Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
I reckon in all seriousness there's going to be a lot more alcoholism about. Like how the Russians coped with communism.
I have sworn off the drink for the duration. Last drink was Friday. I am sure that's not adding to my irritation. Not at all...
I've patented "phone pubs" in my company, unofficially.
We will Skype in a few of us on Thursday night. Each will have a beer in hand.
Has anyone used Zoom? I'm trying to re-establish a discussion group with a bunch of reasonably tech savvy..... all Facebook/Google/email ushering ...... OAPs Don't THINK they've all got Skype.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
I reckon in all seriousness there's going to be a lot more alcoholism about. Like how the Russians coped with communism.
I have sworn off the drink for the duration. Last drink was Friday. I am sure that's not adding to my irritation. Not at all...
I've patented "phone pubs" in my company, unofficially.
We will Skype in a few of us on Thursday night. Each will have a beer in hand.
Has anyone used Zoom? I'm trying to re-establish a discussion group with a bunch of reasonably tech savvy..... all Facebook/Google/email ushering ...... OAPs Don't THINK they've all got Skype.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
propping up a business isnt just economic cost it is also social cost of those that still have a job to goto. Covid could potentially send half our small businesses to the wall in my opinion , first the ones directly unable to operate, followed by the ones that support them or are supported on the wages of their staff.....its a huge chain of domino effects
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The chess candidates tournament is happening, it's pretty exciting, and the live commentary on chess24 is usually quite entertaining. Round 2 starts in half an hour
Of all the sports...sitting stationary facing an opponent who is breathing on you for hours on end?!??? I would ahve thought of all the sports, cricket was the saftest from a Covid-19 perspective.
Most sports can be done safely IMO its just the spectators who are really at risk.
Dont forget the Darwin award chasing sports star who decided to lick all the microphones at a press conference to mock the spread of Coronavirus and went on to catch it......
Re my tooth... fractured in Sunday, half of it fell out On Monday... sounds like a Craig David song so far...
I have an appointment tomorrow, I suppose it will need a filling. It doesn’t really host, I wonder if it’s best to get a temporary solution from the chemist and only go to the dentist if it becomes really painful. Will they still be open if we lockdown?
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The chess candidates tournament is happening, it's pretty exciting, and the live commentary on chess24 is usually quite entertaining. Round 2 starts in half an hour
Of all the sports...sitting stationary facing an opponent who is breathing on you for hours on end?!??? I would ahve thought of all the sports, cricket was the saftest from a Covid-19 perspective.
Most sports can be done safely IMO its just the spectators who are really at risk.
Dont forget the Darwin award chasing sports star who decided to lick all the microphones at a press conference to mock the spread of Coronavirus and went on to catch it......
Well excusing theatrics,
Bowls, Darts, and the senior golf tour seem the most vulnerable.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
I haven't played games for a few years, but all my lads are still big gamers. I watched them play Modern Warfare Battlezone (I think!) last night, it was way to fast for my old eyes to follow on a 55inch 4K telly. Made me feel quite sick!
Blast would actually be a good name for a pub app to facilitate this. Use the peleton business model, charge £1000 for a special glass and 2 bottles of introductory beer, and £40 a month for a further 6 bottles. Make up for the small additional cost by having a bouncer shout "Your names not down your not coming in" when you try and enter, and a barman holding back the start of drinking each bottle until he is ready to serve you.
Re my tooth... fractured in Sunday, half of it fell out On Monday... sounds like a Craig David song so far...
I have an appointment tomorrow, I suppose it will need a filling. It doesn’t really host, I wonder if it’s best to get a temporary solution from the chemist and only go to the dentist if it becomes really painful. Will they still be open if we lockdown?
There are other health risks apart from Covid-19. I'd get it seen to now.
If two people are in lock down in separate houses. Good mates say. Neither shows any signs of the illness and neither is going anywhere.
Eventually there must be a point when they can visit each other (say it is walking distance)? How long can someone stay asymptomatic?
A significant minority will do that immediately I reckon. If you’re good mates with your neighbour, you’re going to have a beer in the evening in the garden with them
Sunak has established a direction of travel from which there is no turning back. He will be throwing a lot more than £330 billion at this. The interesting thing is what happens then.
There will have to be a turning back at some point.
Or the country will go bankrupt.
What does that even mean though?
Surely uncontrolled inflation is the worry but that seems distant danger right now.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
propping up a business isnt just economic cost it is also social cost of those that still have a job to goto. Covid could potentially send half our small businesses to the wall in my opinion , first the ones directly unable to operate, followed by the ones that support them or are supported on the wages of their staff.....its a huge chain of domino effects
This domino effect is happening today, our IT support firm will close this Friday, its main customer was a pub chain. There will be thousands of such closures over the next few weeks. We could hit 5 million unemployed very quickly and 10 million by the end of the year. Millions of peoples lives will be destroyed by our response to Covid 19
I haven't played games for a few years, but all my lads are still big gamers. I watched them play Modern Warfare Battlezone (I think!) last night, it was way to fast for my old eyes to follow on a 55inch 4K telly. Made me feel quite sick!
Try eve online its got a free to play option and is slower paced, should you like space themed games and like playing with other people
Day 1 of WFH for the duration. A real end of days vibe in the office yesterday as we (senior management team) signed off the operations plan for both the factory and office to divide the team in two and work two completely separate shifts. Hasty setting up of Skype / Teams / Team Viewer accounts and then testing yesterday as half the team won't see the other half again face to face.
Skype behaving itself so far with various 1on1 video calls made this morning. The big test will be the daily SMT call at lunchtime. As I pointed out to the rest of the team the big impact on us all is the disconnection - not seeing your colleagues for even a few days makes effective and regular communication all the more important.
Some interesting* WFH environments for my colleagues...
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must noSome people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangeroust forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
"Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous."
Totally agree. I hope the government is using multiple sources of advice and also referring to the models and assumptions used by Italy, France, Germany etc that inform their policy decisions to get a more robust basis rather than depending on just the Imperial model.
Re my tooth... fractured in Sunday, half of it fell out On Monday... sounds like a Craig David song so far...
I have an appointment tomorrow, I suppose it will need a filling. It doesn’t really host, I wonder if it’s best to get a temporary solution from the chemist and only go to the dentist if it becomes really painful. Will they still be open if we lockdown?
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The chess candidates tournament is happening, it's pretty exciting, and the live commentary on chess24 is usually quite entertaining. Round 2 starts in half an hour
Of all the sports...sitting stationary facing an opponent who is breathing on you for hours on end?!??? I would ahve thought of all the sports, cricket was the saftest from a Covid-19 perspective.
You can set live chess up to be non face to face very easily if you want to. 2 boards, back to back.
One player calls E4, other player moves the opponent's piece to E4 etc.
Or you can just play online !
That could get messy, especially in time trouble. They are playing face to face, only 8 players and all being regularly tested, but some players thought it should be postponed.
Yesterday Carlsen was part of the commentating team yesterday, unfortunately not today. Instead there's the teenage star Alireza Firouzja!
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
We might well. But the question all along has been whether we lockdown hard or whether we let the pandemic do its thing but with some measures to smooth the curve. The government has favoured the latter approach but quickly pivoted on Monday.
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
Lucky me then. I never watch sport. It would not bother me if no one ever kicked another football or hit another golf ball or played a set of tennis or whatever...
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
Wouldn't it be great if the final EPL games were played in empty stadiums with all matches broadcast live for free. Its going without sport that I'm finding hard.
That's the do absolutely nothing, chaotic stupidity, poor medical care number. Basically all the elderly/vulnerable in a society get it and can't get medical treatment.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
We might well. But the question all along has been whether we lockdown hard or whether we let the pandemic do its thing but with some measures to smooth the curve. The government has favoured the latter approach but quickly pivoted on Monday.
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
We've only got 3 months, not enough time to watch him crawling to a hundred more than once!
Wouldn't it be great if the final EPL games were played in empty stadiums with all matches broadcast live for free. Its going without sport that I'm finding hard.
If they're played then free to air broadcast has to be sorted somehow. Can't go to pubs.
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
I know slow TV is a thing but that's surely going too far?
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
Most sports can be done safely IMO its just the spectators who are really at risk.
Some sports require medical cover and if that isn't available, the activity cannot go ahead.
One sport still very much going is greyhound racing - it used to be on World of Sport in the 60s and 70s when the horse racing was off. Saturday afternoon dogs at Harringay, morning dogs at Hackney. Also gone are venues like Catford and Walthamstow and of course Wimbledon.
Nonetheless, dog racing lives on and should be on ITV on Saturday afternoon instead of the horse racing.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
I reckon in all seriousness there's going to be a lot more alcoholism about. Like how the Russians coped with communism.
I have sworn off the drink for the duration. Last drink was Friday. I am sure that's not adding to my irritation. Not at all...
I've patented "phone pubs" in my company, unofficially.
We will Skype in a few of us on Thursday night. Each will have a beer in hand.
Has anyone used Zoom? I'm trying to re-establish a discussion group with a bunch of reasonably tech savvy..... all Facebook/Google/email ushering ...... OAPs Don't THINK they've all got Skype.
I don't but I might look into it.
Skype is unreliable.
Agree. Just been on the Skype site for info and it said it was busy, and to come back later. I appreciate they might be, world-wide at the moment, but .....
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
But Geoff's best innings were often quick scoring.
All the other ministers in Jonson's cabinet got their jobs by being ideologically correct on Brexit and not showing any obvious competence. They owe everything to Johnson's patronage. Sunak got his job by accident of a bungled humiliation of his predecessor. A metaphorical giant amongst pigmies, if physically somewhat the opposite.
Most Prime Ministers are found accidentally.
Even Churchill - who had 2 political careers (arguably 3) before ending up in post.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
This IS what we are doing.
No, it isn't, and even if was, it's what we should have been doing from the beginning, like Japan and South Korea.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
Yes I agree that elimination has to be the aim, my worry is it is going to take several lockdowns over a year or possibly longer to get it to that point.
If that happens I'm wondering if the government should bailout all businesses while this is happening.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
We might well. But the question all along has been whether we lockdown hard or whether we let the pandemic do its thing but with some measures to smooth the curve. The government has favoured the latter approach but quickly pivoted on Monday.
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
Korea is not in lock down
Fair enough. We can observe how China gets on unlocking and we can observe how Korea gets on longer-term with its super-data intensive approach to Covid19 and whether it is sustainable.
Most sports can be done safely IMO its just the spectators who are really at risk.
Some sports require medical cover and if that isn't available, the activity cannot go ahead.
One sport still very much going is greyhound racing - it used to be on World of Sport in the 60s and 70s when the horse racing was off. Saturday afternoon dogs at Harringay, morning dogs at Hackney. Also gone are venues like Catford and Walthamstow and of course Wimbledon.
Nonetheless, dog racing lives on and should be on ITV on Saturday afternoon instead of the horse racing.
Wasn't there something about medicines at dog-tracks. Romford's still open, too.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
I reckon in all seriousness there's going to be a lot more alcoholism about. Like how the Russians coped with communism.
I have sworn off the drink for the duration. Last drink was Friday. I am sure that's not adding to my irritation. Not at all...
I've patented "phone pubs" in my company, unofficially.
We will Skype in a few of us on Thursday night. Each will have a beer in hand.
Has anyone used Zoom? I'm trying to re-establish a discussion group with a bunch of reasonably tech savvy..... all Facebook/Google/email ushering ...... OAPs Don't THINK they've all got Skype.
I don't but I might look into it.
Skype is unreliable.
Agree. Just been on the Skype site for info and it said it was busy, and to come back later. I appreciate they might be, world-wide at the moment, but .....
WhatsApp seems to have more capacity for video calls. By comparison Skye is crap
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
Yes I agree that elimination has to be the aim, my worry is it is going to take several lockdowns over a year or possibly longer to get it to that point.
If that happens I'm wondering if the government should bailout all businesses while this is happening.
Not elimination, but suppression, and then a gradual build up of herd immunity by allowing everyone to become infected at a rate compatible with (massively increased) ICU capacity.
Wouldn't it be great if the final EPL games were played in empty stadiums with all matches broadcast live for free. Its going without sport that I'm finding hard.
As a Spurs fan, I am absolutely loving there being no football. I will miss the cricket, though.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
It is worth remembering that "cocooning" the elderly and vulnerable comes from the idea that by *reducing* their rate of infection (hopefully massively) this will reduce the load on ICU etc to the point that care does not collapse.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
We might well. But the question all along has been whether we lockdown hard or whether we let the pandemic do its thing but with some measures to smooth the curve. The government has favoured the latter approach but quickly pivoted on Monday.
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
This IS what we are doing.
No, it isn't, and even if was, it's what we should have been doing from the beginning, like Japan and South Korea.
We started out a slightly different strategy, but have changed tack in recent times. We are now trying to suppress spread massively whilst clearing the hospitals, creating more ICU capacity and scraping together as many ventilators as possible. It was probably a mistake not to go hard at the start, but without shutting the borders and closing down incoming travel we would have been seeing new infections popping up all over (all those skiers on the mid-term holiday).
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
I don't believe the difference between intervention and nothing ranges from 12,000 to 3,500,000. The figures at both ends are surely wrong.
The Diamond Princess shows why the 3.5 million figure is nonsense. That ship was the perfect breeding ground for the virus and the majority of people were aged over 60, they had 16 days in quarantine living on top of each other yet only 20% of passengers tested postive with 25% having no symptons.
A large proportion of the population must be immune to Covid-19
That's a poor comparison, as everyone on the Diamond Princess got proper healthcare when needed. The Iranian doomsday scenario would be the exact opposite of that. Say 50-60% of the population infected, but essentially no healthcare because the system is overwhelmed, and people dying from all the other things that the Iranian healthcare system has to do.
The oft mentioned ski chalet was the same. A whole ski holiday living on top of each other and sharing a chalet with no precautions, yet half of them were uninfected.
That doesn't make a good comparison either. Any of those people who developed any serious symptoms got healthcare. What the Iranians are being warned about is an outbreak becoming so large that there's no real healthcare, not just for coronavirus but for everything. If things got bad enough you will get outbreaks of other diseases too.
The point is simply that you can have prolonged exposure and still a 50% chance of non infection. Latest estimate seems to be 5% chance from a single contact
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
It is worth remembering that "cocooning" the elderly and vulnerable comes from the idea that by *reducing* their rate of infection (hopefully massively) this will reduce the load on ICU etc to the point that care does not collapse.
Yes, but cocooning is simply not practicable if the virus is left to let rip in the rest of the population. Sure, isolate the vulnerable as much as possible, but that in addition to lockdown.
Wouldn't it be great if the final EPL games were played in empty stadiums with all matches broadcast live for free. Its going without sport that I'm finding hard.
There was a great suggestion into R5 Live the other day: replay all of London 2012 IN REAL TIME. Two weeks of fantastic pick-me-up sport. OK, so there might not be the surprise element. But at least we'd know when to crowd round the telly for the medals. And even the 9.00 am badminton heats would be better than nothing. I mean, who can remember how they played out??
It's not as if the Beeb has plenty of other content it would be replacing.....
Has anyone used Zoom? I'm trying to re-establish a discussion group with a bunch of reasonably tech savvy..... all Facebook/Google/email using ...... OAPs Don't THINK they've all got Skype.
A couple of our vendors use Zoom, and my experience of it has been reliable.
Our corporate system is Skype, which works OK for people on the system, but outside users have issues.
We had a Webex call with a vendor yesterday, which we had to move to Zoom half way through.
The future of Skype is meant to be Teams. We haven't tested it on a large scale yet.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
We might well. But the question all along has been whether we lockdown hard or whether we let the pandemic do its thing but with some measures to smooth the curve. The government has favoured the latter approach but quickly pivoted on Monday.
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
Personal experience of contact tracing: My son suddenly had a fever 39.6 on Saturday. On Sunday we got an email from his kindergarten (already closed, but my son was there recently) saying a parent of one of the children had tested positive. My wife phoned the kindergarten leader to get more info - apart from anything else she is an emergency dept doctor and wanted to find out if she might be infected before going to work. Apparently, the local health Amt didn't test the child because s/he had no symptoms, so weren't testing anyone at the kindergarten because nobody had come in contact with a confirmed infection. She then tried to get through to the Cologne number to try and get us tested, but gave up after an hour.
So she got herself tested at her hospital, and took a swab to test our son there too. Both came back negative.
Yesterday we heard from the kindergarten that one of the teachers tested positive. I was expecting the local health people to get in touch, as our son is certainly a contact, but we've heard nothing.
I'm wondering if they've given up. Which would be stupid and depressing.
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
But Geoff's best innings were often quick scoring.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
More broadly, I think it is important to use models to inform decisions but we must not forget the BASICS. That is, we must keep sense checking the information provided to us against observed reality.
Some people choose to put their faith in experts but those experts sometimes choose to put their faith into models. That's dangerous. We must always think for ourselves, listen to evidence and make a judgement. Then think again, listen to new evidence and make a further judgement.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
Of course, it does require people not to be twats, hunker down for a few weeks and let the forest fire burn out for lack of trees.
C'mon, HM the Q - tell the nation what to do. It could be the, er, crowning moment of your entire reign.
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
This IS what we are doing.
No, it isn't, and even if was, it's what we should have been doing from the beginning, like Japan and South Korea.
We started out a slightly different strategy, but have changed tack in recent times. We are now trying to suppress spread massively whilst clearing the hospitals, creating more ICU capacity and scraping together as many ventilators as possible. It was probably a mistake not to go hard at the start, but without shutting the borders and closing down incoming travel we would have been seeing new infections popping up all over (all those skiers on the mid-term holiday).
We're still not really locking down though. Schools are still open; shops are still open. Our "lockdown" is very half-hearted and probably insufficient to stop the spread.
Wouldn't it be great if the final EPL games were played in empty stadiums with all matches broadcast live for free. Its going without sport that I'm finding hard.
There was a great suggestion into R5 Live the other day: replay all of London 2012 IN REAL TIME. Two weeks of fantastic pick-me-up sport. OK, so there might not be the surprise element. But at least we'd know when to crowd round the telly for the medals. And even the 9.00 am badminton heats would be better than nothing. I mean, who can remember how they played out??
It's not as if the Beeb has plenty of other content it would be replacing.....
Absolutely - I'm doing that with darts. A huge number of matches I have never seen and have no idea who wins.
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
But Geoff's best innings were often quick scoring.
Really surprised that PMQs still going ahead. Can't be sensible having hundreds of MPs cramming into the House. And sends the message that social distancing can't be that important if it doesn't apply to MPs.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
Of course, it does require people not to be twats, hunker down for a few weeks and let the forest fire burn out for lack of trees.
C'mon, HM the Q - tell the nation what to do. It could be the, er, crowning moment of your entire reign.
Agreed, the bragging about pub visits on here last night was a low point for PB.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
Harsh on clubs facing promotion to annul completely too.
If the seasons can't be completed then I think fairest solution is to scrap relegation for a season and terminate season as is. Liverpool win the Premiership, Leeds win the Championship, West Brom get promoted, no relegation from the Premiership.
Cancel next seasons League Cup to deal with the extra fixtures and have 4 relegated teams next season.
These £330bn in emergency loans. Suggestions this morning that a company with a less than stellar credit rating (i.e. struggling for cash hence the need for a loan) might not get it. Similarly business now in trouble gets the loan, keeps going now then falls over when repayments get demanded.
They'll need to become grants for smaller businesses. If you are easyJet you can probably cope with borrowing. If you are the cafe where easyJet pilots used to eat every morning outside Luton airport probably less so.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
Even as a Man U fan I actually think that's the right solution for the PL winners... but what about the CL and relegation places?
Most sports can be done safely IMO its just the spectators who are really at risk.
Some sports require medical cover and if that isn't available, the activity cannot go ahead.
One sport still very much going is greyhound racing - it used to be on World of Sport in the 60s and 70s when the horse racing was off. Saturday afternoon dogs at Harringay, morning dogs at Hackney. Also gone are venues like Catford and Walthamstow and of course Wimbledon.
Nonetheless, dog racing lives on and should be on ITV on Saturday afternoon instead of the horse racing.
I always loved how in SE London (incl. Greater London) we used to call the local Greyhound Racing "Catford-Dogs"
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
Even as a Man U fan I actually think that's the right solution for the PL winners... but what about the CL and relegation places?
I absolutely agree as another lifetime Man U supporter
These £330bn in emergency loans. Suggestions this morning that a company with a less than stellar credit rating (i.e. struggling for cash hence the need for a loan) might not get it. Similarly business now in trouble gets the loan, keeps going now then falls over when repayments get demanded.
They'll need to become grants for smaller businesses. If you are easyJet you can probably cope with borrowing. If you are the cafe where easyJet pilots used to eat every morning outside Luton airport probably less so.
If this is going to work then the debt is going to have to be seriously deferred. If it is not it will impact on existing banking arrangements and not improve the cash flow situation of the company all that much. The government has to accept that they will be subordinated debt. They will also have to accept that there is going to be a default rate that would make a pay day lender pale.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
Of course, it does require people not to be twats, hunker down for a few weeks and let the forest fire burn out for lack of trees.
C'mon, HM the Q - tell the nation what to do. It could be the, er, crowning moment of your entire reign.
Agreed, the bragging about pub visits on here last night was a low point for PB.
What really angered me was the apparent total disregard for the health and wellbeing of others. The whole point of this thing is to reduce transmission, and they could be walking around spreading it everywhere.
It is an interesting argument, which seems intuitively correct:
...However, they make structural mistakes in analyzing outbreak response. They ignore standard Contact Tracing [2] allowing isolation of infected prior to symptoms. They also ignore door-to-door monitoring to identify cases with symptoms [3]. Their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong. After a few weeks of lockdown almost all infectious people are identified and their contacts are isolated prior to symptoms and cannot infect others [4]. The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China, where new cases were down to one yesterday, after excluding imported international travelers that are quarantined.
Their assumptions are equivalent to ergodicity, as they consider new infections to be a function of infected fraction and immunity, and not influenced by where in the trajectory of the outbreak they are, distinguishing going up from going down...
Of course it is dependent on sufficiently reducing the number of new cases via lockdown so that contact tracing becomes effective again.
And 'sufficiently' is likely not trivial to define.
More widespread testing would, of course, reduce modelling uncertainties.
I agree there is some merit in this critique. The expert input for this decision by the government is not just coming from this Imperial team, there is at least one more academic team who are experts in Infectious Disease Models and PHE will have their own experts. Hopefully the different groups have taken different approaches to conceptualising this problem.
Crucially, it is important not to forget how to think.
A month ago it looked like the End of Days in much of Asia, not just China with its welded homes.
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
Of course, it does require people not to be twats, hunker down for a few weeks and let the forest fire burn out for lack of trees.
C'mon, HM the Q - tell the nation what to do. It could be the, er, crowning moment of your entire reign.
Agreed, the bragging about pub visits on here last night was a low point for PB.
The two main posters making such bragging rights were either deliberately trying to anger other posters or were otherwise insane
To continue my thought below about if season can't be completed I'd follow through the lower leagues with the "promote the top clubs but no relegation" plan too if the season can't be completed. And for the CL spots too.
For clubs currently outside the top who were hoping to get to the top (or those hoping to get into CL) its harsh but they can try again next season. However relegating a club that could have climbed out of the relegation zone is much worse fairer just not relegate anyone - even if that gives an undeserved mulligan to clubs like Norwich, or Bolton etc
The time of slow tv might have come into its own. Five-day test cricket on terrestrial channels would be an ideal way to fill the airwaves, with the usual sparse spectator crowd: low risk for the players and spectators and a long-drawn out soporific spell on tv to ease us gently into the required catatonic boredom to tide us over the duration.
I suspect they don't have the rights, but it would be good if the BBC could show re-runs of Geoffrey Boycott's finest innings.
But Geoff's best innings were often quick scoring.
Day 2.5 of WFH. I think if I have to do 3 months of this there is going to be blood.
A few days it dawned on me there's not going to be any live sport for the next few months.
No football, no rugby, and no cricket, that might lead to blood in this household.
I wonder if county championship cricket could be played.
Would fill up the sports schedules nicely.
The difference between a county championship match behind closed doors and usual attendance is about 11 people and a dog.
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too. Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
Even as a Man U fan I actually think that's the right solution for the PL winners... but what about the CL and relegation places?
I for one am happy that we have Rishi in lock-step with the PM. Not sure how this situation would have played out if No.10 didn't have confidence that an independent No. 11 and Sajid's Spads were going to do the right thing....
Sunak is ten times as impressive as Javid. I didn't take to Javid's speaking style at all, and he lost me when he did that silly legs-apart stance.
Haha pretty much where I was with Javid.
Sunak is impressive because he is likely to know more than those briefing him and definitely more than the political journalists asking him questions. Therefore he doesn't need to bluster or bluff on tricky questions he just talks as if he is an expert, which he probably is.
However, he is still using a peashooter when we need a bazooka. Hopefully he is aware of that and he is working to fix it.
£330bn is a peashooter?
Mostly 1 year loans to businesses who would still be bust at the end of the 1 year?
If a business needs to be propped up by government for more than a year, it is not a viable business. Businesses need to be able to adapt to the new situation quickly and those that can't will go to the wall unfortunately.
When things eventually return to normal then new businesses will be able to emerge and things will start to recover.
I don't buy the idea that everything must be preserved as it was before the virus outbreak and infinite amounts of government money thrown at the problem that we'll be paying for for decades.
Plenty of businesses dont have reserves of 4 months costs whilst still being perfectly viable pre and post covid 19.
Yes but if the "during" part of covid 19 is say 2 or even 3 years are we going to keep paying for these "viable" businesses? This could be the new normal.
There would be much lower economic cost to letting them fail and new businesses replace them afterwards if it goes on too long.
I dont think lockdown is mentally or socially possible for that long regardless of the economy.
If as soon as we relax the lockdown the virus makes a comeback then we'll be in exactly the same situation as we are right now currently heading into the first lockdown.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
That, surely, is what we should be doing. Lock down tightly to get the spread under control, then gradually release restrictions while putting massive efforts into expanding ICU capacity. The idea of "cocooning" the vulnerable was never going to be practicable.
This IS what we are doing.
No, it isn't, and even if was, it's what we should have been doing from the beginning, like Japan and South Korea.
We started out a slightly different strategy, but have changed tack in recent times. We are now trying to suppress spread massively whilst clearing the hospitals, creating more ICU capacity and scraping together as many ventilators as possible. It was probably a mistake not to go hard at the start, but without shutting the borders and closing down incoming travel we would have been seeing new infections popping up all over (all those skiers on the mid-term holiday).
We're still not really locking down though. Schools are still open; shops are still open. Our "lockdown" is very half-hearted and probably insufficient to stop the spread.
We will be. But it takes a few days to do a full 180 degree turn. Schools will be closed very soon is my view.
Mr. Eninjeeya, I had a quick check of some currency movements and the Australian and Canadian dollars have also fallen versus the USD (although not by as much). Bit surprised the euro strengthened against the dollar (not by a huge margin, but still).
Here's an idea, we complete this season in the summer or autumn.
Next season, to save on fixtures:
• No League Cup (who would even notice) • Teams play each other only ONCE in the league – names out of a hat for home/away, equal numbers of home and away games, seed it so you don't get unfair fixtures like Liverpool's games against City, Spurs, Chelsea, Utd etc all being at home.
Comments
Skype is unreliable.
The only way we could let it infect a large proportion of the population is if we increase ICU beds massively between now and then somehow or an effective treatment is rapidly discovered and mass produced which makes that unnecessary.
I have an appointment tomorrow, I suppose it will need a filling. It doesn’t really host, I wonder if it’s best to get a temporary solution from the chemist and only go to the dentist if it becomes really painful. Will they still be open if we lockdown?
Just to note that "All Time" is the 18 months since we moved here!
Eventually there must be a point when they can visit each other (say it is walking distance)? How long can someone stay asymptomatic?
Today? Not so much.
In six weeks, will be thinking "What was THAT all about?"
Bowls, Darts, and the senior golf tour seem the most vulnerable.
Should be worth, what, £10bn at least?
Surely uncontrolled inflation is the worry but that seems distant danger right now.
Skype behaving itself so far with various 1on1 video calls made this morning. The big test will be the daily SMT call at lunchtime. As I pointed out to the rest of the team the big impact on us all is the disconnection - not seeing your colleagues for even a few days makes effective and regular communication all the more important.
Some interesting* WFH environments for my colleagues...
- 13.500 positivos
- 558 fallecidos
- 774 casos graves en UCI
- 5.717 hospitalizados
- 1.081 curados
Latest figures from Spain
Then again again it’s about players and staff available , not mass gathering
This current football and rugby seasons certain be annulled without a winner or any ups and downs, most likely the coming cricket season too, and quite possibly next seasons football and rugby too.
Very tough on Liverpool, but this is war.
Totally agree. I hope the government is using multiple sources of advice and also referring to the models and assumptions used by Italy, France, Germany etc that inform their policy decisions to get a more robust basis rather than depending on just the Imperial model.
They are playing face to face, only 8 players and all being regularly tested, but some players thought it should be postponed.
Yesterday Carlsen was part of the commentating team yesterday, unfortunately not today. Instead there's the teenage star Alireza Firouzja!
In the safety of the lockdown we can observe China, Korea and all the others and see how they get on unlocking their societies.
One sport still very much going is greyhound racing - it used to be on World of Sport in the 60s and 70s when the horse racing was off. Saturday afternoon dogs at Harringay, morning dogs at Hackney. Also gone are venues like Catford and Walthamstow and of course Wimbledon.
Nonetheless, dog racing lives on and should be on ITV on Saturday afternoon instead of the horse racing.
The 1965 Gillette Cup final for example.
https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/8629/scorecard/368638/surrey-vs-yorkshire-final-gillette-cup-england-1965
Even Churchill - who had 2 political careers (arguably 3) before ending up in post.
If that happens I'm wondering if the government should bailout all businesses while this is happening.
Formula 1 is getting a bit twitchy.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1240147791587966976?s=20
Fair comment. I spoke with my Shanghai-based colleague yesterday in the SMT meeting. She spent most of the session reassuring her English colleagues that life would eventually return to normal and not to worry too much. It was good to talk to her actually!
It's not as if the Beeb has plenty of other content it would be replacing.....
Our corporate system is Skype, which works OK for people on the system, but outside users have issues.
We had a Webex call with a vendor yesterday, which we had to move to Zoom half way through.
The future of Skype is meant to be Teams. We haven't tested it on a large scale yet.
I think annul but hand Liverpool the title is a possible option – they have won it. It would simply take Man City to concede.
My son suddenly had a fever 39.6 on Saturday. On Sunday we got an email from his kindergarten (already closed, but my son was there recently) saying a parent of one of the children had tested positive. My wife phoned the kindergarten leader to get more info - apart from anything else she is an emergency dept doctor and wanted to find out if she might be infected before going to work. Apparently, the local health Amt didn't test the child because s/he had no symptoms, so weren't testing anyone at the kindergarten because nobody had come in contact with a confirmed infection. She then tried to get through to the Cologne number to try and get us tested, but gave up after an hour.
So she got herself tested at her hospital, and took a swab to test our son there too. Both came back negative.
Yesterday we heard from the kindergarten that one of the teachers tested positive. I was expecting the local health people to get in touch, as our son is certainly a contact, but we've heard nothing.
I'm wondering if they've given up. Which would be stupid and depressing.
C'mon, HM the Q - tell the nation what to do. It could be the, er, crowning moment of your entire reign.
If the seasons can't be completed then I think fairest solution is to scrap relegation for a season and terminate season as is. Liverpool win the Premiership, Leeds win the Championship, West Brom get promoted, no relegation from the Premiership.
Cancel next seasons League Cup to deal with the extra fixtures and have 4 relegated teams next season.
They'll need to become grants for smaller businesses. If you are easyJet you can probably cope with borrowing. If you are the cafe where easyJet pilots used to eat every morning outside Luton airport probably less so.
Right now its probably a price worth paying.
For clubs currently outside the top who were hoping to get to the top (or those hoping to get into CL) its harsh but they can try again next season. However relegating a club that could have climbed out of the relegation zone is much worse fairer just not relegate anyone - even if that gives an undeserved mulligan to clubs like Norwich, or Bolton etc
Next season, to save on fixtures:
• No League Cup (who would even notice)
• Teams play each other only ONCE in the league – names out of a hat for home/away, equal numbers of home and away games, seed it so you don't get unfair fixtures like Liverpool's games against City, Spurs, Chelsea, Utd etc all being at home.