Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[JK_Queens]

Level 3 - Pubs and restaurants open until 6pm but can’t serve alcohol.
Level 2 - Pubs and restaurants open until 8pm, can only serve alcohol with a main meal.
Level 1 - People not allowed to visit others at home.
This is actually nuts, she’s lost the fucking plot.

Can visit others at home in level 1 generally unless that’s changed since the strategic framework was published.

[LongTimeLurker]

4 hours ago, madwullie said:

But it's a fact that we were so slow to lockdown and flirted with herd immunity (as they did in the states) because all the preparations we had were for a pandemic which this wasn't....

Pandemic just means an epidemic on a global scale, so COVID-19 definitely falls under that definition. Think the politicians in western countries were hoping it wasn't something that was really going to take off for them until the following winter's flu season.

Turned out that the R0 number was too high and there were way too many difficult to screen mild and asymptomatic cases for that to be the case, and that it wasn't as dependent on ambient temperature being above freezing but below 20C as it initially appeared to be.

[madwullie]

36 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

Pandemic just means an epidemic on a global scale, so COVID-19 definitely falls under that definition. Think the politicians in western countries were hoping it wasn't something that was really going to take off for them until the following winter's flu season.

Turned out that the R0 number was too high and there were way too many difficult to screen mild and asymptomatic cases for that to be the case, and that it wasn't as dependent on ambient temperature being above freezing but below 20C as it initially appeared to be.

Well from this document it specifies a fly virus, and outlines some of thencharacterisitives of this virus that we should prepare for. (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/225869/Pandemic_Influenza_LRF_Guidance.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjgiPef2dbsAhUtSEEAHXT7A4wQFjAFegQIGRAB&usg=AOvVaw1rIVqZtmXiy_iDcSq75B32) 

It states that adults are infectious for up to 5 days after symptom onset and the incubation time will be 1-4 days. 

They had already defined the characteristics of the virus because they were preparing for a flu, which this turned oir not to be. 

The suggesting is that is why they pushed for HI early on, allowed stuff like Cheltenham etc and ultimately why they locked down too late to keep our deaths at less horrifying level. I thought all this was pretty much taken as read in public stuff 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2020 by madwullie

[Britney Spears]

7 hours ago, Chairman Mao said:

A vaccine that won’t stop infection, transmission or death

A vaccine that will merely reduce symptoms for people who are already asymptomatic or immune

A vaccine that will be ineffective in the elderly and vulnerable 

It’s pointless 

WOW! What a SUPER post!!!

You know, that is just soooooo true!!!!

Cupcake, I've just got to tell you that when I see your fabulous outfits  it reminds me of something Ryan Gosling used to say back on The Mickey Mouse Club.

He used to say, "You know what, Brit, if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign".

Ry Ry is SO. SMART. !!! LIKE WOW!!!

Now you go right on ahead and have just THE BEST DAY!!!! xx

[Marshmallo]

 

[Bairnardo]

You're not one to preach to everyone about virtues given you lied to track and trace and were proud of that, all so you could sit down to a hearty meal in a restaurant.
That's the standard of your virtue and your right wing middle class belly will always be full.

Well yeah but.... He made all that stuff up though

[Steven W]

38 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

 

Well done her eh?

She's the only one daft enough to put it out there for us all to see. You can be sure the super rich have been at this throughout

Edited October 28, 2020 by Steven W

[madwullie]

From here https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/why-weren-t-we-ready

Although TBF one guy does say it was immaterial that our prep for was for flu and this wasn't a flu. The main issue is that we had no plan (because it was flu) to try to actually stop it, only mitigate and let it run through the population

 

But the government’s planning documents – which date from 2005 to 2018 but are mainly based on the 2011 “Influenza Preparedness Strategy” – suggest that Britain may in fact have been prepared, just for the wrong outcome. The UK’s plans appear to have rested on a false assumption: if a pandemic such as Covid-19 struck, the UK intended only to mitigate rather than suppress the impact. 

Mitigation accepts that the virus will spread. Suppression does not. Boris Johnson did not come up with the concept of taking the virus “on the chin”, as he put in an interview on 5 March. Nor did Dominic Cummings, his most senior adviser, who is reported to have at first welcomed the idea. The strategy predates them both. 

***

Strict social distancing of the kind that Britain has now enforced does not underpin any of its planning documents. As Alan Johnson told the Lords in 2009, foreshadowing the initial advice of Boris Johnson’s government many years later, “even in a full pandemic… people should only stay at home if they have symptoms”. This approach dated back to the 2005 national strategy, which argued that, “Local restrictions in the movement of people, eg in a community or town, are unlikely to have much impact”. That thinking carried over to the updated version in 2011, the most recent version of the plan. Local measures to disrupt transmission, the document says, “cannot be relied on as a way to ‘buy time’”. 

“It will not,” the strategy continues categorically, “be possible to stop the spread” of a virus as contagious as Covid-19. 

In that 2011 document, banning mass gatherings is not only deemed ineffectual (“there is very limited evidence… [it] will have any significant effect on… transmission”) but is discouraged, because such events “may help maintain [to] public morale”. Technological tracking of the type being employed in Singapore does not figure in the plans. Neither does mass testing on the scale of South Korea. The deaths of between 210,000 and 315,000 people are accepted as a plausible planning outcome under a worst-case scenario. 

This is the playbook that the government followed throughout February and into early March

[madwullie]

5 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

 

What an absolute grade A, top drawer, fucking arseHOLE

[madwullie]

7 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

The point being no it didn't, but we did it anyway.

Given there's been plenty of studies to show we could have saved ~20k more lives had we shut down a week or two earlier, I think it was more urgent than we acted. 

[LongTimeLurker]

8 hours ago, Chairman Mao said:

A vaccine that won’t stop infection, transmission or death

A vaccine that will merely reduce symptoms for people who are already asymptomatic or immune

A vaccine that will be ineffective in the elderly and vulnerable 

It’s pointless 

If it provides the UK elite with a face saving exit strategy from their cycle of imposing lockdown measures every time the new cases curve goes in the wrong direction, it will be far from pointless. Think it's obvious by now that they are never going to admit to the plebs that they got it wrong back in March when they were panicking over things like ventilator provision and shunting the elderly out of hospitals and back into care homes because they believed misleading computer models.

[101]

48 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

 

Hilarious that America are so shit scared of socialist ideas when the capitalists over there have said keep working in factories, offices etc and we will plough money into pretending it's not real.

[Marshmallo]

And so it begins - "it's not the schools, it's the house parties!"

 

[Paco]

I agree with a lot of what you’ve posted but at some point someone’s going to have to decide a number of daily deaths that is acceptable, like we do with every other disease and various other aspects of life such as driving. f**k knows what that number is, but for me it’s definitely above one.

This is the sort of thing often repeated and it certainly sounds like a good idea. Zero Covid deaths quite clearly are unachievable in this country, so we do have to accept a level of daily death between now and the vaccine which returns society to normality.

However, the problem is there is no ‘fixed’ number that we can sit at indefinitely. I’m sure most of us would agree the ten or so UK wide that died through July and August was perfectly acceptable. And yet two months later we’re at a rolling average of 181 and rising. Is 181 acceptable? Through the winter, being absolutely brutal, probably given our situation. You can make a case that better work through the summer could’ve avoided this but we’re here now.

But it’s rising pretty quickly from 181 too, and we’ve already ‘baked in’ to quote Chris Whitty further rises over the next month. We’ll pretty easily hit the much-mocked Vallance prediction of 200 per day in November, and it’s likely to keep rising beyond that unless measures have an unexpected impact, or the virus slows down - every indicator from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain suggest that simply won’t happen.

So we’re very much headed for 3-400 per day by Christmas. Is that acceptable? What about 500 beyond that? The point being, we can’t fix the acceptable level of deaths and leave it there. It keeps rising. Sooner or later it would settle down untouched but we don’t know where or when.

The fact so many people have died in this country tells you we do have an acceptable level of death. UK wide there hasn’t been a zero deaths day since early March, and at that given the lack of tests it was almost definitely wrong. I’m quite sure in a hypothetical world the UK Government would be delighted to accept 200 deaths every single day between now and whenever a level of population immunity arrives via a vaccine. Nicola Sturgeon would happily accept take the 20 or so population share of that number too.

But wishful thinking doesn’t make it true. Unless we’re setting our bar at 1000+ per day there is no magic number that leaves us bobbing along without severe restrictions.

[doulikefish]

The news this morning saying sage in england is advocating for the whole of England to be on tier 3 for the whole of December

Edited October 28, 2020 by doulikefish

[Lurkst]

57 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

 

What would Mao Zedong say about this?

 

[101]

13 minutes ago, Marshmallo said:

And so it begins - "it's not the schools, it's the house parties!"

 

To be fair this is the press not the government or the police blaming house parties. Let's not pretend this isn't a multi faceted issue schools are an issue of course they are but SO are house parties and whilst they are illegal anyone thick enough to attend one risks arrest or a FPN and for journalists that makes a better story than "school sends 20 people into self isolation" 

[8MileBU]

6 minutes ago, Lurkst said:

What would Mao Zedong say about this?

“Naughty naughty, very naughty...”

 

[Marshmallo]

2 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

I think I'm less militant than you on this issue, and I do still think holding a large house party is selfish at best at the moment, but it completely amazes me how little fuss the teachers unions have made about the schools. There is no way they can be safe places to work right now for individual teachers, never mind their wider impact on the nationwide figures. 

When you consider that story shows ~15 illegal house parties in one day Lanarkshire as part of the recent 'spike', then compare that to the number of schools where kids are mixing every day in far greater numbers? 

I would also ask where the people going to these house parties and infecting others are getting the virus from

[PWL]

I also get the impression that the EIS dont have much support outwith the teaching profession either.  Rightly or wrongly, the "10%" raise exhausted a lot of goodwill amoung the public.

Even the recent statement they put out about teachers and their Oct staycations was hardly going win sympathy in current situation. 

Hell, I'm still bitter about never getting to play football or run for my school due to the 80s strikes...