Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[dirty dingus]

Stop the Covid challange now.

[effeffsee_the2nd]

 
I'm glad sturgeon is being cautious with us, but I've got less and less time for people who are gripped by fear these days. We need to get up and
I agree but it’s hard to blame them when we’ve had months of this “deadly virus” and “red zone” shite pumped out this year. Death is a fact of life, show must go on

[Hillonearth]

1 hour ago, Donathan said:

 

Nothing to do with furlough payments. This is talking about office workers where working from home has become the norm. Note that very few City desk jobs were furloughed.

WFH has caught on in the UK a lot more so than continental Europe. It may be part of the reason that we are yet to see a full blown second wave like France, Spain and Germany have in recent weeks

It's been coming for a while and current events have just accelerated the process. My place was planning to swap out our superannuated base units at the end of this year, replacing them with docking stations and issuing us all with laptops to facilitate working from home...all that happened when COVID hit was they brought forward the lappy acquisition by a few months and delivered one to our homes a couple of weeks in.

I could envisage there having been some resistance to WFH under normal circumstances, mostly from "traditional" middle management who instinctively don't like the idea of their staff not being visible under their noses at all times, but the decision was of necessity taken out of their hands and most people seem to have adapted well to it.

After knocking on five months of doing this, in all honesty I don't ever see myself going back to trailing into the office five days a week - most of what I do can be done remotely and the odd thing that would be better conducted face to face could be taken care of by going in once or at most twice a week.

 

[buchan30]

Not in my experience - I reckon about 20% weren't wearing them in Tesco on Saturday. I just give them a dirty look (probably not very effective as I'm wearing a mask).

I still go into places and sometimes give people a friendly smile, forgetting they can’t fucking see it.

[ICTChris]

Maybe the residents of Western Edinburgh are just a better class of citizen but I've not seen anyone breaching the regulations in any of the shops I've been in.  I've seen one person not wearing a mask at all but I think she was learning disabled and maybe couldn't cope with it.

[vikingTON]

10 hours ago, pandarilla said:

England and Ireland both seem to be running ahead of us with restriction easing, and have a much higher number of new cases per day.

 

Ireland had 200 the other day, and it's population is less than ours. The whole of the uk had over 1000 new cases each day now, and that includes our relatively low totals.

Scotland actually jumped ahead of Ireland on easing restrictions for the most part some time ago: they never actually went ahead with reopening pubs without a meal requirement for example and the schools aren't due back for another couple of weeks.  

52 minutes ago, Binos said:

Bit of an unsubstantiated statement

But is it not just because people in Inverclyde are very unhealthy already

Lots of poverty etc

So got hit harder

And will again soon

There are many other places with a relatively older and unhealthy population that didn't get hit too badly during the initial wave: local media reports of the health board's study into the outbreak suggest that the virus was circulating in Inverclyde (presumably also Glasgow) from late February, with the number of cases/deaths peaking in the first week of April. The report therefore attributed the figures primarily to bad luck rather than underlying structural causes, which prompted the usual spray of bluster and outrage from the gobshite local councillors of every party affiliation. It could just well be true though. 

Any area that has got the virus milling around for fully three weeks without any restrictions at all and four before any schools close is going to have a significant outbreak this winter and it won't necessarily be the same places as before.

[SlipperyP]

Thailand Government reporting daily, that Thailand has had no community transmitted cases for over 70 days.  We know what we're doing....Foreigners all to blame. 

A report from Malaysia has just come in that 1 person has been tested positive while in quarantine.  They had been to Thailand (Bangkok).

Ooof.  This is going to be fun.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1969727/malaysian-visitor-found-infected-after-he-returned-home

Scrambling for  any/all excuses, coming soon.

[effeffsee_the2nd]

58 minutes ago, Hillonearth said:

It's been coming for a while and current events have just accelerated the process. My place was planning to swap out our superannuated base units at the end of this year, replacing them with docking stations and issuing us all with laptops to facilitate working from home...all that happened when COVID hit was they brought forward the lappy acquisition by a few months and delivered one to our homes a couple of weeks in.

I could envisage there having been some resistance to WFH under normal circumstances, mostly from "traditional" middle management who instinctively don't like the idea of their staff not being visible under their noses at all times, but the decision was of necessity taken out of their hands and most people seem to have adapted well to it.

After knocking on five months of doing this, in all honesty I don't ever see myself going back to trailing into the office five days a week - most of what I do can be done remotely and the odd thing that would be better conducted face to face could be taken care of by going in once or at most twice a week.

 

I think anyone who can work from home should be allowed to IF THEY WANT TO but it shouldn't be mandatory . It's not for everyone all the time. keep in mind your middle management types can't see you anymore  but your employer has just encroached on your private personal space which may or may not be suitable for work AND by extension you could end up arguing / limiting what your family can or can't do IN THEIR OWN HOME whilst you are working.   There are pluses though the obvious one is lack of travel , some people might find it more difficult to brownnose round the office to superiors but I guess they will find a way.

Where I work there was already a massive gulf in the treatment of those who were office based and those on the tools / shop floor - being located in filthy hovels where basic defects go months without being addressed vs plush carpeted rooms where they get the day off if the heating doesn't work -  out of sight out of mind. If the office staff are hardly ever at their work I can see the gap widening even more and the resentment growing to new levels

[VladimirMooc]

1 hour ago, Billy Jean King said:

11 hours ago, Thereisalight.. said:

It shows how bad the alternatives are when the SG can literally “kill your granny” and they’ll (SNP) still win by an absolute landslide

And here was me thinking it was the local NHS trusts that were discharging patients and I come on here and discover it was the govt themselves that were discharging them. Every days a school day right enough.

NHS boards are under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Government. If there’s been a systemic failure on the part of health boards then the Scottish Government have to be criticised and held to account. 

Your response sums up a lot of what’s wrong with Scottish politics. As I’m fairly sure if the Tory Government had done the same (and I’m sure they have) you’d be criticising them. 

[Derry Alli]

1 hour ago, effeffsee_the2nd said:

Death is a fact of life, show must go on

 

[bendan]

1 hour ago, ICTChris said:

Maybe the residents of Western Edinburgh are just a better class of citizen but I've not seen anyone breaching the regulations in any of the shops I've been in.  I've seen one person not wearing a mask at all but I think she was learning disabled and maybe couldn't cope with it.

Yeah, I can't recall seeing anyone not complying as far as masks are concerned in my area of Edinburgh, though I haven't been on the buses. The effort put into social distancing has been a bit mixed but it's not always that easy.

[Turkmenbashi]

In the West End of Glasgow at least mask compliance tends to be good. Only time I've seen more than one person disobeying, was about 9pm at Friday night. Had friends visiting from London and Somerset and they were saying mask compliance was much better in Scotland than England. Well at least where they were.

[Billy Jean King]

NHS boards are under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Government. If there’s been a systemic failure on the part of health boards then the Scottish Government have to be criticised and held to account. 
Your response sums up a lot of what’s wrong with Scottish politics. As I’m fairly sure if the Tory Government had done the same (and I’m sure they have) you’d be criticising them. 

Yes but the two govts were not making these day to day decisions. The will be a public enquiry to cover these incidents that has already been announced but an NHS board is not an extension of govt directly. NS or BJ nor their ministers were not having to sign off on hospital discharges, that is the job of the NHS . It will all come out in due course as it should but this notion that every hospital discharge is directly guided by central govt is just nonsense.

[Aufc]

I think anyone who can work from home should be allowed to IF THEY WANT TO but it shouldn't be mandatory . It's not for everyone all the time. keep in mind your middle management types can't see you anymore  but your employer has just encroached on your private personal space which may or may not be suitable for work AND by extension you could end up arguing / limiting what your family can or can't do IN THEIR OWN HOME whilst you are working.   There are pluses though the obvious one is lack of travel , some people might find it more difficult to brownnose round the office to superiors but I guess they will find a way.
Where I work there was already a massive gulf in the treatment of those who were office based and those on the tools / shop floor - being located in filthy hovels where basic defects go months without being addressed vs plush carpeted rooms where they get the day off if the heating doesn't work -  out of sight out of mind. If the office staff are hardly ever at their work I can see the gap widening even more and the resentment growing to new levels

^^
University of Life

[effeffsee_the2nd]

2 minutes ago, Aufc said:

 

 

^^
University of Life

 

Oh come on now I used the capitals sparingly

[coprolite]

14 hours ago, MixuFruit said:

dogshit decision, this business model should be disincentivised.

https://www.ft.com/content/809cb691-f4f9-48e8-80f8-2cfd08c14106

I'm interested to see what payments are being made for but the fts trial sub looks potentially expensive for a forgetful twat like me. 

I don't agree that there's anything wrong with private equity as a model in itself. Private equity + outsourcing public services gets a bad press but i think that most of the problem is in the outsourcing. 

[Todd_is_God]

It's all very well increasing capacity to 65,000 but if they use all of these, and do not account for false positives, this will never end.

A recent German study found the false positive rate in a sample of 521 tests to be around 0.58%

On an individual basis, this is fairly insignificant, however across 65,000 tests would return at least 377 positives (and you can imagine the fear and paranoia that will come along with that). In addition, targetting close contacts will identify more partial RNA strands from low exposure / viral load, which are not actually positive infectious cases, but are being recorded as such.

You can argue a false positive is less harmful than a false negative, and from a health perspective you'd be right. But as cases are now the sole driver of policy in Scotland, it is important to recognise that they do occur, and that increasing the number of tests, particularly on asymptomatic people, increases the number of false positives too.

There are a number of studies in to false positives, however if you listened solely to our MSM you'd think they did not exist.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911v2

Again, however, our journalists will fail to identify these perfectly valid questions and observations, and instead ask pointless questions along the lines of "how concerned are you by x" to which the answer that will be given is completely obvious, or what advice NS might have regarding exam results to other areas of the UK.

Another obvious question should be along the lines of "when should we expect the public enquiry to begin?" as, if it is after the election, it's a bit of a swerve and will have little impact regardless of its findings.

ETA Finally a journalist asks about the reliabilty of PCR testing on asymptomatic cases. No answer really given to what the SG are doing to verify positive asymptomatic cases by either NS or JL, which leads me to believe the answer is nothing. They know they aren't reliable as indicators of a person who is infected and infectious, but they don't want the general public to know that, in case they need people to comply with wide reaching restrictions being reimposed at a later date.

Edited August 17, 2020 by Todd_is_God

[Todd_is_God]

I find it slightly incredible that NS can even try to defend any decision to transfer positive covid cases from hospitals to care homes, whether she personally knew about them or not.

It was widely known even in March that the virus was most deadly among elderly the elderly population, especially those with underlying health conditions. I cannot believe anyone could think that that course of action, even if not guaranteed to be a bad idea, would be a good one.

[Hedgecutter]

This may have been discussed to death already, but I'm lazy:

Are they just going to go with the status quo until cases are down to zero (which is somewhat ambitious to say the least), or do they have a magic R-type number target that allows officials to say "f*** the measures, this will be as good as we'll get, keep calm and carry on, fingers-crossed"?

[Steven W]

3 minutes ago, Hedgecutter said:

This may have been discussed to death already, but I'm lazy:

Are they just going to go with the status quo until cases are down to zero (which is somewhat ambitious to say the least), or do they have a magic R-type number target that allows officials to say "f*** the measures, this will be as good as we'll get, keep calm and carry on, fingers-crossed"?

Good question. I've no idea what we're aiming for any more. NZ has proved that "Zero Covid" is impossible.

The restrictions can't last forever