And in any event, she'd likely be more use to Biden (and perhaps less problematic to him) in the Senate.
I'm still pleased with my 1000/1 on Harris as next President (and a similar side bet on Abrams).
I think there'd be a strong expectation that Biden should appoint Warren to a key Cabinet position where she can lay down the law to the gangster capitalists, so Treasury, maybe Commerce but possibly even Attorney-General.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstly, Italy's percentage of positive tests peaked at 56%. Given that (approximately) 25% of people who have the disease test negative, this suggests that perhaps three quarters of the people who were tested on that day had CV-19. The vast majority of people who have CV-19, of course, never get tested. The true number of new cases that day, we can reasonably assume, is going to have been at least 10x (and possibly much more) the number reported.
Italy is now doing 60,000+ tests a day. That's 20x the number it was doing when it was getting 56% positives. It's now seeing a positive rate (and I'm sorry, I haven't been keeping up with my spreadsheet so I don't know for sure) of less than 7%. (And it may now be down to sub-5%.)
The reality is that Italy's real new test load has collapsed, it's just that we dramatically miscounted the number it started off from.
Secondly, the lockdown in Italy and Spain is not as total as in China. By this, I mean that in China, if you have CV-19 (or the symptoms of CV-19) you get pulled out of your home and put in a holding place to avoid you infecting your family/housemates. That doesn't happen in Italy/Spain/anywhere in the Western world. This means the path to R equals zero is much longer, because you have whole households the virus has to spread through.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Well indeed. How many diseases have been inflicted on the world by meat-eaters? HIV/AIDS, CJD, SARS, Covid-19 to name but a few.
PARIS - April 16, 2020 - Sanofi and Luminostics have signed an agreement to evaluate a collaboration on a unique self-testing solution for COVID-19, using Luminostics’ innovative technology, and further adding to Sanofi’s ongoing efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic on multiple fronts.
Luminostics would contribute its proprietary technology for consumer-diagnostics for COVID-19 testing while Sanofi would bring its clinical research testing experience and capabilities. The goal is to provide a smartphone-based solution that eliminates the current need for healthcare professional administration or laboratory tests.
“This partnering project could lead to another important milestone in Sanofi’s fight against COVID-19. The development of a self-testing solution with Luminostics could help provide clarity to an individual – in minutes – on whether or not they are infected” says Alan Main, Executive Vice President, Head of Sanofi Consumer Healthcare. “Following this week’s announcement of an unprecedented partnership with GSK in the hunt for a vaccine, our company’s ambition is to continue to find other ways to help solve this pandemic situation.”
The goal of this collaboration is to provide a consumer-based test that can detect the COVID-19 virus with high sensitivity and specificity from respiratory samples. The total time from specimen collection to results is expected in the range of 30 minutes or less. It is based on Luminostics’ unique technology that utilizes a consumer smartphone’s optics, controlled by an iOS/Android app paired with an inexpensive adapter, in combination with “glow-in-the-dark” nanochemistry and signal processing artificial intelligence.
The diagnostic platform is composed of:
an iOS/Android app to instruct a user on how to run the test, capture and process data to display test results, and then to connect users with a telehealth service based on the results; a reusable adapter compatible with most types of smartphones; and consumables for specimen collection, preparation, and processing.....
I see the Chinese government have upped the death toll in Wuhan by 50% in a single day. Death certificates got lost in the post, perhaps?
As I pointed out on the previous thread if turns out China was lying about its death toll, that just means the Infection Fatality Rate has been given a big bump, maybe beyond 1%. We can see a jump in UK death toll, unmitigated, in six figures.
For popcorn lovers, @AaronBastani is still banging on about that leaked 'report'.
Like McDonnell spending 15 minutes of an interview banging on about it, these people aren't going to go quietly and will attempt to cement the narrative of betrayal.
So you don't actually care if people in the party obstructed handling of antisemitism cases?
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
But an imperfect one. My understanding is that Sweden are closer to voluntary lockdown than they are to business as usual.
Very true. According to City Mapper, Stockholm's "mobility" is about 28% of it's usual levels.
High compared to Spain/Italy etc. and more than two to three times our own big cities (London 8%, Brum 13%), but still nothing like normal life.
B Obama as Veep. 22nd Amendment prevents him being *elected* President. The 12th Amendment states that no-one ineligible to the office of President be Vice-President. He isn't ineligible to hold the office as he has held the office thus proving his eligibility to satisfy the 12th. He just can't be *elected* to it.
I'm certain the GOP would challenge such an appointment. Which will get us into a letter of the law argument. If they can argue that the letter applies to the 2nd its hard to argue the letter doesn't apply and its the meaning that matters for the 12th...
That is an excellent quibble, and it's almost sad that we'll never find out for real.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Looking at the number of cases reported for the past few days, the number of positive tests as a function of sample collection does seem to be declining. I wonder if many of the 'new' positive cases were from samples collected quite some time ago...
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
B Obama as Veep. 22nd Amendment prevents him being *elected* President. The 12th Amendment states that no-one ineligible to the office of President be Vice-President. He isn't ineligible to hold the office as he has held the office thus proving his eligibility to satisfy the 12th. He just can't be *elected* to it.
I'm certain the GOP would challenge such an appointment. Which will get us into a letter of the law argument. If they can argue that the letter applies to the 2nd its hard to argue the letter doesn't apply and its the meaning that matters for the 12th...
That is an excellent quibble, and it's almost sad that we'll never find out for real.
Except that "ineligible" means "not electable."
Based a on quick wiki and source reading, I think @RochdalePioneers does have a valid point that what s/he suggests is not explicitly ruled out by the constitution. I think if it did occur and was litigated, SCOTUS would rule that the intent is clear that someone who has reached their term-limit as POTUS should not be qualified to be VPOTUS. I'd expect it to be a 9-0 ruling.
Yes, but their tests kits are utter shit. Not just the UK, but places like the the US, they have been looking at the science of the antibody tests, and basically none of these tests work.
If you had CV bad, they often produce a positive result. If you had it mildly or with no symptoms, it seems like total pot luck if it picks up it. There is even suggest that those who didn't suffer, especially younger people, their bodies has reacted differently to it and so you need a different test to check.
And in any event, she'd likely be more use to Biden (and perhaps less problematic to him) in the Senate.
I'm still pleased with my 1000/1 on Harris as next President (and a similar side bet on Abrams).
I think there'd be a strong expectation that Biden should appoint Warren to a key Cabinet position where she can lay down the law to the gangster capitalists, so Treasury, maybe Commerce but possibly even Attorney-General.
You know how in the UK we have manifestos so that (in theory) we know what someone will do if they win power?
What is the equivalent in US presidential elections?
For example, Trump and his Wall and the linked promise of Mexico funding it. Was there anything formal there? Or was it just derived from rhetoric at rallies?
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Ecuador's official coronavirus death toll is 403, but new figures from just one province suggest many thousands have died in the country.
The government said 6,700 people had died in the Guayas province alone in the first two weeks of April, far more than the usual 1,000 deaths there in the same period.
That is about 1600 excess deaths per million for that province, that must easily be one of the worst death rates in the world for COVID-19.
B Obama as Veep. 22nd Amendment prevents him being *elected* President. The 12th Amendment states that no-one ineligible to the office of President be Vice-President. He isn't ineligible to hold the office as he has held the office thus proving his eligibility to satisfy the 12th. He just can't be *elected* to it.
I'm certain the GOP would challenge such an appointment. Which will get us into a letter of the law argument. If they can argue that the letter applies to the 2nd its hard to argue the letter doesn't apply and its the meaning that matters for the 12th...
That is an excellent quibble, and it's almost sad that we'll never find out for real.
Except that "ineligible" means "not electable."
Based a on quick wiki and source reading, I think @RochdalePioneers does have a valid point that what s/he suggests is not explicitly ruled out by the constitution. I think if it did occur and was litigated, SCOTUS would rule that the intent is clear that someone who has reached their term-limit as POTUS should not be qualified to be VPOTUS. I'd expect it to be a 9-0 ruling.
As I said, it's an awesome quibble, and will never be tested - in part for the reason you give.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
We are ignoring the huge implications of the casual admission, from China, that the Wuhan death toll was 50% higher than they first said (of course in reality it is more like 500% or 5000% but hey)
They are hoping the global panic over the bug will mean they can quietly cremate this bit of bad news.
Can they?
I don't think so. Millions are going to die, worldwide. A global Depression beckons. This cannot be swept under the carpet of business-as-usual. There will be a reckoning. A Cold War.
But what will we do? Will western consumers take a principled stand not to buy lots of cheap Chinese stuff? Will western governments elect not to buy lots of cheap stuff from China? Will western companies elect to pay for more expensive suppliers from elsewhere? Will western capitalists forego a market with 1.3bn consumers?
It was easy during the cold war not to trade with the soviet union because their stuff was terrible. Not trading with China will require a level of economic self-denial that I don't think we in the west have.
FPT - do we know how many people have been furloughed? Aren't we all guessing - the government's estimate of 9 million is big enough!
Could large sections of the country be getting used to dossing around on a kind of super dole?
They could, but in any event, isn't it limited to a maximum of three months for now ?
Think so, yes. But many are expecting an extension. Perhaps that would be ill advised. Three months might already be a habit forming period. Then again, in the context of working for 40 odd years. Don't know. Difficult.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
The situation in Sweden isn't noticeably worse than places like Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, France, etc, that have instituted a lockdown.
I may be wrong but as I understand it the majority of Swedes are doing voluntarily what what we are being required to do because we can't be trusted to do it voluntarily.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
It's misleading because Sweden has instituted social distancing on a partially voluntary personal responsibility basis, rather than forcing people to do it. Turns out the hybrid solution has middling results. Social distancing has been somewhat successful, but they could have got more of they had made all of it compulsory.
It's partly successful medically, but almost wholly successful economically. Compare the unemployment rates of Sweden and Norway.
Sweden wins.
It does but again it's a mixed picture. Sweden's unemployment rate has increased slightly to 9% while Norway has hit 10% from a lower base. The Norwegian government is funding furloughs while the Swedish government isn't, I believe.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
I'd disagree with that, the local chinese takeaway isn't much to do with this virus. Sadly mine seems to just ring out now - closed I'm guessing for the forseeable ;(
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
But an imperfect one. My understanding is that Sweden are closer to voluntary lockdown than they are to business as usual.
Very true. According to City Mapper, Stockholm's "mobility" is about 28% of it's usual levels.
High compared to Spain/Italy etc. and more than two to three times our own big cities (London 8%, Brum 13%), but still nothing like normal life.
For an idea about the timings and some other comparisons:
Yestdy Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6% 12 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 10%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6% 05 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 6%, London 9%, NYC 6% 29 Mar Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 7%, London 12%, NYC 7% 29 Mar Stockholm 36%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 14%, London 36%, NYC 15% 15 Mar Stockholm 73%, Copenhagen 54%, Brussels 71%, London 83%, NYC 67%
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
You know that uneasy sense we all have (whether openly admitted or not) that Germany does everything apart from winning WW1s and WW2s significantly better than us?
Coronavirus has not done much to quell it, has it?
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Mr. kinabalu, their financial sector is inferior, their handling of the migrant crisis was incredibly stupid, and they increased energy costs massively by Merkel's ridiculous reaction to the Fukushima[sp] meltdown and banning of nuclear power in a country not necessarily renowned for earthquakes and tsunamis.
You can point at any country and find good and bad aspects.
Still, those arguing Germany's magnificent will have fun making the case for banning the niqab and completely changing the way the NHS works.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
I shall be quietly boycotting all things Chinese until such times as their treatment of animals becomes humane. I don't expect to be buying anything of Chinese origin during the remainder of my lifetime.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
It's misleading because Sweden has instituted social distancing on a partially voluntary personal responsibility basis, rather than forcing people to do it. Turns out the hybrid solution has middling results. Social distancing has been somewhat successful, but they could have got more of they had made all of it compulsory.
It's partly successful medically, but almost wholly successful economically. Compare the unemployment rates of Sweden and Norway.
Sweden wins.
It does but again it's a mixed picture. Sweden's unemployment rate has increased slightly to 9% while Norway has hit 10% from a lower base. The Norwegian government is funding furloughs while the Swedish government isn't, I believe.
On checking it seems Sweden does publicly fund furlough "under specific conditions"
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
I'd have thought reducing infection chance through the nose and mouth via wearing a mask would be more effective than not wearing a mask at all though. Of course it could pop into your eyes but I'd have thought that's less likely than a nasal or oral infection. Wear a mask but act like you don't have one on could be the best advice. People also need to learn not touch their face first - a mask is like the advanced driver's course after the beginner's no face touching one.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstly, Italy's percentage of positive tests peaked at 56%. Given that (approximately) 25% of people who have the disease test negative, this suggests that perhaps three quarters of the people who were tested on that day had CV-19. The vast majority of people who have CV-19, of course, never get tested. The true number of new cases that day, we can reasonably assume, is going to have been at least 10x (and possibly much more) the number reported.
Italy is now doing 60,000+ tests a day. That's 20x the number it was doing when it was getting 56% positives. It's now seeing a positive rate (and I'm sorry, I haven't been keeping up with my spreadsheet so I don't know for sure) of less than 7%. (And it may now be down to sub-5%.)
The reality is that Italy's real new test load has collapsed, it's just that we dramatically miscounted the number it started off from.
Secondly, the lockdown in Italy and Spain is not as total as in China. By this, I mean that in China, if you have CV-19 (or the symptoms of CV-19) you get pulled out of your home and put in a holding place to avoid you infecting your family/housemates. That doesn't happen in Italy/Spain/anywhere in the Western world. This means the path to R equals zero is much longer, because you have whole households the virus has to spread through.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Well indeed. How many diseases have been inflicted on the world by meat-eaters? HIV/AIDS, CJD, SARS, Covid-19 to name but a few.
Ebola and swine fever can be added to that list. It covers just about every epidemic of the last few decades. Revenge of the animals some might call it.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
It would be just weird, shades of Italian caffs getting smashed up for serving frothy coffee in 1939.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
Exactly. You would just be hurting the British Chinese community. They aren't at fault.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
I wasa leaning that way and the photos from the Chinese markets finished me off. I genuinely think I ate my last animal about 6 weeks ago. Not missing it in the slightest
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
I shall be quietly boycotting all things Chinese until such times as their treatment of animals becomes humane. I don't expect to be buying anything of Chinese origin during the remainder of my lifetime.
Good luck with that! Even the stuff which doesn't say 'made in China' will inevitably have bits that were made in China. Or be made by Chinese companies who have, for example, bought up factories in Lombardy, laid off the Italian workers and brought in Chinese workers so they can label the goods 'made in Italy'.
That said, I've noticed I've been avoiding the more obviously-Chinese stuff on Amazon for reasons I can't fully articulate.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Takes time, and there is undoubtedly a massive ramp up in production underway.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
But an imperfect one. My understanding is that Sweden are closer to voluntary lockdown than they are to business as usual.
Very true. According to City Mapper, Stockholm's "mobility" is about 28% of it's usual levels.
High compared to Spain/Italy etc. and more than two to three times our own big cities (London 8%, Brum 13%), but still nothing like normal life.
For an idea about the timings and some other comparisons:
Yestdy Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6% 12 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 10%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6% 05 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 6%, London 9%, NYC 6% 29 Mar Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 7%, London 12%, NYC 7% 22 Mar Stockholm 36%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 14%, London 36%, NYC 15% 15 Mar Stockholm 73%, Copenhagen 54%, Brussels 71%, London 83%, NYC 67%
Oops, corrected a typo in the dates above.
Interesting how much Stockholm's figure isn't so far off where London was just before the lockdown was imposed but the general message had clearly sunk home for a lot of people.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
It would be just weird, shades of Italian caffs getting smashed up for serving frothy coffee in 1939.
Not to mention the local caff family getting drowned in the Aramdora Star (still remembered with much sympathy for them by the older folk here, just).
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
You know that uneasy sense we all have (whether openly admitted or not) that Germany does everything apart from winning WW1s and WW2s significantly better than us?
Coronavirus has not done much to quell it, has it?
We didn't win WW1 or WW2 - the Allied coalitions did (and WW1 was a close shave more than once). Which completes your point nicely.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstly, Italy's percentage of positive tests peaked at 56%. Given that (approximately) 25% of people who have the disease test negative, this suggests that perhaps three quarters of the people who were tested on that day had CV-19. The vast majority of people who have CV-19, of course, never get tested. The true number of new cases that day, we can reasonably assume, is going to have been at least 10x (and possibly much more) the number reported.
Italy is now doing 60,000+ tests a day. That's 20x the number it was doing when it was getting 56% positives. It's now seeing a positive rate (and I'm sorry, I haven't been keeping up with my spreadsheet so I don't know for sure) of less than 7%. (And it may now be down to sub-5%.)
The reality is that Italy's real new test load has collapsed, it's just that we dramatically miscounted the number it started off from.
Secondly, the lockdown in Italy and Spain is not as total as in China. By this, I mean that in China, if you have CV-19 (or the symptoms of CV-19) you get pulled out of your home and put in a holding place to avoid you infecting your family/housemates. That doesn't happen in Italy/Spain/anywhere in the Western world. This means the path to R equals zero is much longer, because you have whole households the virus has to spread through.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Well indeed. How many diseases have been inflicted on the world by meat-eaters? HIV/AIDS, CJD, SARS, Covid-19 to name but a few.
Ebola and swine fever can be added to that list. It covers just about every epidemic of the last few decades. Revenge of the animals some might call it.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I would have thought even with our depleted manufacturing base there are companies who could tool up to deliver enormous amounts of a simple product there is suddenly a vast demand for.
Mr. Carnyx, neither would've been won without British involvement.
The notion we didn't win the wars because others were on our side is a bit like claiming a footballer didn't win the world cup because it was a team effort.
Mr. Carnyx, neither would've been won without British involvement.
The notion we didn't win the wars because others were on our side is a bit like claiming a footballer didn't win the world cup because it was a team effort.
Well, yes? Normally you credit a team with winning rather than an individual footballer.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
I shall be quietly boycotting all things Chinese until such times as their treatment of animals becomes humane. I don't expect to be buying anything of Chinese origin during the remainder of my lifetime.
Good luck with that! Even the stuff which doesn't say 'made in China' will inevitably have bits that were made in China. Or be made by Chinese companies who have, for example, bought up factories in Lombardy, laid off the Italian workers and brought in Chinese workers so they can label the goods 'made in Italy'.
That said, I've noticed I've been avoiding the more obviously-Chinese stuff on Amazon for reasons I can't fully articulate.
It is not proving that difficult to avoid buying things made in China. A little research and questioning of suppliers. Once I go back to shopping off-line it will be easier still
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
It would be just weird, shades of Italian caffs getting smashed up for serving frothy coffee in 1939.
Not to mention the local caff family getting drowned in the Aramdora Star (still remembered with much sympathy for them by the older folk here, just).
I've know a few Italian Scots over the years, still quite a bit of folk memory bitterness about the Andorra Star. One bloke had lost his grandad and great uncle on it.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
Sweden has approx 10 million people. Finlad, Norway and Denamrk have bout 5 million each,
If you add up the dead from the 3 other Nordic Countries they don't get up to even half the number of Swedish deaths.
Sweden has a nasty death toll compared to, say, Norway, but Sweden is not obviously doing worse than France, UK, Spain, etc
Mr. Carnyx, neither would've been won without British involvement.
The notion we didn't win the wars because others were on our side is a bit like claiming a footballer didn't win the world cup because it was a team effort.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authoritis", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
I'd have thought reducing infection chance through the nose and mouth via wearing a mask would be more effective than not wearing a mask at all though. Of course it could pop into your eyes but I'd have thought that's less likely than a nasal or oral infection. Wear a mask but act like you don't have one on could be the best advice. People also need to learn not touch their face first - a mask is like the advanced driver's course after the beginner's no face touching one.
Whether masks reduce the chance of you being infected is less important than the fact they very definitely limit your chance of SPREADING the disease, through coughs and sneezes - that's the fundamental point which westerners seem to find very hard to grasp (ie: we ask what will benefit me as an individual, not what will benefit society)
So that guy over there in a mask is doing YOU a favour. You are less likely to catch the bug from him, if he is infected, because his sneeze is muffled. Why not return the favour, and wear a mask, so you are less likely to kill HIM?
Then get everyone to do it, as a favour to everyone else, and bingo we are on the way to being South Korea, not Ecuador.
The flip side is, you touch and fiddle with the mask you've just made wet by coughing into it, as you walk out of the carriage you hold on to one of the grab rails before pressing the button to open the door...
Also the issue of whether you change your behaviour while wearing a mask. Seems pretty likely to me the average Joe will change it in some respects.
There are prima facie benefits to the masks, but I can understand why scientists don't feel happy being drawn about their net effect based on the currently available evidence. And particularly for "home-made masks" which will be of highly variable composition.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
People keep saying lockdowns work, but the evidence of Spain and Italy is not really showing that. It remains a mystery to me how so many people are getting infected so far into a lockdown.
We don't have the counterfactual Spain and Italy where they didn't do the lockdown though, do we?
Absolutely not, so thats why is so hard to judge if the lockdowns are working. Two weeks ago there was talk of Italys figures dropping off a cliff by now, but that has not happened. I thought they would of, and I can't find a reason as why they have not. I realise that this is a very odd virus but it surely must need human to human contact to infect. If it does how on earth are the Italian and Spainish new infections so high?
I was countering your claim that the evidence from Spain and Italy is showing that lockdowns don't work. The current evidence doesn't let us say that, because we don't know what it would have been like without it.
We have Sweden as a control
It's misleading because Sweden has instituted social distancing on a partially voluntary personal responsibility basis, rather than forcing people to do it. Turns out the hybrid solution has middling results. Social distancing has been somewhat successful, but they could have got more of they had made all of it compulsory.
It's partly successful medically, but almost wholly successful economically. Compare the unemployment rates of Sweden and Norway.
Sweden wins.
It does but again it's a mixed picture. Sweden's unemployment rate has increased slightly to 9% while Norway has hit 10% from a lower base. The Norwegian government is funding furloughs while the Swedish government isn't, I believe.
On checking it seems Sweden does publicly fund furlough "under specific conditions"
A bit more on this because the Swedish furlough scheme looks interesting and possibly a more sustainable model. As I understand it, you only get a subsidy for reduced hours, not if you are made redundant. So the employer has to pay at least some of those hours while the employee's salary gets topped up to near their original salary. It's a way of keeping your staff and encouraging at least some work.
And in any event, she'd likely be more use to Biden (and perhaps less problematic to him) in the Senate.
I'm still pleased with my 1000/1 on Harris as next President (and a similar side bet on Abrams).
I think there'd be a strong expectation that Biden should appoint Warren to a key Cabinet position where she can lay down the law to the gangster capitalists, so Treasury, maybe Commerce but possibly even Attorney-General.
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
Mr. kinabalu, their financial sector is inferior, their handling of the migrant crisis was incredibly stupid, and they increased energy costs massively by Merkel's ridiculous reaction to the Fukushima[sp] meltdown and banning of nuclear power in a country not necessarily renowned for earthquakes and tsunamis.
You can point at any country and find good and bad aspects.
Still, those arguing Germany's magnificent will have fun making the case for banning the niqab and completely changing the way the NHS works.
You supply more supporting evidence -
Their financial sector is VASTLY more fit for purpose and value added. The welcoming of the refugees was an act of great vision and compassion. They got ahead of the curve on nuclear. It's not the future. Banning full face covering is a great example of tolerance without cultural cringe. Their healthcare system knocks the NHS into a cocked one.
And a few more for the pot -
Their education system is tons better. And no silly fetish for privates. The way that top level football is run. Exemplary c.f. our rich man's toy model. They devolve power so much better. They are a true democracy. They make quality things and look after the people who do the work. The approach to housing over there. So much more rational than ours.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
The discussion pre thread on Spain's shedload of new cases is very timely.
The same could be said - I said it two weeks ago - of Italy's new cases.
These countries are many weeks into lockdown. Where and how are they getting infected? Are they key workers, is it happening in households, care homes, hospitals?
It shouldn't be hard to find out: ask them what they've been doing the last 2-3 weeks.
Armed with that info we could start relaxing the lockdown with the right precautions, or giving PPE to those key workers, maybe even divide households. Or just abandon lockdowns a la Suedois
Oh, and, of course, we should all be wearing masks FFS, as even the British government is now slowly admitting.
I think there are a couple of elements here.
Firstlough.
There are also other possibilities that are slight, but exist. Could domestic pets be carriers, for example?
Interesting and thoughtful, and my point remains good: just ask the new cases where they've been for the last few weeks. That will give us a rough and ready idea where new infections are happening. Which would be useful.
If the bulk are household transmission, then we either have to accept Corona will burn through families, or we have to get even more draconian and send people within families to quarantine centres.
Re your comment about pets. I just did a quick Twitter search on the words "Wuhan" and "dog" looking for that famous video of someone walking the dog by lowering it from an apartment window on a rope.
Instead, I found a video of a Chinese chef (at a wet market, I think) cheerfully cooking a dog alive.
It is one of the worst videos I have ever seen. It is branded on my brain.
China must pay for the barbaric cruelties of its wet markets, which are now being visited on the rest of us.
It's a shame that the rest of us have to suffer for the barbarism of meat-eaters and their insatiable hunger for flesh.
Coronavirus is making me rethink my attitude to many things, and one of those is meat-eating. Whether I emerge from this the same eager omnivore I was, I don't know.
The Satan Bug is also making me rethink my attitudes to China. Yes we can blame the Chinese Communist Party for the terrible cover up (and probably the lab that bred this bastard) but the party is not responsible for Chinese culture of eating wild animals, the rarer the better. They often cook them alive because that is said to improve the flavour
Here's an article from 2003 expressing fears that the Chinese taste for boiled owls, fried scorpions, wriggling snakes, sauteed pangolins, will one day lead to a terrible disease
Everyone could make a stand and stop eating Chinese food, in any guise, until all their hideous markets are closed down. It can't be any hardship for China to do so. And enforce it ferociously. They normally aren't squeamish. Otherwise it will just go underground, with rich fools still paying a fortune to eat a tiger's cock instead of popping viagra.
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
A great cuisine. I married into it.
But I still insist on egg and chips and spotted dick every Thursday.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authoritis", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
I'd have thought reducing infection chance through the nose and mouth via wearing a mask would be more effective than not wearing a mask at all though. Of course it could pop into your eyes but I'd have thought that's less likely than a nasal or oral infection. Wear a mask but act like you don't have one on could be the best advice. People also need to learn not touch their face first - a mask is like the advanced driver's course after the beginner's no face touching one.
Whether masks reduce the chance of you being infected is less important than the fact they very definitely limit your chance of SPREADING the disease, through coughs and sneezes - that's the fundamental point which westerners seem to find very hard to grasp (ie: we ask what will benefit me as an individual, not what will benefit society)
So that guy over there in a mask is doing YOU a favour. You are less likely to catch the bug from him, if he is infected, because his sneeze is muffled. Why not return the favour, and wear a mask, so you are less likely to kill HIM?
Then get everyone to do it, as a favour to everyone else, and bingo we are on the way to being South Korea, not Ecuador.
The flip side is, you touch and fiddle with the mask you've just made wet by coughing into it, as you walk out of the carriage you hold on to one of the grab rails before pressing the button to open the door...
Also the issue of whether you change your behaviour while wearing a mask. Seems pretty likely to me the average Joe will change it in some respects.
There are prima facie benefits to the masks, but I can understand why scientists don't feel happy being drawn about their net effect based on the currently available evidence. And particularly for "home-made masks" which will be of highly variable composition.
Any barrier to coughs and sneezes is better than none at all. No one is coughing into their elbows (what an absurd suggestion that was, tho it shows that barriers work)
So: put a bloody bandana on.
Another positive effect of masks is that they make you conscious of your face and that you should not touch your mouth with your hands. Masks are a constant reminder of that.
This is simplistic - the science is more nuanced - but it is still persuasive
The question is how the positives and negatives balance out, and I fear that's not a straightforward calculation.
Coughing into a paper tissue which you immediately dispose of ("catch it, bin it, kill it") seems preferable to coughing into a fabric handkerchief for all the obvious hygienic reasons. Coughing into a handkerchief you've tied over your mouth, hmm. How many people are going to touch it - I know you say it makes you more conscious of it, but plenty of people seen "in the wild" seem to have an urge to adjust it? And I suspect that's going to be even stronger with the home-made masks rather than the professional products which are designed to fit.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
"When you get a vaccine, how will you priortise who gets it first?"
perhaps we can cross that bridge in 12 months when we have one.
Healthcare workers followed by the shielded group followed by those recommended for a flu jab. I'll have to wait (Assuming I haven't had Covid by then) but that's OK.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
You know that uneasy sense we all have (whether openly admitted or not) that Germany does everything apart from winning WW1s and WW2s significantly better than us?
Coronavirus has not done much to quell it, has it?
We didn't win WW1 or WW2 - the Allied coalitions did (and WW1 was a close shave more than once). Which completes your point nicely.
OK, but I'm claiming it for these purposes since we're very light otherwise.
There's the whole creative arts area, I suppose. I rate us better than Germany there.
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
You know that uneasy sense we all have (whether openly admitted or not) that Germany does everything apart from winning WW1s and WW2s significantly better than us?
Coronavirus has not done much to quell it, has it?
We didn't win WW1 or WW2 - the Allied coalitions did (and WW1 was a close shave more than once). Which completes your point nicely.
OK, but I'm claiming it for these purposes since we're very light otherwise.
There's the whole creative arts area, I suppose. I rate us better than Germany there.
Imagine having to listen to Rammstein and German Rap every day....
How much Chinese food that's been anywhere near China do we eat in the first place? It seems harsh to punish the UK Chinese restaurant trade for the motherland's failings. (Disclaimer: I almost never eat UK Chinese food because it's so terrible in the provinces).
Germany are going to make 50 million masks a week by August. I fear we will be having discussions by then why in the UK nobody can get a mask.
How long can a mask be used for
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
It depends. There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway. But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask. Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
I do not like masks and of course in China and the the far east they are generally worn because of the pollution.
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
The WHO (along with parts of the British government) are just about the last "authorities" still resisting universal mask usage.
Against them we now have the USA (and the CDC), the governments of France, Korea, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Spain, Hong Kong, etc etc etc, even the BMJ within the UK now supports mask wearing. The governor of New York is now imposing mask wearing. The mayor of London, despite being an idiot, now sees it as necessary.
Incidentally, the argument the WHO now uses against masks is that "anyway, the virus can also infect you through the eyes", quite ignoring the central idea that masks stop the SPREAD.
It is controversial but my point is the cost and how much will it cost HMG or consumers per week and how are the numbers required sourced and where
Well, we are about to spend a third of a trillion pounds supporting the economy.
How much is a mask if manufactured at scale? 5p? 50p?
We could spend five billion on fifty billion masks, bringing forward the moment we can ease lockdown, and still save money
Only if it works and where do we get the constant supply
I have now told you about ninety times. Just make your own and it is better than nothing.
I am aware of your obsession over masks but I am not convinced that widescale use of masks will make the difference you maintain
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
You're not offering any evidence at all. Why should anybody be persuaded by what you're saying? More interestingly, why are you persuaded by it?
I have made it clear that WHO do not recommend them, a sneeze travels at 70mph making a mask less than secure and most everyone continually touch their mouth and face
There are times in medical environments and close contact when their use is justified but mandating the use to the public is a big step and is not proven
And with respect I am not concerned that some will disagree with me and I am responding to the Eadric
Comments
e.g. the militia is really the army so only the army can have guns.
“Never gonna get it never gonna get it, Never gonna get it never gonna get it, Never gonna get it never gonna get it, Never gonna get it...”
The epitome.
PARIS - April 16, 2020 - Sanofi and Luminostics have signed an agreement to evaluate a collaboration on a unique self-testing solution for COVID-19, using Luminostics’ innovative technology, and further adding to Sanofi’s ongoing efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic on multiple fronts.
Luminostics would contribute its proprietary technology for consumer-diagnostics for COVID-19 testing while Sanofi would bring its clinical research testing experience and capabilities. The goal is to provide a smartphone-based solution that eliminates the current need for healthcare professional administration or laboratory tests.
“This partnering project could lead to another important milestone in Sanofi’s fight against COVID-19. The development of a self-testing solution with Luminostics could help provide clarity to an individual – in minutes – on whether or not they are infected” says Alan Main, Executive Vice President, Head of Sanofi Consumer Healthcare. “Following this week’s announcement of an unprecedented partnership with GSK in the hunt for a vaccine, our company’s ambition is to continue to find other ways to help solve this pandemic situation.”
The goal of this collaboration is to provide a consumer-based test that can detect the COVID-19 virus with high sensitivity and specificity from respiratory samples. The total time from specimen collection to results is expected in the range of 30 minutes or less. It is based on Luminostics’ unique technology that utilizes a consumer smartphone’s optics, controlled by an iOS/Android app paired with an inexpensive adapter, in combination with “glow-in-the-dark” nanochemistry and signal processing artificial intelligence.
The diagnostic platform is composed of:
an iOS/Android app to instruct a user on how to run the test, capture and process data to display test results, and then to connect users with a telehealth service based on the results;
a reusable adapter compatible with most types of smartphones; and
consumables for specimen collection, preparation, and processing.....
Just 2 a day for our population is nearly 1 billion a week if my maths are right
High compared to Spain/Italy etc. and more than two to three times our own big cities (London 8%, Brum 13%), but still nothing like normal life.
https://citymapper.com/cmi
There are masks designed to be reusable many times, and others which are throwaway.
But the idea of everyone wearing masks in public (especially indoors) is more to limit the amount of transmission from anyone infected than protect a given individual wearing a mask.
Research suggests that even the simplest masks have some efficacy in this respect.
https://twitter.com/redevries/status/1251159387487387650
If you had CV bad, they often produce a positive result. If you had it mildly or with no symptoms, it seems like total pot luck if it picks up it. There is even suggest that those who didn't suffer, especially younger people, their bodies has reacted differently to it and so you need a different test to check.
What is the equivalent in US presidential elections?
For example, Trump and his Wall and the linked promise of Mexico funding it. Was there anything formal there? Or was it just derived from rhetoric at rallies?
However if they were mandated for use by the public when out and about the numbers required are huge. I do not know the cost of a mask, but scale that up for the population over weeks and even months and we are talking of a lot of money, so the science needs to be right.
At present the WHO are not recommending the use of masks
Will western consumers take a principled stand not to buy lots of cheap Chinese stuff?
Will western governments elect not to buy lots of cheap stuff from China?
Will western companies elect to pay for more expensive suppliers from elsewhere?
Will western capitalists forego a market with 1.3bn consumers?
It was easy during the cold war not to trade with the soviet union because their stuff was terrible. Not trading with China will require a level of economic self-denial that I don't think we in the west have.
There may be sound and fury, but I'd be surprised if it signified anything.
We'll see.
Yestdy Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6%
12 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 10%, Brussels 7%, London 8%, NYC 6%
05 Apr Stockholm 27%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 6%, London 9%, NYC 6%
29 Mar Stockholm 28%, Copenhagen 9%, Brussels 7%, London 12%, NYC 7%
29 Mar Stockholm 36%, Copenhagen 11%, Brussels 14%, London 36%, NYC 15%
15 Mar Stockholm 73%, Copenhagen 54%, Brussels 71%, London 83%, NYC 67%
Coronavirus has not done much to quell it, has it?
You can point at any country and find good and bad aspects.
Still, those arguing Germany's magnificent will have fun making the case for banning the niqab and completely changing the way the NHS works.
https://www.axios.com/vice-president-women-color-warren-poll-biden-c75d2901-aead-424c-a5b1-a987ab312c6c.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100
Wear a mask but act like you don't have one on could be the best advice. People also need to learn not touch their face first - a mask is like the advanced driver's course after the beginner's no face touching one.
Even the stuff which doesn't say 'made in China' will inevitably have bits that were made in China. Or be made by Chinese companies who have, for example, bought up factories in Lombardy, laid off the Italian workers and brought in Chinese workers so they can label the goods 'made in Italy'.
That said, I've noticed I've been avoiding the more obviously-Chinese stuff on Amazon for reasons I can't fully articulate.
Interesting how much Stockholm's figure isn't so far off where London was just before the lockdown was imposed but the general message had clearly sunk home for a lot of people.
The notion we didn't win the wars because others were on our side is a bit like claiming a footballer didn't win the world cup because it was a team effort.
The Allies isn't exactly a rarely used term.
Also the issue of whether you change your behaviour while wearing a mask. Seems pretty likely to me the average Joe will change it in some respects.
There are prima facie benefits to the masks, but I can understand why scientists don't feel happy being drawn about their net effect based on the currently available evidence. And particularly for "home-made masks" which will be of highly variable composition.
In confined spaces and of course medical locations it may well have a benefit but it is not the silver bullet you think it is.
A sneeze velocity is 70mph and masks do not 100% stop the spread and of course most people touch their face and masks multiple times negating their effectiveness
Their financial sector is VASTLY more fit for purpose and value added.
The welcoming of the refugees was an act of great vision and compassion.
They got ahead of the curve on nuclear. It's not the future.
Banning full face covering is a great example of tolerance without cultural cringe.
Their healthcare system knocks the NHS into a cocked one.
And a few more for the pot -
Their education system is tons better. And no silly fetish for privates.
The way that top level football is run. Exemplary c.f. our rich man's toy model.
They devolve power so much better. They are a true democracy.
They make quality things and look after the people who do the work.
The approach to housing over there. So much more rational than ours.
One could go on. One has, really.
"When you get a vaccine, how will you priortise who gets it first?"
perhaps we can cross that bridge in 12 months when we have one.
But I still insist on egg and chips and spotted dick every Thursday.
Fly the flag.
Coughing into a paper tissue which you immediately dispose of ("catch it, bin it, kill it") seems preferable to coughing into a fabric handkerchief for all the obvious hygienic reasons. Coughing into a handkerchief you've tied over your mouth, hmm. How many people are going to touch it - I know you say it makes you more conscious of it, but plenty of people seen "in the wild" seem to have an urge to adjust it? And I suspect that's going to be even stronger with the home-made masks rather than the professional products which are designed to fit.
I mean for FFS. I think I may scream.
WE DONT FRIGGING KNOW YOU DWERB. ASK A QUESTION THAT MIGHT GAIN US SOME GENUINE INFORMATION!
Done the list already...
1) Frontline Medical Staff
.
.
1966) Politicians
1967) Neo-nazis
1968) People who like Radiohead
1969) Lobby journalists
https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/1251123635118579712
Not actually a question, but a statement of the journalist's opinion.
Jeez, this is the worse session yet.
There's the whole creative arts area, I suppose. I rate us better than Germany there.
Can't read it yet as paywall.
But there is no chance of 12 months. None whatsever.
Not only will we have no economy left and be utterly bankrupt, but half the population will be requiring psychiatric care.
You mean we should develop a vaccine and then use it at once, instead of faffing around for years?
Thank goodness for this cutting edge, incisive, world class political journalism.
There are times in medical environments and close contact when their use is justified but mandating the use to the public is a big step and is not proven
And with respect I am not concerned that some will disagree with me and I am responding to the Eadric
And that figure is worse than it looks as the number of foreign students in Germany is far smaller than in the UK.