The government that us, the health service and care workers are a wonderful asset & don't get enough praise or benefits. The fact that nurses have to pay to park their cars at the hospital every day is just insulting frankly.

Posted by: *Tim 24th April 2020, 07:01 AM

Can we talk about the fact that Ttump suggested a study about injecting desinfectant into someones bloodstream to clean the virus....

Posted by: Karen 🥂 24th April 2020, 07:41 AM

and his supporters will still rabidly support him.....

He’s the absolute worst type of person to be in charge of such an international crisis. Most leaders of the world are likely out of their depth with this but there’s out of your depth and them at the bottom of the ocean

Posted by: Condebola* 24th April 2020, 08:26 AM

Holy f***. He’s officially hit a new low

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 24th April 2020, 10:34 AM

He can't go a day without being the centre of attention. Helps his reelection chances.

That is, unless people start following his advice, because then they won't make it to November. Won't die of COVID though.

"Conservatives" are desperate for a quick fix, doesn't matter who'll die, and probably someone mentioned how good these things are at cleaning, and his moronic mind ended up turning it into bleach homeopathy.

Posted by: Tawdry Hepburn 24th April 2020, 11:12 AM

I'd like to see him try that...

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 24th April 2020, 02:41 PM

Talking out of his arse again, Trump.

Posted by: Suedehead2 24th April 2020, 03:15 PM

I am grateful to Susie Dent for reminding me of the wonderful word ultracrepidarian - one who consistently offers opinions and advice on subjects beyond their understanding.

Posted by: Dobbo 24th April 2020, 03:22 PM

Wrong thread.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 24th April 2020, 03:26 PM

So who was following scientific advice in 2019 with the NSRA report?

Posted by: Suedehead2 25th April 2020, 08:09 AM

If anyone still needs evidence that Trump’s idiocy has gone beyond satire, ...

https://local.theonion.com/man-just-buying-one-of-every-cleaning-product-in-case-t-1842493766

This was published a month ago.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 25th April 2020, 09:15 AM

I guess this is what they mean by natural selection.

Posted by: Cameron 🐠 25th April 2020, 10:37 AM

What is all this about direct sunlight killing corona? Or is it a Trump 'antidote'?

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 25th April 2020, 01:23 PM

A falsehood propagated by blog posts and some US political figures that should know better, that apparently sprung up after twisting some of the as yet not certain results that the spread is marginally slower in warmer weather, which would just be if true, harsher conditions for the virus and not the ultraviolet light/dangerous chemical instakill that idiotic presidents seem to think it is.

or in summation:

(that board is just begging to be misinterpreted anyway)

Posted by: fl00zy* 25th April 2020, 05:51 PM

Having said that, grain of truth, fresh air WAS touted as v beneficial for the Spanish flu, right?

Posted by: Steve201 25th April 2020, 06:13 PM

So the Uk passes 20k hospital deaths today an outcome expected by Patrick Vallance on the 17/3 but we are past that with at least another month of continued figures to come. What has the Uk and America got so wrong?

Posted by: Harve 25th April 2020, 06:14 PM

Two very similar countries ending up with a rather different curve due to slower reactions in Britain in mid-March - less than 200 coronavirus hospital deaths in France today compared to 813 in Britain.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 25th April 2020, 07:27 PM

The rest of the world sees the UK as a basket case surpassed only by the USA in it's response to Covid-19.

Our media is largely failing to hold the government to task for it's inept handling. That Piers Morgan is one of the leading critical lights of both the UK and US handling (Trump has just blocked him for criticising his deadly suggestions about bleach injections) really should be waking everyone up to what is going on - the whitewashing of those responsible for having the worst death rates in the world.

AND IT HASN'T DROPPED YET WEEKS INTO LOCKDOWN.

Random testing (which may or may not be biased in some way) seems to suggest around 3% of the population has the covid-19 antibodies and there is no data to yet prove that prevents you getting it again (you are more likely to die if you receive larger doses of the virus - see Doctors and Nurses dying). germany seems to be about 12-15% have the antibodies, which may well be a more accurate ratio generally. I'm going to repeat "Herd immunity" means accepting, at BEST, the deaths of another 130,000 or so UK citizens spread out over however long it takes. At worst (if it really is 3%) errr, 5 times 130,000.

Plus it's not just dying. Recovery takes ages for some people (eg a 39-year-old fit fireman is alive but struggling to walk).

As we see people demonstrating to end the lockdown in the USA, I suggest everyone worldwide who wants to go back to normal life and sod those who would prefer not to risk dying to all just sign an agreement not to take up hospital beds, go on a massive festival bender, snog everyone is sight, get it over with, and let the rest of us see what percentage die or are seriously ill for months afterwards. Practical scientific results. On the plus side, you can go back to work along with everyone else that has had it, and that'll also free up some jobs for those that have lost one as a result of the lockdown. A bit like playing Russian Roulette with a gun which has 100 bullet chambers and one bullet - only not as quick, and a much more prolonged and unpleasant a death.

Posted by: dandy* 25th April 2020, 08:41 PM

Did everyone see Priti Patel today announcing she was proud that shoplifting had reduced year on year

Posted by: Suedehead2 25th April 2020, 09:06 PM

I was expecting them to come up with an announcement that was designed to keep the figure of 20,000 deaths off tomorrow's front pages. I'm not convinced that particular story will do it.

Posted by: Rooney 25th April 2020, 11:31 PM

But it's a complete double-edged sword, what can we do? If Germany have 12-15% of the antobodies then we're going to have 15-20% of the antibodies as clearly the vorus spread much quicker and aggrssively that the UK realised, so there will have been lots of silent carriers. There's no evidence to prove that catching the virus means you're immune, but there's no data which suggests you are not immune. If you don't at least have some antibodies after being infected then it goes against just about every virus ever known to humankind, which I find unlikely.

We can't just keep the country locked up for 12-24 months until we find a vaccine, which may or may not occur. New Zealand plan on basically isolating until there is a vaccine for example. Sweden seem to be taking on the herd immunity approach. We're going to have to start to open the country up one way or another otherwise we will be even more socially destroyed as a country.

Posted by: Popchartfreak 26th April 2020, 07:37 AM

in which case perhaps the best decision would be to come from the people democratically voting what they want to happen:

accept somewhere between 130,000 and 600,000 deaths and go back to normal (albeit in stages to prevent the NHS getting swamped in any particular week) or put it off as much as possible until there is a vaccine, even if that hits the economy worse than any Banking Crisis. It could be double those estimates of course - deaths in the UK by Easter were 17,000 above normal, so it's likely to be twice that now. Quarter of a million dead would be a good outcome.

It won't be back to normal BTW, people like me will still be self-isolating as much as possible, along with everyone at risk. Industry will still get hammered. Everytime there is a sudden massive weekly increase in deaths, especially over the thousand a day mark which we have already reached but managed to manipulate figures to keep it under that psychological "f***!" moment, when it does get reported, what happens then? Big Lockdown back again for another 2 months?

This is a huge wake-up call to all nations. If you can't self-isolate as a country and self-manage your economy then you are in the long run risking total wipeout when the Big One comes along that is both highly infectious, like Covid-19, and with a death toll more like 50%. Spanish Flu wasnt limited to elderly and vulnerable people, it was young people who had no defence against it. There will be another one, guaranteed. Ignoring nature and treating the natural world like a resource causes pandemics. Viruses mutate all the time and cause pandemics. Human beings do stupid stuff and cause pandemics. Those of us who have been warning of this for decades are not in the least surprised, nor are we remotely surprised that politicians used to short-termism planning don't listen and do what they need to do.

When it's over a lot of folk might want to move to New Zealand.....

Posted by: fl00zy* 26th April 2020, 09:32 AM

I feel like a lot of the (public) discussion around what to do is missing out:

1) what we continue to not know about corona

2) the negatives of a continued lockdown & reduced public services on overall public health - delays in treatment & diagnosis of other conditions; people with preventable conditions avoiding hospital & worsening them; mental health; potential for people to fall into e.g. addiction; and things like a rise in domestic violence.

Personally I think we need a change from total lockdown soon in order to start to mitigate some of those other areas of concern.

Posted by: Helen ✂️ 26th April 2020, 09:49 AM

A poll from Deltapoll about whether people think the ending the lockdown sooner is a worry has yielding some surprising results. The majority thinks the government is moving too quickly to end the lockdown, but the split between age/political party was the opposite of what I expected, with millennials being the least likely to worry about the lockdown ending sooner, and Conservative voters being the most worried about this. Obviously this is only one poll, and I haven't been able to locate the raw data as of yet, but it surprise me somewhat.

Posted by: Jesty Cough* 26th April 2020, 10:09 AM

We cannot stay in lockdown until/if there is a vaccine. That would mean the collapse of our society. No debate about that.

However, the reality is that by perhaps June we need to move towards a new normal to mitigate for the virus and this will mean social distancing, phased return to offices, shops opening by sector.

Until there are drug treatments and/or a vaccine that is the reality.

Posted by: *Tim 26th April 2020, 10:23 AM

Yeah we obviously cant stay in lockdown until a vaccine is available. But loosening measures now would spiral the virus out of control. You'd need to make sure the virus calms down a bit before you loosen measures.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 26th April 2020, 10:37 AM

Lockdown cannot remain forever but I’d rather it remained right now until we can be a bit more confident that the virus has died down. This could be after another 3 weeks, perhaps slightly longer.

The government really should be showing us that they are working on the ‘next stage’. At the moment people are literally assuming after 3 weeks we’ll all just go back to normal which is insane. People were demanding schools return just the other week (children had only actually missed 10 school days at that point) and whilst this will have to be one of the first measures, I personally won’t be happy returning to work like that without a plan being in place to ensure my safety. I don’t want to be teaching 30 kids an hour in a cramped classroom with no social distancing or PPE. But I am happy to return to work if these things are addressed but we haven’t heard of any plans for this, just rumblings from the media that are no more than them testing the reaction of the public (they dropped the return to school angle once there was a decent sized outrage.)

The problem really is our untrustworthy government. They only tell us what they either think we want to hear or what will paint them in the best light.

Boris is back this week so maybe they’ll reveal some plans since he has to be the face of the good news if he’s going to get another majority in 4 years.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 26th April 2020, 11:53 AM

Why does the UK government refuse to include non hospital deaths where covid-19 has been detected in their official figures like many other countries do?

Posted by: blacksquare 26th April 2020, 01:33 PM

Because 40k looks a lot worse than 20k?

Posted by: Steve201 26th April 2020, 02:51 PM

I think this past week has been a game changer in terms of my own observations. The roads around where I live have been extremely busy back to what they are like on non school days. This doesn't mean to say that all these people were going against the guidelines but why all of a sudden are there so many about? It seems like the lockdown ended unofficially.

Posted by: fl00zy* 26th April 2020, 03:47 PM

Its just bad communication from the government. This is what I've said since day 1. Even simple messaging like 'stay 2m away from each other at all times'...the UK is a country where the majority of people, especially older people who are more at risk, still use feet and inches for heights and small distances. It would have cost nothing for all the comms to say 2m (six feet) before going out, instead of just recklessly assuming that everyone in the country knows how big 2m is or will have the gumption to look it up rather than just guessing.

Posted by: blacksquare 26th April 2020, 03:53 PM

I'm very intrigued by how the UK is being reported in other countries right now. Has anyone seen anything?

Posted by: Mart!n 26th April 2020, 03:59 PM

It seems some shops are beginning to re-open, a Fish & Chip shop has re-opened, even a Chinese take away shop is due to re-open on our shopping precinct, I'm guessing some shop owners need to open as they need to survive as they are losing trade, in a way we have to support them, you can't boycott them. I guess some people want to go back to normality I get that its their livelihood. Social-distancing is still in force though. The most annoying thing, there will be queues everywhere outside the chemist, bakery, butcher, supermarket etc etc once everything is open, it be harder for people to move around in the shopping precinct.

Posted by: Andrew. 26th April 2020, 04:02 PM

It does really feel like people are starting to be much less strict with the rules. Up here it’s been raining heavily yet it’s still at least 3x busier than a few weeks ago.

I’d love to see the international reaction to Britain’s actions as well but you just know the little Englanders ‘Britain knows best’ folk will still back their wonderful leader :’) (and some of the people who most fit that description are Scottish lol)

Posted by: Rooney 26th April 2020, 04:33 PM

It doesn't matter what other countries think of us, the fact is most of Western Europe got hit pretty bad and we reacted too late. The country has been locked down over 5 weeks now and guess what, people are bored. When you have people who have to spend all day inside with no job, the first few weeks are probably OK but after that boredom massively creeps in. People break the rules everyday in realife, so it's not surprising it's just annoying. And it's not just a UK problem either it's happening all around the world. Admitedly clusters of people, but it's still happening.

Yes there are lots of different strategies but there's no guarantee there will be a vaccine. There are not vaccines for other coronaviruses. There's a very small window of opportunism but of course it's clear as mud social distancing will be the new normal for many months to come

Posted by: dandruff* 26th April 2020, 06:04 PM

Any increase now in people flouting the lockdown rules is likely because of the news that some other countries are starting to ease their lockdowns I think. Almost all flouting the rules will be lower risk groups such as younger people I would think.

Posted by: Jesty Cough* 26th April 2020, 06:09 PM

With no possible vaccine we will never return to life as before the virus. No foreign holidays, no tourism, no office working, no travel, no seeing friends/family when you like, no pubs/clubs/bars/restaurants/cafes.

Wow. Enough to make me want to give up on everything Cheers Roo.

Posted by: blacksquare 26th April 2020, 06:35 PM

It's less about it mattering what other countries think about us — it's just interesting to see the differences between British and international media coverage.

Posted by: dandruff* 26th April 2020, 07:09 PM

Could see a lower birth rate though because of less people meeting each other and becoming couples which could arguably be a good thing as a stabilization of the world's population would put less pressure on resources.

Just thinking of a positive from it....

Posted by: Rooney 26th April 2020, 07:10 PM

You'd be susprised how many people you see flouting the rules, from my own eyes personally it's been a complete mix- only ones I haven't laid witness to are the eldely.



I think eventually there will be a vaccine, or a drug that lessens the symptoms. There are too many powerful countries working on a solution. But the problem I have is everyone is pinning their hopes on this mythical vaccine which the world is clamouring for and will go through minimal approval and regulations. So you don't really know what you are putting in your body and how safe it actually is. The more exposure the virus has to the population, the chances are it lessens the effect. I suspect most countires will be secretly willing the fit and healthy to pick up the virus and achieve some sort of herd immunity whilst hoping there is a strong vaccine in the offing. That seems to be the stategy most countries appear to be adopting (of course without actually saying they are wanting to achieve any sort of herd immunity).




But it doesn't really matter though, the Western media are the ones with influence and they all have their own pandemics to report on. All the big European countries got hit pretty hard for the majority so I think we just fall under that category.

For what it's worth I don't necessarily follow the thought process that we acted too slow in a lockdown etc. - I think the major problem we had is we allowed too many public gatherings to happen in those first couple of weeks in March..

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 07:34 PM

I do think this is quite a selfish view some single people such as myself are finding this difficult especially as we are living on our own so to see you laughing about a problem that is worsening peoples mental health is quite twisted.

Posted by: Oliver 26th April 2020, 08:00 PM

He’s not laughing about it though, just trying to see a positive which everyone should be doing.

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 08:08 PM

It is a selfish response.

Posted by: *Tim 26th April 2020, 08:15 PM

I think the main reason there is no coronavirusses with vaccines yet is because they usually cause nothing more than a cold OR like MERS and SARS are contained to a small aread of the world and have pretty much died out. There is a MERS vaccine in development though, according to WHO.

The news here has been talking about how horrible your government rracted to all of this and ofcourse Johnson being in hospital. Plus the fact that only hospital deaths are counted.

Other than that the focus is mostly on New York, Russia and lately more Brazil as well as the lowering numbers in Spain, Italy, France and Germany

Posted by: *Tim 26th April 2020, 08:18 PM

There is positive sides to it though. I don't neccesarily agree with his statement but people staying inside for a while has brought the world a few good things as well

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 08:59 PM

I would put it down to more places being opened.

Takeaways and places like B and Q being opened are going to result in more traffic on the roads. I also know of many people who were on furlough have started to be called back to work now social distancing measures have been implemented in their workplace.

A further thought I had was that perhaps in the first three weeks many people were isolating and have now recovered from their symptoms.

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 09:05 PM

Are there any thoughts as to why it is speculated in the media that we will have closures on many things such as restaurants to the end of the year yet even Italy are proposing to open restaurants on 18th May.

I am finding it extremely hard mentally living in a flat alone when I hear stories in the media everything will be closed until the end of the year and we won’t be able to meet friends or family it seems that other countries like to give the public more hope yet our government and media like spreading as much fear and panic as possible.

It is causing extreme mental health issues amongst people having to sit and think each day that they may be stuck alone for the rest of 2020 when it seems to be the opposite in other countries.

Posted by: Rooney 26th April 2020, 09:20 PM

It's all pie in the sky, nobody really knows. We were about 2-3 weeks behind Italy and there was a mention on an important 12 week period during the lockdown, which following the model of other countries, we are on the same path. But we are probably 4-6 weeks away yet imo as we were slow to react initially.

Personally I think resturaunts will be able to open as it's fairly easy to implement social distancing measures, but bars/pubs likely to be more of a challenge..

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 09:27 PM

I guess next week is week 6 of lockdown, probably been the most painful experience of my life mentally.

And agreed hard to put a timeframe on anything but I do find it baffling we have media reports no friends or family until December, no Christmas, no restaurants yet we have other countries who were more overwhelmed than us planning for these things Mid to late May it doesn’t really add up.

Posted by: fl00zy* 26th April 2020, 10:31 PM

Agree that the impact on single people who are basically fully isolated right now, or people like me who live with strangers rather than friends, is not being accounted for. It's well and good to say "oh its not so hard" from the comfort of a nice home with a garden and family and friends who you get along well with living right alongside you.

Many of us entered such living arrangements with the intention to not actually be in the house much of the time except to sleep in it & get ready in the morning.

In any case I'm sure we'll see some change soon simply because human nature is to, if no info is given, take a guess rather than waiting. If the government don't establish clear communication soon people will start just making an estimation themselves of what they can & can't do - and acting based on it.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 26th April 2020, 10:41 PM

I doubt lockdown will be lifted. Every day the daily briefings have had ministers and the medical officer state there are five things which need to happen before lifting lockdown and we aren’t near any of them. They repeatedly say easing too early would mean all the sacrifices made by locking down would be wasted.

Posted by: fl00zy* 26th April 2020, 10:48 PM

Not completely, but it will ease. At least for people who are less vulnerable.

After some point the longer it goes on with no change the greater resentment will get.

Posted by: Mack. 🐠 26th April 2020, 10:50 PM

That's what I worry about, what will happen the greater the resentment from some of the public.

Posted by: Alex P 26th April 2020, 11:05 PM

I’m glad you are going through a similar experience to me on this. Whilst I appreciate the severity of coronavirus, my parents have already had it and recovered thankfully, it is extremely tough on single people and those who live with strangers to be isolated for this length of time.

I fully expected the 6 weeks lockdown to 7th May and I think I’ve mentally prepared myself for another 3 weeks after that but then I really thing people in these circumstances will start to get extremely restless and no longer follow the guidance.

I also think there is not enough discussion around this group of people and the impact it is having on them that a large amount of the young and healthy population are developing mental health problems. I’m generally a happy, outgoing person who lives life to the full but this has completely destroyed me.

I have been isolating since 12th March when I moved to home working and I don’t know how much more I can take to be honest.

Posted by: Rooney 26th April 2020, 11:29 PM

There will be old and leaked documents about, which is where some of the media are getting their information from. But quite simply the tabloids are all about clickbait so I wouls not trust any of them as far I could throw them.

If we wait until December to re-open resturaunts, unless the Government furlough the staff and owners there will not be a resturaunt industry. Quite simply imo the lockdown has been all about time to build up the capacity for a potential second wave whilst trying the upmost to stop the spread and manage the impact on the healthcare system. I have no doubt a lot of the restrictions will be eased in a few weeks, it might not be at the end of this lockdown period as I could see there being a 1-2 week extension depending on the data.

Posted by: fl00zy* 27th April 2020, 01:29 AM

Quite right. For so many media commentators and people online too it seems to be just the latest excuse to, from the comfort of their full house they have all to themself, complain about "those millennials and YOUNG PEOPLE complaining about stupid things! Back in my day...."

When in actuality this an unprecedented situation that has never happened before in anyone's day, and nobody who lives in a shared house or lives isolated from other people they care about ever expected in their wildest dreams they'd be essentially house arrested by the government for months at a time.

That if they had imagined that would be the case, they probably wouldn't have entered that living situation in the first place.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 27th April 2020, 06:36 AM

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/24/WS5ea239f7a3105d50a3d187fe.html
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/24/WS5ea24ac3a3105d50a3d188ee.html
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/24/WS5ea241e9a3105d50a3d1887c.html

China Daily is an interesting news source, it's aimed at foreigners within China and Chinese people learning English, it's about as liberal as a Chinese outlet is going to be (it's still very pro-China government where that matters as you'd expect, which is important to keep in mind when you read from there). Anyway, these three articles are based around Britain, the third one compares how Western Europe has fought the virus from a 'neutral' perspective, it mentions the German situation as being lauded while the UK's position is being questioned by critics, and the second notes that Hancock has faced criticism, and the first:



Obviously this is on an issue where it's gotten the Chinese riled a bit as it's partly a response to the UK government starting to shift blame towards Beijing but that's scathing.

Posted by: Suedehead2 27th April 2020, 06:40 AM

I read something over the weekend about restaurant owners saying they couldn’t make a profit if they had to introduce full social distancing measures. However, their calculations seemed to be based on an extreme assumption, including people at the same table having to remain two metres apart.

The lockdown is going to be harder to maintain as the weather improves. Seeing other countries gradually ease their lockdowns will indeed lead to a great deal of frustration here.

The government continues to deny that they are even thinking about what happens next. However, the comments in this thread show that they have a great deal of work to do in managing expectations.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 27th April 2020, 06:51 AM

As far as I understand, social distancing measures for 2m apart haven't been implemented here in the recovery stage, and restaurants are starting to reopen without strict limits, but still with some I assume.

The successful governments have been doing basically closed borders (unfortunate and hopefully not a long-term solution but it seems to work), strict isolation for anyone who comes into contact, supplemented by a wide system of tracing cases. Caveat that this seems to be best working in East Asian countries with a history of collectivism (meaning conscientiousness from the population) and isolated island nations.

That's what the UK should be looking at doing once the number of active cases comes under control, because it sort of assumes that most people aren't infected but they're keeping their vigilance high and not having unnecessary social contact.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 07:50 AM

The denial that they are thinking about anything that happens next is the worst part of how they are managing this crisis for me. You have Whitty and Raab continuing to appear on tv implying strict measures will be in place all year yet giving zero guidance on what this actually means and there are many people I know who it is tipping over the edge as they believe they will be in lockdown for all of 2020.

We then see other countries coming out of this crisis and setting target dates. How can Italy who were extremely overwhelmed be communicating plans for reopening areas yet the message we are receiving is the end of the year, it is completely shambolic.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 08:09 AM

Yes agreed I am also completely tired of this commentary specifically comparing it to World War II, it is a completely different scenario. The people who went through that dealt with a completely different situation and I am not even going to compare the two.

I fail to see any reason how people can say we shouldn’t complain about this when we have been put under house arrest with no parole date.

I think it is also frustrating in the media when they target people in a park sitting on the grass themselves, appreciate this is against current guidance but this could be a person with mental health issues stuck in a small flat with no garden or balcony and they need fresh air to keep themselves sane and are probably exhausted.

Knowing how hot it gets in London in July and August particularly in homes I seriously do not know how they can continue this through then of only being allowed out one hour a day it will send people to their deaths or a mental ward.

Something has to give on this soon as I can feel the anger and unrest brewing.

Posted by: Rooney 27th April 2020, 08:55 AM

Well if anyone is struggling, it looks like the Government are going to share the plan for what lockdown might look like later in the week. I still think the narrative is mixed, but what do I know!

Posted by: Mart!n 27th April 2020, 09:05 AM

The thing is working from home is not really ideal, you have the constant kid from next door "hey mister, can we have our ball back, its in your garden again", or they are playing loud music. Than you have the noise outside at the front as we live in a cul-de-sac, the weather now is getting warmer we have to keep our windows open, people mowing their gardens, you can't tell them to do it later. Also motorbikes going up and down the road not far from us, loud as anything. Its the constant disruptions, working in an office would be much better as you won't get the noise that's what I miss and my colleagues, sometimes I hardly get much work done at home... I just want to get back to normality especially for my mental state of health and our family, our children they are not kids anymore, they are teenagers on the verge of leaving school and college, and scared of what's going on around them, missing their friends, getting bored. Its a bit soul destroying for some families.

Even when standing in a queue people talk to you from a self-distance, you get the general feeling they just want to get back to normality, it effects people in so many ways.

Posted by: Jack 27th April 2020, 09:32 AM

I haven't been keeping up with the news much at all but what I have read is that it isn't likely that we will come out of this at May 7th which is the original lockdown extension date, am I right??

I hope it's not for too much longer but I am quickly getting used to it but I am in a privileged position where I can work form home and live with my boyfriend and best friend. I'm guessing it'll be for another three weeks at least.

I agree us having to do this guess work is frustrating, I wish we had proper concrete dates of something to aim towards .

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 09:43 AM

No one knows regarding 7th May extension and it is just speculation at this point. Personally I think they will extend it but if they do I think 2 weeks would be more reasonable as opposed to 3. The next extension will be the test as people will be becoming extremely restless by then.

And agreed on your point this is where the vast difference in situations occur people living with partners and friends and those on their own.

I am hoping at the next extension that some restrictions such as seeing friends or family members are relaxed otherwise I’ll be seriously considering doing it anyway.

Posted by: Mart!n 27th April 2020, 10:20 AM

I've actually seen friends and relations of different families going into neighbours houses, for example, its like their eldest son who lives elsewhere visiting his parents, turns up with his wife and eldest daughter, and they get invited in. An hour or two later they leave.

So I'm guessing if they are related they are okay to visit and stay for a few hours. I'm sure that's not right though.

Posted by: Suedehead2 27th April 2020, 10:25 AM

The last review date turned out to be the day they started the review rather than the date of the next announcement. If the same happens again, that means they won't say anything until around the 11th or 12th (assuming they work over the three-day weekend). By then we will be at the end of week seven.

My guess is that they are hoping the will be able to announce a two-week extension which will at least give people more hope that some sort of easing of the lockdown is in sight. However, once they reduce the period between reviews they will not want to increase it again.

Again, it's a question of managing expectations. I don't think anyone seriously expected anything other than a three-week extension from the first review. Hopes seem to be higher for the second review. This is where they need to make a distinction between maintaining support for "the government" and support for the Conservative party. It is important that people continue to support "the government" insofar as they respect the lockdown conditions and that is where their focus should be. How that affects support for the Conservative party shouldn't be considered for more than half a nanosecond.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 10:30 AM

Yeah that’s against the rules and shouldn’t be happening. Which is where the issue comes in as I have followed the guidelines not visited anyone but given how long this is dragging on and the government is not being clear or offering any hope I will probably take the decision into my own hands if the lockdown is extended a further three weeks.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 10:34 AM

That is another frustrating point it is being extended longer than the three weeks each time due to how long it takes them to do the review. Why they can’t just give a clear proposed end date like all other countries is beyond me.

I have historically voted Tories but they have lost my vote for good after this and their lack of transparency.

Thinking we have another 5 weeks minimum of this is really hard to deal with.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 27th April 2020, 10:45 AM

Ultimately the lockdown in the UK will have to be for a longer time period than other places as it started too late and the virus had already spread far too much for any kind of control of it to be in place soon, and the lockdown isn't particularly strict anyway. New Zealand have now said they've eliminated the virus, infection rates are close to zero and they know where new infections are coming from. Reading their lifting of lockdown restrictions, what they're moving to sounds a lot like what the UK has, and it's difficult to see much easing in the UK anytime soon.

For me the last couple of weeks have gone a lot quicker since I stopped trying to focus too much on it and reading as much news. There's nothing about the situation that I can control, so there's no point letting myself get annoyed or frustrated about it and to focus on what I can, and there's such a vast amount of ways to entertain and educate. It certainly helps that I am still working from home, not sure I'd find it as easy living alone if I'd been furloughed

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 11:15 AM

I think the constant comments I read that the lockdown isn’t strict are wrong. It is not strict in comparison to countries like China where they were boarded up in their homes, however, what I am living with personally is strict and I refuse to let anyone tell me otherwise. I do not understand how people can say being confined to your home day in day out is not strict.

I am not sure a comparison with New Zealand is the best as the UK are not going to ease lockdown when infection rates are zero otherwise we would be in this current form until 2021.

I personally think we locked down only one week late the error in judgement was still allowing mass gatherings to go ahead with what was happening in Italy.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 11:20 AM

Also regarding your New Zealand point they are opening restaurants and schools on a smaller scale from Wednesday so they are really not moving to what we are now they have eased restrictions more.

Posted by: Suedehead2 27th April 2020, 11:22 AM

The lack of a ban on mass gatherings was extraordinarily negligent. Thankfully, many organisations took matters into their own hands and suspended activities anyway. I hate to think how bad things would be if professional football hadn't been suspended for a full two weekends before the government did anything.

Posted by: Rooney 27th April 2020, 11:29 AM

The UK lockdown is not strict, but you have extremes of it- some people taking it very seriously and others not at all, so it sort of balances it all out. I'm pretty sure we are on a very similar trajectory to Italy, I think a lot will ultimately come down to what the Government model they decide to follow. My best guess is we are in lockdown pretty much until end of May and then we see a gradual staggering. But before then we need to tracing app and probably some anti-body testing annoucement I would imagine.

It's impossible to compare ourselves to New Zealand as well. Take it from someone who was there when the world closed! They went from no measures to lockdown within the space of 5 days. While they don't have the same loss of life that other countries have, tourism is the biggest driver of their economy and they are going to close their borders to pretty much everyone unless you want to self isolate in quarantine for 2 weeks when entering the country. So it creates a whole different raft of other problems socially .

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 11:35 AM

I’m not sure how only being able to leave your house for essential shopping and one walk a day is not regarded as ‘strict’ in the context of other countries it is not strict but in the impact of life and health it is.

I think it was announced today for New Zealand they would look to ease travel restrictions with Australia only in the near future but their main airline carrier seems to be suspended until April 2021 which would mean their next summer season a write off.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 11:38 AM

Cheltenham, Crufts, Lewis Capaldi and Stereophonics tours being the key issues. I think these were more of a problem than the lockdown being delayed pretty much all major companies in London were working from home from 12th March. Canary Wharf was a ghost town from early March so people had started to take notice and apply their own rules I am not sure how much impact an extra week of lockdown would have had if a mass gathering ban was in place.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 27th April 2020, 11:46 AM

Yes, the government's hand was essentially forced into closing stuff on the basis that other organisations had started to. Sport had cancelled everything en masse, local government was shutting services, public events were being cancelled, they didn't really have an option for life to continue as normal.

Posted by: RabbitFurCoat 27th April 2020, 11:50 AM

Taking the measures that New Zealand did have helped preserve the health of their own citizens and limited Covid related deaths to a tiny amount. They're now able to re-start parts of their economy internally. Whatever actions were taken, there was always going to be major economic in social problems anywhere. It's hard to imagine there won't be those problems in the UK, but we have done an awful job at preserving the health of our citizens and lost a huge amount of lives too.

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 11:52 AM

They can't give an end date because you are still in your deaths peak. It's not slowing down as of yet.
Belgium had their deathpeak roughly around 10th of april and are only losening the first restrictions on may 4th. The UK is gonna have to stay in a lil' longer

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 11:55 AM

In other non-UK news, The Netherlands has only reported 65 new hospitalisations in the past 24 hours

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 11:56 AM

I am pretty sure the peak was earlier this month when we had 3 days of 900+ over the course of four days. We have not hit 900 since April 11th and actual deaths per day excluding backlog are showing a downwards trend.

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 12:00 PM

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

And you're still very much above 750 a lot of the time. You seem to be platteauing now, which is good. The decline will be slower tho.

First your ICU's need to empty a bit as well. I have no numbers for those so can't judge based on that

Posted by: Rooney 27th April 2020, 12:01 PM

While I agree to some extent, New Zealand were one of the very few countries 'Westernised' countries that went as strict as they did in such a short impact. The models showed their healthcare system would basically be overwhelmed. But it's also a much smaller country, made up of two islands and extremely rural in its makeup. I'm fairly sure Taiwan have also managed to effectively curb the virus as well.

The bigger problem for New Zealand is their country relies mainly on international tourism. So they can restart their economy but the tourism sector will be majorly damaged. So it's a poisioned chalice really.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 12:03 PM

Spain’s new cases have shot up to 9,000 today I sometimes question the timing and accuracy of the numbers on Worldometer.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 27th April 2020, 12:08 PM

You have just listed two ways you are allowed to leave your house in one day and you consider that strict? What do you actually think a non strict lockdown would look like?

Also what are you doing to help your own mental health right now? Because there are plenty of things you can do that, although it won’t be as great as it was before, will help you.

I am locked down on my own. But I am in touch with family, friends and colleague through FaceTime, phone and the internet. No, it’s not as good as seeing them in person but it’s the best I can get and I’ll take that! Twenty years ago this wouldn’t have been possible. I cannot go for my morning swim anymore. Big instead, I’m running up and down my garden. It’s not as fun but it’s something I can do. Don’t have a garden? You can jog on your one daily exercise. Or you can even follow some online fitness routines from the likes of Joe Wicks. I am still working from home and even having to go into work on occasion but for when I’m not working, I am reading books, watching films and binging tv shows, gaming, completing jobs around the house, general housework and working in the garden.

No, this lockdown is not great and we are all suffering to a degree. Things are not going to go back to normal quickly. What we need to remember is that although this sucks right now, hundreds of people are still dying every day because of this illness. We have to do our part to keep ourselves and everyone else safe. Restrictions will ease eventually but my biggest fear right now is that the government will ease things too quickly because of pressure from people who are getting itchy feet and then things will get worse again. I don’t trust this government at all but what other options have we?

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 12:16 PM

Spain has started testinf their resting houses deaths as well I think so a lot of these are backlog data. Looking at cases is kinda useless though as depends on how many tests one does. It is only usefull if you're actively testing a la South Korea or at the start of a new wave.

Deaths, hospitalisations and ICU patients are a much better indication

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 12:18 PM

The answer to your strict question depends on what we are regarding as strict I have already stated that our lockdown measures are not strict in comparison to other countries but this way of life is strict and is not easy.

I live in a central London flat with no garden. All of the options you have suggested are things that I have been doing but as I stated earlier in this post I have been doing this since 12th March so all of your suggestions can be done but this is obviously going to impact people eventually as it is a prison sentence with no release date. I don’t think the mental health of people should be questioned and advised there are other things people could be doing when they are obviously doing everything they can.

I do appreciate your suggestions though.

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 12:22 PM

It has been revised downwards to 2,700 so must have been an error.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 27th April 2020, 12:25 PM

Yes, and I’ve already stated that this is shit for everyone. I’ve had bad days myself, most recently this weekend where I have felt my mental health suffering, so please do not act like I have no idea.

You haven’t stated what it is you think you should be able to do right now that you can’t. Forgive me, but it’s coming off a lot like you’re not bothered that hundreds of people are dying.

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 12:26 PM

I literally have facetime parties with my friends. Grab the vodka hun, we're going out to our livingrooms drinking.

I hate this lockdown as well. I am in an entirely different country from my friends as well. But I'm trying my best to make something out of it. Complaining will only make me feels worse about it so I just forget about it an started playing some videogames again as well.

Sidenote: I've been in lockdown since the 13th of march. On my 8th week already

Posted by: Alex P 27th April 2020, 12:30 PM

Your tone is quite rude and not really any need for it.

I think the I’m not bothered hundreds of people are dying is such a bog standard response when people can’t hold a debate properly. I’ve stated in previous posts that what I am finding the most difficult is no relaxation on people who live alone being able to visit others not like I am sitting here saying I want to go to Glastonbury the fact I have been isolated alone since 12th March demonstrates I do care about people dying but thanks for making me feel even worse when I was seeking discussion on support hopefully you now have in your mind have you have made someone feel like crap who is already struggling.

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 27th April 2020, 12:37 PM

I’m leaving the thread now because you do not want a discussion because you seem unwilling to accept anyone’s points, which I’ll point out that I considered all of yours in my responses.

Also with this latest response, you have done exactly what you have accused me of doing and attempted to make me feel bad but in addition you’ve also tried to make me look bad. I don’t think I’ve displayed a rude tone at all, I’ve just been trying to engage in an actual discussion. You ‘hope’ that I feel like crap? I feel like this is more rude and now I absolutely won’t. I’m not going to speak to you again.

Posted by: Linda 🙋‍♀ 27th April 2020, 12:40 PM

In this instance, if you are looking for support, I would suggest you seek out the Lounge's COVID-19 community thread. Not that we can't be supportive in here, but a political debate forum is going to be focused on debates.

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 12:42 PM

Well to be honest. People are already stretching the borders of the lockdown. What do you think is gonna happen if you loosen them for 1 particular group? If ur a silent carrier you pose a danger to the people you visit, the people you come along in the streets and anypne they visit.

Posted by: Liam* 27th April 2020, 12:54 PM

Give people an inch they'll take a mile, selfishly I want nothing more than to go and see my boyfriend but if the government relax things so that we can do that or see our family, close friends, more and more people are going to take the piss and flout the rules, have more gatherings. Everyone is suffering right now, no matter who they live with what they do.

I still go to work and I should be grateful for that, I live with my mum so I'm not alone, but it doesn't mean that I can't struggle with other things. Making something that affects virtually everyone a competition of who has it worse just doesn't sit right with me. I mean some people wanting to go the pub sounds selfish, but for them in their world that could be more or less all they have and something that seems trivial or small to us is a lot to them. We can't underestimate the importance of those little things that get people through the week or day or whatever, that's why I'm trying to do things like virtual quizzes and games with my friends, it's a little bit of almost normality for a couple of hours.

Posted by: Rooney 27th April 2020, 01:17 PM

I think the point Alex is trying to make is that for people who live in flats/apartments they don't have the luxury of going out to the garden etc. when it's a nice summer's day and quite often what we are finding is a response from the general public who look upon with disgust when there are large amounts of people out and about in parks on a nice day for example. I agree entirely it's easy to criticse and judge when you have a garden but not everyone has the same luxury. But it's almost impossible to start having different restrictions on different groups - it overcomplicates the situation and it's extremely hard to then manage and implement.

It's shit when you see people flaunting the rules and you abide to them, but people break the rules in all kinds of life no matter how trivial- be it breaking speed limits, having that extra drink at the pub when you're driving, checking your phone at the wheel etc. etc. all things the majority are or have been guilty with at times. It's not right, but my point is people break rules all the time.

Posted by: fl00zy* 27th April 2020, 02:17 PM

I'm with Alex here. With respect regarding "you don't care that people are dying!" arguments... if we're getting into blunt honesty territory, then done is done. Yes, people have died. Yes, people will continue to. Caring or not caring about that doesn't make coronavirus sit up and go "oh since people are caring now I'll stop".

And once again to be bluntly honest lockdown isn't stopping transmission either, it's only decreasing its likelihood. With respect to people who have gardens and the like, one could level the exact same argument back - from the comfort of your garden exercising, you may be sending someone to their death by suggesting they go for a run if they happen to cross paths with someone with a high viral load.

Fact is people are going to have varying levels of empathy to others and imo, the level of stress they're under will affect that.

Posted by: *Tim 27th April 2020, 02:59 PM

In my humble opinion that is a very worrying stance on things 🤷‍♂️

Posted by: blacksquare 27th April 2020, 03:45 PM

I do feel for those that are struggling mentally with the lockdown. It's easy to fall into a trap of policing or belittling those feelings — especially when people suggest that empathy is pointless right now — and so on. It's difficult, and we're all going a little stir-crazy, but we just need to remind ourselves that we are saving lives, and lockdown is working. Of course, that is easier said than done.

The government needs to, again, work on their messaging and manage expectations for May. It's going to be an important month — one where deaths will fall and we'll build our capacity to ease the more strict restrictions for (likely) very early June.

Thank you!

Posted by: Leanne 🧘🏻‍ 27th April 2020, 04:04 PM

I was not belittling anyone’s struggle with the current situation and actually offered suggestions on how to help cope with it just to have them tossed aside. I’m aware that not everyone has a garden to exercise in but everyone is allowed to go out for exercise and that includes visiting numerous parks. And to start scoffing about people being ‘comfortable’ life in their nice gardens it turns into exactly what Liam was describing-a competition over who has it worse. All I did was point out that the people who have it the worst are not even in this thread. They’re in hospital or at home suffering with a deadly illness. There is a reason we have locked down and although it is difficult to varying different degrees for everyone, at the moment it is the best option. I cannot see anywhere in this thread a solution or different approach that would work. As Rooney has said, it is pretty much impossible to lift restrictions on certain demographics without causing more strife. You might think you’ll be fine but you can’t be sure that you or anyone else you encounter will be-this disease has killed young and healthy people.

Posted by: Dobbo 27th April 2020, 04:08 PM

Allow me to extend my empathy to those struggling. I too do have ups & downs going from a typical busy social schedule to the current situation but in such a situation everyone really does have to look at the bigger picture. We should be somewhat thankful we can still go outside/to parks etc. unlike a number of countries in Europe.

Posted by: dandy* 27th April 2020, 05:40 PM

I'm glad to say I'm coping reasonably well, it's not too dissimilar to when I was unwell last year so I've had practice at this!!!

I found last year that it really helps to set yourself little tasks to do to help you feel like you've achieved something, it also helps focus your mind on something and removes that temptation to drift and dwell on the bad points around all of this. I found that computer games were quite good to absorb yourself into as can more old fashioned things like jigsaws that you can sit and do with your favourite music on in the background etc. The other thing is, if you're not fortunate enough to be able to work at the moment as a purpose, find yourself something else to focus on - maybe take up art or writing... or more likely on this site, establish what your top 20 singles would have been every week from 1980 onwards

The other thing I do is control when news about COVID-19 infiltrates my life. All the news alerts etc are really bad as they catch you unawares, if you want to keep up to date I think it's better to limit to half an hour a day when you choose to catch up with the events of the day.

Posted by: Steve201 27th April 2020, 06:16 PM

Yeh all those problems are annoying working at home, One thing about working from home which is good is that I get to play music/records and chose what I want whereas at work I can't and we aren't allowed music. But on the other hand it's much harder doing the actually work even simple things like scanning documents!

Posted by: Steve201 27th April 2020, 10:28 PM

There was a good ch4 news report about the difficulties of those who live in flats this evening.

Posted by: Liam* 27th April 2020, 11:01 PM

Exactly, of course we are all strugglng and I have really shit days but the thing that usually gets me out of it is, we cannot do a thing about this and we just need to remember the things we can enjoy and take as much joy from those as possible. Or just adapt to things, like I said I do little things like virtual quizzes and of course that can't replace actually seeing people but when it's that or nothing, it ends up being really fun, something to look forward to and break up the week a bit. Of course the more time you have to do nothing, be bored and mull things over, the worse you feel, and I do it way too often but I'm trying to get out of it because it just doesn't help.

Posted by: blacksquare 28th April 2020, 09:58 AM

The ONS figures this week are absolutely heartbreaking.

Posted by: Suedehead2 28th April 2020, 11:24 AM

And yet we keep being told we should be rejoicing that Johnson is back. Yes, we are meat to be grateful that the man whose dithering contributed to these figures is back to do even more damage.

We can already see he's the same as he ever was. He'd only been back five minutes before the lies started. He had the gall to say that other countries would be looking at "our apparent success". Yet the number of deaths in the UK has continued to follow roughly the same pattern as Italy at the same stage in the outbreak. Indeed, the figures in the UK are slightly higher - even before you factor in the fact that Italy's figures, unlike the UK's, include all care home deaths. We should be doing significantly better than Italy. Not because of some imagined superiority but because we had the advantage of being able to learn form other countries. Instead, we are doing a lot worse.

So no, I won't be celebrating Johnson's return.

Posted by: Helen ✂️ 28th April 2020, 11:42 AM

Nicola Sturgeon is is recommending face masks when at shops. Glad to see at least one part of the UK is finally doing so, but I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this recommendation to be endorsed at the national level.

Posted by: Suedehead2 28th April 2020, 12:25 PM

The consensus still seems to be that masks are next to useless in preventing an uninfected person contracting the virus. They can, however, help to prevent an infected person passing it on to someone else. What we don't know is how many infected people there are at any one time. As (to my knowledge) no country has been testing people who are showing no symptoms. we therefore haven't got a clue how many infections might be prevented by the wearing of masks.

Of course, the other consideration is whether there are enough masks and how they should be distributed. What have they done in other countries?