On an extension to the EU negotiations beyond the end of this year there is a case to be made that in this crisis more time would be helpful when so much is uncertain
However, there has to be a suspicion that the chorus to extend, and even a lengthy one, is coming from those who want to frustrate the process for their hopes that either brexit will be reversed or we end up almost as we were, still in a very close union inhibiting our trade and keeping us under EU law
The question that has to be answered is how much the EU would demand the UK pays to extend the transition, and how much the UK could be liable for to contribute to mitigation of the EU financial problems following covid 19
If those wanting an extension want to keep public support, the answers to how much we pay, what are our liabilities, and how they affect our trade and laws, will have to be answered as the public will not go along with paying more money in and being subject to EU law to bail the EU out over the financial implications of covid 19
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Well the Irish deaths started to take off about 12-13 days after the festival, so it actually lines up pretty well.
For reasons that should be obvious though, you can't really draw conclusions either way from the data. Exponential growth means you don't see "spikes" like that.
No because the Irish authorities would have picked up on cases coming from Cheltenham rather than just the normal curve seen everywhere. Ireland's population is around 5 million so it is unlikely medical staff would have missed even a few of their patients giving the same history.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
No. There are no quick, rapid solutions to this - there are slow steps to avoid overwhelming health services and allowing thousands of vulnerable people to die. Nothing works quickly.
The UK doesn't have the 2nd highest number of deaths in the world. Next.
According to Worldometer we currently sit 5th in the world in terms of deaths per million.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
Your expectation is completely wrong. As such the political dig you make on the back on your false premise is irrelevant.
If you think we will have worse deaths per capita than Belgium you seriously need to look again.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
I doubt that would have been the case had things carried on as normal.
I still think the US approach of “drop some money on everyone” is better than the UK’s myriad of schemes involving complex admin and all with loopholes that will figure prominently in the media once we get beyond lockdown.
Dropping money on everyone doesn't save a single job or business. Look at the US unemployment stats.
Nor is it simple to administrate. Which database would you use to send the cheques? To what addresses? They would have to be physical cheques because the government doesn't have bank details for everyone.
On topic, the government’s paramount priority remains Brexit purity. If some people die in a pandemic as a result, that’s a regrettable necessity for them.
That is an unfair and partisan attack on the Government. We are doing as well as France in terms of testing, and have mobilized quickly.
The government turned down an opportunity to get additional supplies of PPE because it would have involved working with the EU. People enjoying this sunny day will almost certainly die as a result of that ideological decision.
Still, blue passports eh?
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
No matter how many times I point it out, Leavers seem incapable of understanding the difference between “or” and “and”..
There are care home workers relaxing in their gardens right now who will die in the coming weeks because the government decided that it could get all the PPE it needed without participating in the EU scheme.
'or' and 'and' become completely irrelevant if you have already placed sufficient PPE orders in the pipeline,but like every other country you are subject to delays because of lack of supplier capacity.
Are you expecting the EU tender / order to jump the already massive queue?
Only hours ago you made the completely incorrect claim about the EU tender & ventilator supplies for the UK.
My wife's niece is working on the front line in Toulon & was asking us if we could send her masks from the UK over three weeks ago.You seriously believe (or want to believe) that the UK is the only European country with PPE shortages, even Germany has shortages.
I have made no claim about the EU and ventilator supplies. Nor did I suggest that the UK is the only European country with PPE shortages. Please do not traduce me.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
It would be interesting to ascertain how much of the reduction is due to.people who don't really need the NHS clogging up the system ?
Except to contact and trace properly we need wide spread surveillance. Does the UK have the infrastructure to do this, even if we can convince the public to get onboard.
Remember South Korea is not only one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth, they had SARs and MERs and the result of that was the creation of all this tech in case it happened again.
They spent years creating an overall response system from lab capacity, to automated contact tracing and scheduling of test appointments based upon establishing priority.
I sense that extensive Contact & Trace, for us, is a Unicorn. I think our core strategy will be to squash the virus down to a long long way below NHS capacity before lifting the lockdown. Then lockdown again if and when hospital admissions breach a certain trigger point.
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Maybe all the old folk in care homes caught it watching the festival on tv
Which is more relevant than perhaps intended because it looks like most of the clusters we know about came from indoors spreading like care homes or religious services rather than outdoors like racecourses. It does still look as if we do not know enough about how the virus is transferred, and where.
On an extension to the EU negotiations beyond the end of this year there is a case to be made that in this crisis more time would be helpful when so much is uncertain
However, there has to be a suspicion that the chorus to extend, and even a lengthy one, is coming from those who want to frustrate the process for their hopes that either brexit will be reversed or we end up almost as we were, still in a very close union inhibiting our trade and keeping us under EU law
The question that has to be answered is how much the EU would demand the UK pays to extend the transition, and how much the UK could be liable for to contribute to mitigation of the EU financial problems following covid 19
If those wanting an extension want to keep public support, the answers to how much we pay, what are our liabilities, and how they affect our trade and laws, will have to be answered as the public will not go along with paying more money in and being subject to EU law to bail the EU out over the financial implications of covid 19
Quite. A few months is one thing to make up for list negotiation time but it seems, if I read correctly, the EU would insist on a year of two. It’s stringing it out (again), and creating more uncertainty at best, and using us as a cash cow to help oil the wheels If the budget ( won’t those talks be fun!) and hope (Test again again) that something turns up to stop it all.
It’s the diplomatic equivalent of Manuel Neuer fishing an English “goal” from behind the line in S Africa 2010 and hoping nobody notices ( which the match officials didn’t of course, even though about 500m watching did).
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
The Liverpool - Athletico Madrid game was more likely to have been the mistake.
Exactly, Ireland wasn't a Covoi-19 hotspot, Madrid most certainly was. The decision to go ahead with the game borders on the criminal negligence.
if you have a load of carrier bags that take up a lot of room in your cupboards, I saw a way of folding them up that takes about 30 seconds per bag and keeps them all super neat and tidy/saves a lot of space
Passed the time for quarter of an hour this morning...
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
It would be interesting to ascertain how much of the reduction is due to.people who don't really need the NHS clogging up the system ?
My worry is those who need the NHS that are not currently being treated as their operations have been cancelled, the effect on their life expectancy could be dramatic.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
It would be interesting to ascertain how much of the reduction is due to.people who don't really need the NHS clogging up the system ?
Routine procedures were cancelled at the start so it is not so much people who do not really need the NHS as people who need it but who can survive for another few weeks. Hip replacements and that sort of thing, I expect. @Foxy may know more. Similarly outpatients clinics will have been cancelled.
Uninformed guesswork suggests this might at first cause a reduction in deaths, simply because any operation is traumatic to an extent, but later an increase in non-Covid-19 deaths because people who could have been treated were not.
Either way, it is no surprise that, as @NerysHughes said, hospitals are quiet. We know the reasons. In addition A&E will be quiet because lockdown means less fisticuffs and fewer car crashes.
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Maybe all the old folk in care homes caught it watching the festival on tv
Which is more relevant than perhaps intended because it looks like most of the clusters we know about came from indoors spreading like care homes or religious services rather than outdoors like racecourses. It does still look as if we do not know enough about how the virus is transferred, and where.
Yeah aren't crowded, confined spaces the danger zones? @Nigelb perhaps posted something last night about it.
That would make me quite relieved as I daringly broke the curfew on Sunday to go out for a run with a mate, who probably had the virus about three weeks ago
The UK doesn't have the 2nd highest number of deaths in the world. Next.
According to Worldometer we currently sit 5th in the world in terms of deaths per million.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
Worldometer is useful but not entirely accurate. I live in Spain and my understanding is that deaths in care homes and outside hospital are not included in their figures. In any case to get any realistic comparisons with countries you would need to include: Death rate/population density and geographical distribution/age distribution and much more besides. You would aslo be well advised to avoid judgements in the middle of the pandemic when so much remains unknown.
Unless of course you simply want to play politics....
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
It would be interesting to ascertain how much of the reduction is due to.people who don't really need the NHS clogging up the system ?
Routine procedures were cancelled at the start so it is not so much people who do not really need the NHS as people who need it but who can survive for another few weeks. Hip replacements and that sort of thing, I expect. @Foxy may know more. Similarly outpatients clinics will have been cancelled.
Uninformed guesswork suggests this might at first cause a reduction in deaths, simply because any operation is traumatic to an extent, but later an increase in non-Covid-19 deaths because people who could have been treated were not.
Either way, it is no surprise that, as @NerysHughes said, hospitals are quiet. We know the reasons. In addition A&E will be quiet because lockdown means less fisticuffs and fewer car crashes.
It is not just routine procedures, both Cancer and Heart Surgeries have been cancelled
Does the government really think Leave voters will punish them at the ballot box in 2024 for extending the transition period !
Will anyone really give two hoots by then . It’s hard to marry the economic rescue package which although not perfect is a sane response at mitigating the effects of the virus with this unhinged obsession to risk more devastation on business .
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
The ideas behind the financial response are pretty good, as I said. It’s the implementation that’s been lamentable.
It really hasn't. You are being unrealistic about how quickly it is possible to do this kind of thing. I haven't seen a single sensible suggestion on how the implementation could have been better or quicker.
I still think the US approach of “drop some money on everyone” is better than the UK’s myriad of schemes involving complex admin and all with loopholes that will figure prominently in the media once we get beyond lockdown.
It really isn't, as the 20m newly unemployed in the US already indicate.
Throwing money at individuals does not get it to the businesses which most need it - because by their nature, those are the businesses which are either closed to custom outright or not being used anything like as much. The cheques (!) might help employees (and ex-employees) with their bills this month but they don't stop businesses from going under and will make life far harder to resume without major disruption. The 20m unemployed will not necessarily walk straight back into their old jobs and if they do, not necessarily on the same terms.
And on the macro level, splurging trillions of dollars into the economy while also reducing production should lead to a spike in prices unless the money either disappears straight out of circulation and into bank accounts (in which case, no use for businesses), or is withdrawn once the interruption in normal economic activity is over (this latter point is also true for the UK, though the less efficient the money-spraying is, the more inflationary it will be).
Except to contact and trace properly we need wide spread surveillance. Does the UK have the infrastructure to do this, even if we can convince the public to get onboard.
Remember South Korea is not only one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth, they had SARs and MERs and the result of that was the creation of all this tech in case it happened again.
They spent years creating an overall response system from lab capacity, to automated contact tracing and scheduling of test appointments based upon establishing priority.
I sense that extensive Contact & Trace, for us, is a Unicorn. I think our core strategy will be to squash the virus down to a long long way below NHS capacity before lifting the lockdown. Then lockdown again if and when hospital admissions breach a certain trigger point.
Extensive is perhaps too hard but at least cursory questions about WFH or at workplace (where?). Bus, tube, cab or car? Which shops (most people use the same one, or two or three)? That way we can quickly identify clusters and see if we need to check, say, the staff and customers of the MadeUp Supermarket in Dunny-on-the-Wold.
'At those moments his secret loathing of Big Hancock changed into adoration, and Big Hancock seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asian coronaviruses...'
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
The ideas behind the financial response are pretty good, as I said. It’s the implementation that’s been lamentable.
It really hasn't. You are being unrealistic about how quickly it is possible to do this kind of thing. I haven't seen a single sensible suggestion on how the implementation could have been better or quicker.
I still think the US approach of “drop some money on everyone” is better than the UK’s myriad of schemes involving complex admin and all with loopholes that will figure prominently in the media once we get beyond lockdown.
It really isn't, as the 20m newly unemployed in the US already indicate.
Throwing money at individuals does not get it to the businesses which most need it - because by their nature, those are the businesses which are either closed to custom outright or not being used anything like as much. The cheques (!) might help employees (and ex-employees) with their bills this month but they don't stop businesses from going under and will make life far harder to resume without major disruption. The 20m unemployed will not necessarily walk straight back into their old jobs and if they do, not necessarily on the same terms.
And on the macro level, splurging trillions of dollars into the economy while also reducing production should lead to a spike in prices unless the money either disappears straight out of circulation and into bank accounts (in which case, no use for businesses), or is withdrawn once the interruption in normal economic activity is over (this latter point is also true for the UK, though the less efficient the money-spraying is, the more inflationary it will be).
Another problem with the money-spraying-to-individuals approach is that it carries a huge deadweight. A lot of it would go to pensioners, whose income isn't being hit at all unless they rely on dividends, and to those workers whose income is not being much affected (government workers, some parts of the private sector).
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
It would be interesting to ascertain how much of the reduction is due to.people who don't really need the NHS clogging up the system ?
Routine procedures were cancelled at the start so it is not so much people who do not really need the NHS as people who need it but who can survive for another few weeks. Hip replacements and that sort of thing, I expect. @Foxy may know more. Similarly outpatients clinics will have been cancelled.
Uninformed guesswork suggests this might at first cause a reduction in deaths, simply because any operation is traumatic to an extent, but later an increase in non-Covid-19 deaths because people who could have been treated were not.
Either way, it is no surprise that, as @NerysHughes said, hospitals are quiet. We know the reasons. In addition A&E will be quiet because lockdown means less fisticuffs and fewer car crashes.
It is not just routine procedures, both Cancer and Heart Surgeries have been cancelled
In which case we may well see that effect -- initial drop in deaths then an increase.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
No. There are no quick, rapid solutions to this - there are slow steps to avoid overwhelming health services and allowing thousands of vulnerable people to die. Nothing works quickly.
So Spain and Italy should not have eased? should still be in lockdown?
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
And yet many other countries managed to lock down when they had far fewer deaths per capita than the UK did when it locked down. Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
You say "of course" it (the legislation) could have been pushed through earlier. Was it even ready? In an ideal world, the government would have introduced the Bill before - or at least at the same time as - it brought in the lock-down. That the initial phase had no legal basis suggests that the very lengthy Bill might well have still been being drafted at the time.
They could have made use of the Civil Contingecies act. That would not have required any sort of Parliamentary scrutiny at that point and could then have been superceeded by a properly considered act a week or two later
Possibly the lawyers advised that actually using the Civil Contingencies act would guarantee a legal challenge.
Or possibly there is no liking for firing up that monster, in the current government.
That we managed to get through such a massive crisis without invoking it, is as good an argument as any for its repeal.
The UK doesn't have the 2nd highest number of deaths in the world. Next.
According to Worldometer we currently sit 5th in the world in terms of deaths per million.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
Your expectation is completely wrong. As such the political dig you make on the back on your false premise is irrelevant.
If you think we will have worse deaths per capita than Belgium you seriously need to look again.
Read what I said before going off on one. Belgium are one of the 4 countries that I said were currently ahead of us and they are further along the curve than we are. The UK will end up as one of the two or three countries with the worst records on deaths per million. Why is that? We weren't even one of the countries who could claim to have been caught on the hop as Italy was
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
No. There are no quick, rapid solutions to this - there are slow steps to avoid overwhelming health services and allowing thousands of vulnerable people to die. Nothing works quickly.
So Spain and Italy should not have eased? should still be in lockdown?
SINGAPORE - For a second day running, Singapore recorded another daily high of new coronavirus cases, 728, with the total number of people infected crossing the 4,000 mark.
Like in the past two weeks, foreign workers living in dormitories continue to drive this increase, accounting for 654 of new patients.
Of the remaining new cases, 48 are other local community cases while 26 are work permit holders living outside dormitories.....
.....No imported cases were reported for the seventh successive day.
Singapore has reported 728 new confirmed cases of coronavirus detected in the past 24 hours, the biggest jump yet in numbers in the city state which had fought hard to keep its outbreak under control.
The latest increase in confirmed cases is 63% more than the 447 new cases reported by the health ministry on Wednesday, and brings the total number so far in the city to 4,427.
Singapore had been praised by the World Health Organization for rigorous contact tracing, quarantine and surveillance measures which had previously mitigated the spread of Covid-19.
But the disease has begun spreading rapidly within the large migrant worker community that Singapore relies upon to staff many of its basic services, highlighting what rights groups say is a weak link in containment efforts, Reuters reports.
On an extension to the EU negotiations beyond the end of this year there is a case to be made that in this crisis more time would be helpful when so much is uncertain
However, there has to be a suspicion that the chorus to extend, and even a lengthy one, is coming from those who want to frustrate the process for their hopes that either brexit will be reversed or we end up almost as we were, still in a very close union inhibiting our trade and keeping us under EU law
The question that has to be answered is how much the EU would demand the UK pays to extend the transition, and how much the UK could be liable for to contribute to mitigation of the EU financial problems following covid 19
If those wanting an extension want to keep public support, the answers to how much we pay, what are our liabilities, and how they affect our trade and laws, will have to be answered as the public will not go along with paying more money in and being subject to EU law to bail the EU out over the financial implications of covid 19
Spot on. I'm pretty relaxed about a delay in the process but not if it gives the EU panjandrums an opportunity to squeeze more wonga out of UK plc.
Does the government really think Leave voters will punish them at the ballot box in 2024 for extending the transition period !
Will anyone really give two hoots by then . It’s hard to marry the economic rescue package which although not perfect is a sane response at mitigating the effects of the virus with this unhinged obsession to risk more devastation on business .
Why would the government lose the opportunity to blame covid-19 for any Problems caused by not extending the transition? The interesting bit is how they deal with the additional harms the decision will cause. And now we won’t even get to use our blue passports!
Of course many countries have simply banned arrivals from Britain, except for their own nationals.
They're all wrong and we're right?
But that really isn't the choice, is it ? We're talking about a complete absence of any kind of screening. Asking if we should ban all arrivals isn't an answer to that.
I think the answer is that it doesn't work. Screening by temperature misses the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms, and catches a lot of other people. No other country is currently much worse than us so it doesn't really matter. And to do it properly the Government would have to rent hotels and quarantine everyone for 14 days under house arrest,
New Zealand managed it. If people genuinely, really genuinely need to fly they'll accept quarantine on each end.
The difference being that the number of visitors who genuinely, really genuinely, need to fly to New Zealand is statistically zero.
Why do people (Other than repatriation) need to fly here during a lockdown ?
Fruit pickers?
Why? There are masses of people furloughed. A special dispensation to pick fruit for extra money could be very attractive. 'land army' etc.
We are literally flying in fruit pickers right now
It turns out that not even mass unemployment following a pandemic can induce Brits to pick fruit.
If you are unemployed in the Lake District how do you get to East Anglia to do this fruit picking / where do you stay etc? Do you just leave home speculatively to try and find such a job - not actually allowed under the rules?
Maybe those organising these flights might try organising coaches or flights from areas of unemployment? Have they tried this?
The UK doesn't have the 2nd highest number of deaths in the world. Next.
According to Worldometer we currently sit 5th in the world in terms of deaths per million.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
Worldometer is useful but not entirely accurate. I live in Spain and my understanding is that deaths in care homes and outside hospital are not included in their figures. In any case to get any realistic comparisons with countries you would need to include: Death rate/population density and geographical distribution/age distribution and much more besides. You would aslo be well advised to avoid judgements in the middle of the pandemic when so much remains unknown.
Unless of course you simply want to play politics....
I am simply pointing out that the "look at the polls, the government is handling this brilliantly" school of thought does not stand up to close scrutiny. Italy and Spain were caught on the hop to a much greater extent than the UK and we are heading for as bad, if not worse, outcome.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
Is that a bad thing?
Do you think cases would would be the same if Spain had locked down substantially less, or not at all? Because if you think that, given that you can presumably observe from your own life how much lockdown reduces the number of potential infection situations every day, you must think the standard definition of potential infection situations is completely wrong. What do you propose in its place?
There is no test case for completely failing to impose measures: even Sweden has rules in place about maximum gathering sizes, spacing in bars etc. It is looking horribly likely that we are on the cusp of finding out from Sweden that soft measures like that are much, much less effective than hard lockdown. If we aren't you can congratulate yourself for being right. If not, I do hope you are going to learn the difference between having a point, and having a convincing and interesting point..
Of course many countries have simply banned arrivals from Britain, except for their own nationals.
They're all wrong and we're right?
But that really isn't the choice, is it ? We're talking about a complete absence of any kind of screening. Asking if we should ban all arrivals isn't an answer to that.
I think the answer is that it doesn't work. Screening by temperature misses the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms, and catches a lot of other people. No other country is currently much worse than us so it doesn't really matter. And to do it properly the Government would have to rent hotels and quarantine everyone for 14 days under house arrest,
New Zealand managed it. If people genuinely, really genuinely need to fly they'll accept quarantine on each end.
The difference being that the number of visitors who genuinely, really genuinely, need to fly to New Zealand is statistically zero.
Why do people (Other than repatriation) need to fly here during a lockdown ?
Fruit pickers?
Why? There are masses of people furloughed. A special dispensation to pick fruit for extra money could be very attractive. 'land army' etc.
We are literally flying in fruit pickers right now
It turns out that not even mass unemployment following a pandemic can induce Brits to pick fruit.
If you are unemployed in the Lake District how do you get to East Anglia to do this fruit picking / where do you stay etc? Do you just leave home speculatively to try and find such a job - not actually allowed under the rules?
Maybe those organising these flights might try organising coaches or flights from areas of unemployment? Have they tried this?
There will be plenty of unemployed in East Anglia as well but its easier to bring in people from Eastern Europe.
Do you think they will be tested beforehand / have a 14 day quarantine period / have their own medical insurance ?
Of course many countries have simply banned arrivals from Britain, except for their own nationals.
They're all wrong and we're right?
But that really isn't the choice, is it ? We're talking about a complete absence of any kind of screening. Asking if we should ban all arrivals isn't an answer to that.
I think the answer is that it doesn't work. Screening by temperature misses the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms, and catches a lot of other people. No other country is currently much worse than us so it doesn't really matter. And to do it properly the Government would have to rent hotels and quarantine everyone for 14 days under house arrest,
New Zealand managed it. If people genuinely, really genuinely need to fly they'll accept quarantine on each end.
The difference being that the number of visitors who genuinely, really genuinely, need to fly to New Zealand is statistically zero.
Why do people (Other than repatriation) need to fly here during a lockdown ?
Fruit pickers?
Why? There are masses of people furloughed. A special dispensation to pick fruit for extra money could be very attractive. 'land army' etc.
We are literally flying in fruit pickers right now
It turns out that not even mass unemployment following a pandemic can induce Brits to pick fruit.
If you are unemployed in the Lake District how do you get to East Anglia to do this fruit picking / where do you stay etc? Do you just leave home speculatively to try and find such a job - not actually allowed under the rules?
Maybe those organising these flights might try organising coaches or flights from areas of unemployment? Have they tried this?
Probably not that tempting when the government are paying them wages to stay at home. If Romania's government were doing that I doubt their fruit pickers would bother either
SINGAPORE - For a second day running, Singapore recorded another daily high of new coronavirus cases, 728, with the total number of people infected crossing the 4,000 mark.
Like in the past two weeks, foreign workers living in dormitories continue to drive this increase, accounting for 654 of new patients.
Of the remaining new cases, 48 are other local community cases while 26 are work permit holders living outside dormitories.....
.....No imported cases were reported for the seventh successive day.
UAE (pop. c.10m) had 432 new cases today, for a total of 5,365 and 33 deaths. From 767,000 tests. Again, the focus seems to be on the densely populated old city centre and construction worker dormitories.
The problem, in my eyes, to that kind of polling, is that its like asking the British public if they think the 1/2 favourite for Saturdays big race, the horse everyone is talking about on the 24hour news cycle, is a good bet to win at those odds. 91% may say yes, and the minority opposing it, thinking it is actually a lay, will be the professionals/clued up layers and bookies. So being out of sync with public opinion, to me, isn't anything to worry about
Maybe I see everything in terms of gambling, to my detriment, though
Of course many countries have simply banned arrivals from Britain, except for their own nationals.
They're all wrong and we're right?
But that really isn't the choice, is it ? We're talking about a complete absence of any kind of screening. Asking if we should ban all arrivals isn't an answer to that.
I think the answer is that it doesn't work. Screening by temperature misses the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms, and catches a lot of other people. No other country is currently much worse than us so it doesn't really matter. And to do it properly the Government would have to rent hotels and quarantine everyone for 14 days under house arrest,
New Zealand managed it. If people genuinely, really genuinely need to fly they'll accept quarantine on each end.
The difference being that the number of visitors who genuinely, really genuinely, need to fly to New Zealand is statistically zero.
Why do people (Other than repatriation) need to fly here during a lockdown ?
Fruit pickers?
Why? There are masses of people furloughed. A special dispensation to pick fruit for extra money could be very attractive. 'land army' etc.
We are literally flying in fruit pickers right now
It turns out that not even mass unemployment following a pandemic can induce Brits to pick fruit.
If you are unemployed in the Lake District how do you get to East Anglia to do this fruit picking / where do you stay etc? Do you just leave home speculatively to try and find such a job - not actually allowed under the rules?
Maybe those organising these flights might try organising coaches or flights from areas of unemployment? Have they tried this?
There will be plenty of unemployed in East Anglia as well but its easier to bring in people from Eastern Europe.
Do you think they will be tested beforehand / have a 14 day quarantine period / have their own medical insurance ?
Yes, they are going to be in quarantined camps. I hope they wash their hands though!
The problem, in my eyes, to that kind of polling, is that its like asking the British public if they think the 1/2 favourite for Saturdays big race, the horse everyone is talking about on the 24hour news cycle, is a good bet to win at those odds. 91% may say yes, and the minority opposing it, thinking it is actually a lay, will be the professionals/clued up layers and bookies. So being out of sync with public opinion, to me, isn't anything to worry about
Maybe I see everything in terms of gambling, to my detriment, though
Hm, I'm not sure you could apply that logic to all polls that have an overwhelming favourite.
Comments
However, there has to be a suspicion that the chorus to extend, and even a lengthy one, is coming from those who want to frustrate the process for their hopes that either brexit will be reversed or we end up almost as we were, still in a very close union inhibiting our trade and keeping us under EU law
The question that has to be answered is how much the EU would demand the UK pays to extend the transition, and how much the UK could be liable for to contribute to mitigation of the EU financial problems following covid 19
If those wanting an extension want to keep public support, the answers to how much we pay, what are our liabilities, and how they affect our trade and laws, will have to be answered as the public will not go along with paying more money in and being subject to EU law to bail the EU out over the financial implications of covid 19
If you think we will have worse deaths per capita than Belgium you seriously need to look again.
Nor is it simple to administrate. Which database would you use to send the cheques? To what addresses? They would have to be physical cheques because the government doesn't have bank details for everyone.
It’s the diplomatic equivalent of Manuel Neuer fishing an English “goal” from behind the line in S Africa 2010 and hoping nobody notices ( which the match officials didn’t of course, even though about 500m watching did).
if you have a load of carrier bags that take up a lot of room in your cupboards, I saw a way of folding them up that takes about 30 seconds per bag and keeps them all super neat and tidy/saves a lot of space
Passed the time for quarter of an hour this morning...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/11284150/cleaning-fanatic-space-saving-tip-store-plastic-bags-immaculate-drawers-organised-stacey-solomon/
https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1250783639232753665?s=20
Uninformed guesswork suggests this might at first cause a reduction in deaths, simply because any operation is traumatic to an extent, but later an increase in non-Covid-19 deaths because people who could have been treated were not.
Either way, it is no surprise that, as @NerysHughes said, hospitals are quiet. We know the reasons. In addition A&E will be quiet because lockdown means less fisticuffs and fewer car crashes.
That would make me quite relieved as I daringly broke the curfew on Sunday to go out for a run with a mate, who probably had the virus about three weeks ago
Death rate/population density and geographical distribution/age distribution and much more besides.
You would aslo be well advised to avoid judgements in the middle of the pandemic when so much remains unknown.
Unless of course you simply want to play politics....
Will anyone really give two hoots by then . It’s hard to marry the economic rescue package which although not perfect is a sane response at mitigating the effects of the virus with this unhinged obsession to risk more devastation on business .
Can't remember which one it was now. On ITV I think.
Throwing money at individuals does not get it to the businesses which most need it - because by their nature, those are the businesses which are either closed to custom outright or not being used anything like as much. The cheques (!) might help employees (and ex-employees) with their bills this month but they don't stop businesses from going under and will make life far harder to resume without major disruption. The 20m unemployed will not necessarily walk straight back into their old jobs and if they do, not necessarily on the same terms.
And on the macro level, splurging trillions of dollars into the economy while also reducing production should lead to a spike in prices unless the money either disappears straight out of circulation and into bank accounts (in which case, no use for businesses), or is withdrawn once the interruption in normal economic activity is over (this latter point is also true for the UK, though the less efficient the money-spraying is, the more inflationary it will be).
'At those moments his secret loathing of Big Hancock changed into adoration, and Big Hancock seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asian coronaviruses...'
is more what the originator was thinking of, I reckon
https://twitter.com/yougov/status/1250807470655766529?s=21
Here he is in his own words on his new website:
"Although I believe the lockdown needs to be dialled back, I’m not absolutely certain of that and am open to having my mind changed."
Like in the past two weeks, foreign workers living in dormitories continue to drive this increase, accounting for 654 of new patients.
Of the remaining new cases, 48 are other local community cases while 26 are work permit holders living outside dormitories.....
.....No imported cases were reported for the seventh successive day.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/singapore-coronavirus-cases-cross-4000-with-728-cases-in-new-daily-record?cx_testId=20&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s
The latest increase in confirmed cases is 63% more than the 447 new cases reported by the health ministry on Wednesday, and brings the total number so far in the city to 4,427.
Singapore had been praised by the World Health Organization for rigorous contact tracing, quarantine and surveillance measures which had previously mitigated the spread of Covid-19.
But the disease has begun spreading rapidly within the large migrant worker community that Singapore relies upon to staff many of its basic services, highlighting what rights groups say is a weak link in containment efforts, Reuters reports.
If EU plays fair, then fair enough.
https://twitter.com/rorybremner/status/1250740142391939073?s=20
For me I am 100% behind the extension as are 91% of the public in this poll
Maybe those organising these flights might try organising coaches or flights from areas of unemployment? Have they tried this?
https://twitter.com/AngieMaxwell1/status/1250299598347718656
I am simply pointing out that the "look at the polls, the government is handling this brilliantly" school of thought does not stand up to close scrutiny. Italy and Spain were caught on the hop to a much greater extent than the UK and we are heading for as bad, if not worse, outcome.
Do you think cases would would be the same if Spain had locked down substantially less, or not at all? Because if you think that, given that you can presumably observe from your own life how much lockdown reduces the number of potential infection situations every day, you must think the standard definition of potential infection situations is completely wrong. What do you propose in its place?
There is no test case for completely failing to impose measures: even Sweden has rules in place about maximum gathering sizes, spacing in bars etc. It is looking horribly likely that we are on the cusp of finding out from Sweden that soft measures like that are much, much less effective than hard lockdown. If we aren't you can congratulate yourself for being right. If not, I do hope you are going to learn the difference between having a point, and having a convincing and interesting point..
Do you think they will be tested beforehand / have a 14 day quarantine period / have their own medical insurance ?
FFS We will never get out. Never.
Interestingly there is a very low level of "don't know" across the board
https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1250817782024994818?s=21
Recently no traffic on the lane during my walk. Today, 4 vans, 7 cars. That is more than normal.
In other news......guess what the first question to Raab was? Go on, it'll take you one guess, I think. Idiot of the day is Kuenssberg
Did she sleep through Raab address.
https://www.thenational.ae/uae/health/coronavirus-uae-announces-432-new-cases-and-101-recoveries-1.1006588
Maybe I see everything in terms of gambling, to my detriment, though
First 4 tests look likely to be met within 3 weeks.
Test 5 isn't at all clear cut - it will easily be open to interpretation either way.
It would undermine the entire concept of modern journalism.
It would involve listening. No real journalist could ever do that.
Kunnesberg is one of many journalists having a stinker in this crisis
"Next question...."
'Raab just given you the answer to that, what an idiotic question'
I know very little but that sounds like a model of who to test to get a representative sample.
Surely that work could have been ongoing in background while this was developing?