The UK government (right or wrongly ) deliberately killed 25,000 in the fire bombing of Dresden in one night. Not sure why we are destroying the economy and kids lives to protect against a virus that will need to be got by a large amount of the population anyway before it goes away.
So recommendation is no precautions should be taken at all then?
well I get the trying to slow it to allow the NHS to not get overwhelmed to some extent and sensible social distancing measures are fine but schools need to open as to large parts of the economy as soon as possible . We will have an awful time coping with the poverty and inflation and depression that is coming becasue of this lockdown
Schools need to open.
So no social distancing at all then?
well as best it can - We cannot have a mindset that seems dominant at the moment that all deaths from this can be avoided just as long as we all stay indoors for a long long time . Its not how life is , people do die anyway (it seems suddenly we think death is a new concept - look at the obsession and strange macabre enjoyment in some at looking at deaths everyday as though it has just been invented) - It is especially unfair on the young who have opportunity that is being eroded at a fast rate under lockdown
So in the end Boris capitulated and it was left to Sweden to be the libertarian champion against lockdown ironically
It will be interesting to compare the Swedish economy with others after this. It may not have fared much better as I understand that the bulk of Swedes are voluntarily behaving pretty much as we are. I suppose it depends whether thy have kept their factories open and I haven't followed it that closely. I'm sure someone will be along to enlighten me!
One of the issues post covid is that many nations economies will be in a terrible shape and consumer spending is likely to collapse for some time
No country is an island and all countries will take a hit however they perform due to this collapse
Looks like they have hit their goal but this really was a bit of and "Oh" moment for me about the effect of the lockdown, more even than me being moved to a 3 day week.
the twitter thread about the history of that street and that bar. well well worth 10 + minutes.
Tonight's lead story in The Times, if true, is a shocking indictment of the handling of the Covid-19 crisis by the Tory Cabinet in general over the past 3 months and by Boris Johnson in particular whose position should as a result be considered to be in considerable jeopardy.
Dodgy statistical reasoning. For instance Gloucestershire cover 25% more people than the next one down on that list (Great Western). You have to look at all the population aspects before drawing a conclusion especially density of population. It is suggestive but wrong to present it as conclusive.
Looking at deaths per capita, Gloucestershire does appear to be the highest in the West Country, though all are below the national average..
Thank you for taking the time to find this. I did try to find something similar but gave up. Doesn’t seem unusually bad in Cheltenham, despite what the tweeter is claiming.
Gloucestershire is the worst in the southwest. It is certainly circumstantial evidence to support the thesis.
We know this bug loves to spread with big crowds in bars, cafes. Churches. Shrines. Restaurants. Stadia.
But much better than the England average. Isn't that telling us the effect was small? (Probably because all the punters left Cheltenham afterwards!)
I can’t imagine many people who go to Cheltenham Races spend any time in Cheltenham itself. The racecourse is on the northern edge of the town and it’s not that easy to get to from the town. You’d be better off going in from Bishop’s Cleeve, Winchcombe or Tewkesbury.
The staff, of course, are a different matter, but I would have thought at least as many would come from Gloucester as from Cheltenham. Many of them will be outside contractors as well.
Indeed, if I were feeling mischievous I might speculate that the cluster is just as likely to be caused by all those ER protestors based in Stroud taking their swanky land rovers, er, bicycles up to London to put up cretinous posters boasting about how mass death is a good thing - and bringing the plague back with them.
Every hotel in Cheltenham would have been booked up with racegoers
Tonight's lead story in The Times, if true, is a shocking indictment of the handling of the Covid-19 crisis by the Tory Cabinet in general over the past 3 months and by Boris Johnson in particular whose position should as a result be considered to be in considerable jeopardy.
I will believe it when i see it. I am sure there were any number of differentnooinions out there.
I find the obsession with Cheltenham odd. The night of the Gold Cup my parents were in London with friends (who have since had COVID-19). The pubs were heaving.
So in the end Boris capitulated and it was left to Sweden to be the libertarian champion against lockdown ironically
It will be interesting to compare the Swedish economy with others after this. It may not have fared much better as I understand that the bulk of Swedes are voluntarily behaving pretty much as we are. I suppose it depends whether thy have kept their factories open and I haven't followed it that closely. I'm sure someone will be along to enlighten me!
I’m coming to the conclusion that once we are past this first wave we just have to open up the Economy and let the virus do its worst. Keep the Nightingale hospitals open, quarantine the super vulnerable.
We probably wont have a vaccine for many many months, if ever. Destroying the economy, while waiting for it, will make everything worse.
Take it on the chin.
Largely agree, though would still lockdown before we hit a second peak.
Hopefully a vaccine will be found in a year or two, SARs eventually petered out even without a vaccine
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
When Mother Nature made this bastard, she did a hell of a job.
So in the end Boris capitulated and it was left to Sweden to be the libertarian champion against lockdown ironically
It will be interesting to compare the Swedish economy with others after this. It may not have fared much better as I understand that the bulk of Swedes are voluntarily behaving pretty much as we are. I suppose it depends whether thy have kept their factories open and I haven't followed it that closely. I'm sure someone will be along to enlighten me!
I’m coming to the conclusion that once we are past this first wave we just have to open up the Economy and let the virus do its worst. Keep the Nightingale hospitals open, quarantine the super vulnerable.
We probably wont have a vaccine for many many months, if ever. Destroying the economy, while waiting for it, will make everything worse.
Take it on the chin.
Largely agree, though would still lockdown before we hit a second peak.
Hopefully a vaccine will be found in a year or two, SARs eventually petered out even without a vaccine
The effects of a second lockdown on business confidence would be horrendous.
Better to have a single, longer one, and an exit strategy based on e.g. phone app contact tracing, mass community testing, or ideally a vaccine.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
well its clearly his management style - Doesn't mean he is lazy or uncaring - Hitler had the opposite style and look where it got him and Germany
So in the end Boris capitulated and it was left to Sweden to be the libertarian champion against lockdown ironically
It will be interesting to compare the Swedish economy with others after this. It may not have fared much better as I understand that the bulk of Swedes are voluntarily behaving pretty much as we are. I suppose it depends whether thy have kept their factories open and I haven't followed it that closely. I'm sure someone will be along to enlighten me!
I’m coming to the conclusion that once we are past this first wave we just have to open up the Economy and let the virus do its worst. Keep the Nightingale hospitals open, quarantine the super vulnerable.
We probably wont have a vaccine for many many months, if ever. Destroying the economy, while waiting for it, will make everything worse.
Take it on the chin.
Largely agree, though would still lockdown before we hit a second peak.
Hopefully a vaccine will be found in a year or two, SARs eventually petered out even without a vaccine
The effects of a second lockdown on business confidence would be horrendous.
Better to have a single, longer one, and an exit strategy based on e.g. phone app contact tracing, mass community testing, or ideally a vaccine.
Well the effect of mass deaths we largely avoided this time would be even more horrendous without it.
Mass testing and tracing is fine to get business going again in between peaks but as we near peaks we must lockdown
Tonight's lead story in The Times, if true, is a shocking indictment of the handling of the Covid-19 crisis by the Tory Cabinet in general over the past 3 months and by Boris Johnson in particular whose position should as a result be considered to be in considerable jeopardy.
You come to a conclusion but comment 'if it is true'
It does seem to be a hatchet job by the Sunday Times and they will need to stand up their evidence
You also miss the point that Cobra is a cross UK body with the SNP, Labour and the DUP, carrying out the recommendations virtually in unison
The Sunday Times need to provide evidence that scientific advice within Cobra was overruled by Hancock, Boris or the cabinet to sustain their accusations
There are many with their own agendas in this crisis, but I cannot see Boris resigning over this even if many do not like him or more, as I suspect, his attitude to the EU
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
well its clearly his management style - Doesn't mean he is lazy or uncaring - Hitler had the opposite style and look where it got him and Germany
Are we supposed to find such an argument convincing?
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Every w/e since February if not earlier there have been media reports publicised on here and elsewhere - many have been full of predictions of the same kind. They originate from media hostile to the government and Boris in particular. So far the polls have taken a different view to the chattering classes as they did twice in London and at a recent GE. It's a mystery.....to them no doubt. I wonder when the penny is going to drop.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
well its clearly his management style - Doesn't mean he is lazy or uncaring - Hitler had the opposite style and look where it got him and Germany
Are we supposed to find such an argument convincing?
Well it would be a great coincidence that the PM is the best person to do detail on any crisis let alone this one and only a bad boss ever thinks that he or she is the best person to do detail on complex stuff. Boris is intelligent enough to have a management style that is not hands-on . It generally works best when the boss allows the right people to get on with stuff whoever they are
Tonight's lead story in The Times, if true, is a shocking indictment of the handling of the Covid-19 crisis by the Tory Cabinet in general over the past 3 months and by Boris Johnson in particular whose position should as a result be considered to be in considerable jeopardy.
Why didn't we just stop people from arriving in the UK as soon as we heard about the virus? (Unless they agreed to go into strict quarantine for 2 weeks).
So in the end Boris capitulated and it was left to Sweden to be the libertarian champion against lockdown ironically
It will be interesting to compare the Swedish economy with others after this. It may not have fared much better as I understand that the bulk of Swedes are voluntarily behaving pretty much as we are. I suppose it depends whether thy have kept their factories open and I haven't followed it that closely. I'm sure someone will be along to enlighten me!
I’m coming to the conclusion that once we are past this first wave we just have to open up the Economy and let the virus do its worst. Keep the Nightingale hospitals open, quarantine the super vulnerable.
We probably wont have a vaccine for many many months, if ever. Destroying the economy, while waiting for it, will make everything worse.
Take it on the chin.
Largely agree, though would still lockdown before we hit a second peak.
Hopefully a vaccine will be found in a year or two, SARs eventually petered out even without a vaccine
The effects of a second lockdown on business confidence would be horrendous.
Better to have a single, longer one, and an exit strategy based on e.g. phone app contact tracing, mass community testing, or ideally a vaccine.
This is what I think they are trying to do, get the r0 down as near to zero as they can, close the borders, test everyone and track and trace (it does need to be compulsory for everyone leaving the house, though, anything else will inevitably raise the r0). The big, big, danger is that people will relax far too early and muck the whole attempt up, though, then we’re back to square one. Maybe that message needs to get out, ‘big effort for the next period needed and it will stop us having to do it again’.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
It could be never.
We have never found a vaccine for a human coronavirus, eg the common cold
We have never found a vaccine for SARs either but the WHO declared it contained in summer 2003
With authority and confidence we present you with our empirical quantifiable numbers of something we have estimated from non recorded statistics assimilated by disparate methodologies.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
It could be never.
We have never found a vaccine for a human coronavirus, eg the common cold
We’ve never really looked hard and for a long time for a vaccine for a human coronavirus. After all, of the 200+ viruses under the category “the common cold”, only about 3 or 4 of them are coronaviruses (most are rhinoviruses). When we looked to get vaccines for coronaviruses in pets we succeeded, and I think we want this even more than those.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
From mathematical modellers. They’re one of the groups, via SAGE, that got us into this mess. The figures certainly look way off compared to any number from tests we are seeing to find out who has had it. The lowest end in the chart is pretty much at their top end of probability.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
The good news (from yesterday) is that hardly anyone under the age of 45 with no health conditions has died from the virus in this country.
The less good news is that things like diabetes and being overweight count as health conditions under their metric. (In slightly better news, it has incentivised me to lose 6 lbs so far during lockdown. After all, that’s pretty much the only risk factor I can have any influence over. Getting younger, no matter how hard I try, just isn’t happening)
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
It could be never.
We have never found a vaccine for a human coronavirus, eg the common cold
We have never found a vaccine for SARs either but the WHO declared it contained in summer 2003
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
I have assumed that that would be the case from the start. I have never been one of those who expected a vaccine inside a year. My concern going forward is that we might never find a vaccine and that even herd immunity is a pipe dream. Imagine a world where everyone knows that by the age of 70 at the latest they effectively have to isolate for the rest of their lives or run a very high risk they will catch this thing and die. The common cold but with far deadlier consequences.
The good news (from yesterday) is that hardly anyone under the age of 45 with no health conditions has died from the virus in this country.
The less good news is that things like diabetes and being overweight count as health conditions under their metric. (In slightly better news, it has incentivised me to lose 6 lbs so far during lockdown. After all, that’s pretty much the only risk factor I can have any influence over. Getting younger, no matter how hard I try, just isn’t happening)
Good for you! I'm at a loss as to why the govt is shouting from the rafters than the overweight should try to eat healthy, exercise and shift the pounds to save the NHS.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
He was very big on that we had to get testing capacity up, even from very early on.
Also, he had a number of very good suggestions before the official government policy, like keep schools open for only key workers and close old people's home to any visitors.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
Maybe but Jeremy Hunt would probably not have won a majority, the Brexit Party would still have split his vote
The good news (from yesterday) is that hardly anyone under the age of 45 with no health conditions has died from the virus in this country.
At what point will the young'uns start to realise they're surrendering their freedom, mental health and economic future for nothing? When they could get back to working, socialising, living.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
The UK government (right or wrongly ) deliberately killed 25,000 in the fire bombing of Dresden in one night. Not sure why we are destroying the economy and kids lives to protect against a virus that will need to be got by a large amount of the population anyway before it goes away.
So recommendation is no precautions should be taken at all then?
well I get the trying to slow it to allow the NHS to not get overwhelmed to some extent and sensible social distancing measures are fine but schools need to open as to large parts of the economy as soon as possible . We will have an awful time coping with the poverty and inflation and depression that is coming becasue of this lockdown
Schools need to open.
So no social distancing at all then?
Well, the logical alternative to not re-opening the schools is to abolish them and legislate to force one parent or guardian to remain at home with a child until they reach the age of 18. We dig out some of the ideas from the last Labour manifesto - give every household free broadband and IT equipment - and then the children do all of their learning remotely. We establish a central educational institute for providing lessons in all the various specialisms, assign each child one tutor to counsel them and to check personally on their progress, make the remainder of the teaching profession redundant and sell all the schools off for housing, which would help to pay off some of the costs of dealing with the pandemic and release an enormous bank of brownfield land for development.
The first priority in all of this is to educate the children. If we then take it as read that we have no idea when we'll be able to abandon social distancing (and it could be years); that it is impossible to implement social distancing in the school environment; and that equipping every child and teacher with disposable full-body hazmat suits would result in an impossibly large requirement both for fresh PPE and the disposal of contaminated waste; then whatever solution to providing education that then remains, however radical, must be correct?
Without being funny, Linus Tech Tips are doing 700 a day and they are just some randoms off the internet. A guy from the Czech Republic open sourced the design.
3D printing is really too slow and costly. Surely we have injection mould capabilities?
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
It could be never.
We have never found a vaccine for a human coronavirus, eg the common cold
We have never found a vaccine for SARs either but the WHO declared it contained in summer 2003
SARS only killed 774 people worldwide.
888 people died of Covid-19 just in the UK today.
More people have died of one of the strains of flu than have yet died of Covid 19, life goes on, the focus should be on containment until a vaccine can be found
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
He was very big on that we had to get testing capacity up, even from very early on.
Also, he had a number of very good suggestions before the official government policy, like keep schools open for only key workers and close old people's home to any visitors.
But would he have delivered on testing capacity? It's one thing saying "we need more of x", it's another thing making it happen.
And as for applying lockdown measures earlier, that presumably would have meant going against scientific advice. Now, that may have been the right thing to do. But I am struggling to imagine Jeremy Hunt being the one to make such a bold play.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
Generally he's a better manager and would have grasped the issues quicker given his time as health secretary.
Specifically he would have focused on testing much earlier, as he warned. He would also have involved the private sector much earlier.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
He was very big on that we had to get testing capacity up, even from very early on.
Also, he had a number of very good suggestions before the official government policy, like keep schools open for only key workers and close old people's home to any visitors.
But would he have delivered on testing capacity? It's one thing saying "we need more of x", it's another thing making it happen.
And as for applying lockdown measures earlier, that presumably would have meant going against scientific advice. Now, that may have been the right thing to do. But I am struggling to imagine Jeremy Hunt being the one to make such a bold play.
The government made a big mistake. The egg-heads said we can get these antibody kits, they will allow up to do shit loads of tests. What they hoped was antibody tests for all front line staff and wider key workers, and use the antigen tests for public coming in.
And the government went ok...and then they found that the Chinese were billy bullshitting and didn't work.
By which stage we hadn't developed a second strand. No call to all the private and uni labs in the country to say we need your machines, we need your staff etc. Which is what we are doing now.
In the meantime they said, policy change, no contact tracing (problem too big now), 100% hospital admissions. And no staff testing. I said at the time, this seems like a big call.
I don't know to this day why we didn't repeat the same approach as with ventilators. Lets order some, lets make more, lets get private companies to see what they can do.
Beyond that we still need more data on how (and where) the virus spreads. Bars and restaurants might be safe: hot food and alcohol; washed up plates and glasses. I think HMG was taken by surprise when the big chains closed their takeaway operations which were OK under the guidelines.
When I asked some years ago why all our office kitchens had dishwashers fitted, I was told that it is a H&S hygiene requirement that all commercial restaurants wash their dishes and cutlery at > 70c (i.e. too high for hand washing).
So the question is: is 70c enough?
Nope. Well not according to the piece I read a day or two ago. I may have even posted a link here. Researchers had to get to 90 degrees to kill the bastard iirc.
you did.
Longer report reproduced here, editing & bold is mine:
The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.
Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate. The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday.
The team in France infected African green monkey kidney cells, a standard host material for viral activity tests, with a strain isolated from a patient in Berlin, Germany. The cells were loaded into tubes representing two different types of environments, one “clean” and the other “dirty” with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After the heating, the viral strains in the clean environment were thoroughly deactivated. Some strains in the dirty samples, however, survived. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
There had been hope that hotter weather, such as that in Singapore or northern hemisphere countries heading into summer, might reduce the spread of Covid-19. The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity but enough living strains remained to be able to start another round of infection, said the paper.
The 60-degrees Celsius, hour-long protocol has been adapted in many testing labs to suppress a wide range of deadly viruses, including Ebola. For the new coronavirus, this temperature may be enough for samples with low viral loads because it could kill a large proportion of the strains. But it may be dangerous for samples with extremely high amounts of the virus, according to the researchers.
The French team found a higher temperature could help solve the problem. For instance, heating the samples to 92 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes rendered the virus completely inactive.
“The results presented in this study should help to choose the best suited protocol for inactivation in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel in charge of direct and indirect detection of Sars-CoV-2 for diagnostic purpose,” wrote the authors.
--- "it's a bit more complicated than that"
Combined with the news today from the WHO that there is so far no evidence that having the virus confers long term immunity, this has been a pretty rotten day for the fight against CV-19.
As I have said before many people seem to assume there will be a solution to this. There is no guarantee there will be.
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
It could be never.
We have never found a vaccine for a human coronavirus, eg the common cold
True but most of the search for a common cold vaccine or cure predates modern molecular biology.
I caught a bit of the health select committee the other day. Hancock took a bit of pleasure in responding to a question about preparedness by pointing out that a lot of the decisions had been taken by his predecessor.
The chair of committee declined to comment on that.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
You really have been poisoned by brexit to suggest any poster would accept the death of anyone.
You have a very vindictive streak and it is not nice to see in anyone
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
The SoS for Health that didn't act upon Exercise Cygnus?
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
You really have been poisoned by brexit to suggest any poster would accept the death of anyone.
You have a very vindictive streak and it is not nice to see in anyone
Your blind defence of a Prime Minister who has thrown away lives through casual laziness is sickening.
I have assumed that that would be the case from the start. I have never been one of those who expected a vaccine inside a year. My concern going forward is that we might never find a vaccine and that even herd immunity is a pipe dream. Imagine a world where everyone knows that by the age of 70 at the latest they effectively have to isolate for the rest of their lives or run a very high risk they will catch this thing and die. The common cold but with far deadlier consequences.
I get your pessimism, given that the present circumstances are not exactly custom built to encourage the opposite condition, but one would've thought that the likelihood of this disease conferring no immunity upon those who survive it, being permanently and completely incapable of being tamed by vaccination, and of there being no possibility - ever- of producing a medicine capable of treating its most severe effects, is somewhat remote.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
The SoS for Health that didn't act upon Exercise Cygnus?
The good news (from yesterday) is that hardly anyone under the age of 45 with no health conditions has died from the virus in this country.
At what point will the young'uns start to realise they're surrendering their freedom, mental health and economic future for nothing? When they could get back to working, socialising, living.
In three to six weeks time when the government tell those in their 20s and 30s living their own lives (i.e. not with their parents) to get on with it. Those that are living with parents could go and live with friends instead,
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
What do you think he would have done differently? (honest question)
He was very big on that we had to get testing capacity up, even from very early on.
Also, he had a number of very good suggestions before the official government policy, like keep schools open for only key workers and close old people's home to any visitors.
But would he have delivered on testing capacity? It's one thing saying "we need more of x", it's another thing making it happen.
And as for applying lockdown measures earlier, that presumably would have meant going against scientific advice. Now, that may have been the right thing to do. But I am struggling to imagine Jeremy Hunt being the one to make such a bold play.
I thought that it is alleged Jeremy Hunt took no action over the 2016 pandemic report
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
Indeed but most of those will be over 70 and about half over 80, so it is the old we need to focus on protecting.
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
Clearly the government put more planning into the Brexit coin than preparing for the pandemic ! Not to worry the PM is taking back control now according to the DT .
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Ease up, Alastair. PB-ers are now losing parents, and it will probably get worse. We can all be a bit kinder
I’ll be kinder to people who don’t blindly defend the grossly negligent.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
Perhaps it is time to switch over to ConHome to get a more balanced critique of the Government's Coronavirus programme.
Some things are going to have to change after all this over. Social Care mess is another.
This makes me very cynical. "Can't do anything about homelessness". Suddenly we can sort it all out in the instant, when those homeless might give us the plague.
A note of caution - we haven't actually sorted out homelessness, we've just corralled rough sleepers into temporary accommodation and made it very difficult for them to leave. This doesn't resolve the core issues most rough sleepers are facing; whether that's addiction, severe mental illness, inability to hold a job, etc. After this is all over, we could probably keep locking rough sleepers in hotels, but those core issues will still be there and resolving them is the primary challenge.
A very good note of caution. Nevertheless I welcome them finding accommodation for homeless people, when it was impossible before, at the point when they might become a problem for the rest of us. Even if it makes me a little cynical.
I think it's more that the immediate, 'blunt force' option of essentially sectioning rough sleepers (without spending very large sums of money providing specialist support to solve the fact they're sleeping rough to begin with) is now politically viable when it wasn't before. Before the outbreak, if the government had tried to do what they're doing now, they would be crucified in the court of public opinion, there would be parallels drawn with the Nazis rounding up undesirables to put them in camps, and on top of that it would be extremely difficult to justify the large per capita spending on specialists, therapists and social workers needed to help rough sleepers at a time where other priorities are being squeezed. The shift in the Overton Window created by the outbreak, hopefully, will lead to public opinion changing and the government will have room to spend the money needed to solve the issues that lead to rough sleeping.
My understanding is that this is not the case in London. Many rough sleepers have been desperate to get off the street with the unfolding Covid-19 crisis, with the lack of public being around to offer help and drugs becoming scarce also having an impact. Many have agreed to taking the temporary accommodation or hostel spaces that have been freed up (as other facilitilities have been rolled out for those residents needing to isolate for 12 weeks). Other services have been linked into these temporary accommodation facilities or hostel spaces so are seeing a significant hike in referals to help link these people in with services that are more use to dealing with the issues involved with rough sleepers. This is a huge opportunity to help these people.
The UK government (right or wrongly ) deliberately killed 25,000 in the fire bombing of Dresden in one night. Not sure why we are destroying the economy and kids lives to protect against a virus that will need to be got by a large amount of the population anyway before it goes away.
So recommendation is no precautions should be taken at all then?
The best policy may have been a lockdown for people in the most vulnerable categories and allowing everyone else to go about their lives as normal. A bit like Sweden in other words. But we won't know for a long time which countries made the best decisions.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
You really have been poisoned by brexit to suggest any poster would accept the death of anyone.
You have a very vindictive streak and it is not nice to see in anyone
Your blind defence of a Prime Minister who has thrown away lives through casual laziness is sickening.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Ease up, Alastair. PB-ers are now losing parents, and it will probably get worse. We can all be a bit kinder
Thanks eadric
Alastair's brutal and vindictive attitude has become a very upsetting feature of his posts
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
Indeed but most of those will be over 70 and about half over 80, so it is the old we need to focus on protecting.
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
your right because they cant infect anyone else or take up hospital beds ...
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
Indeed but most of those will be over 70 and about half over 80, so it is the old we need to focus on protecting.
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
Apart from the lying I could beat Boris every time.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
Perhaps it is time to switch over to ConHome to get a more balanced critique of the Government's Coronavirus programme.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Ease up, Alastair. PB-ers are now losing parents, and it will probably get worse. We can all be a bit kinder
Thanks eadric
Alastair's brutal and vindictive attitude has become a very upsetting feature of his posts
And it is not necessary
You are blindly defending a Prime Minister whose failings are obvious because... well because he’s a Conservative. And you have the gall to be upset because this is pointed out?
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Ease up, Alastair. PB-ers are now losing parents, and it will probably get worse. We can all be a bit kinder
Thanks eadric
Alastair's brutal and vindictive attitude has become a very upsetting feature of his posts
And it is not necessary
To be fair Mr G. your sychophancy is also unhelpful, particularly in the light of people on PB losing loved ones, and I am broadly supportive of the government so far.
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
Indeed but most of those will be over 70 and about half over 80, so it is the old we need to focus on protecting.
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
0.5% of under 50s is about 250,000 people.
Out of a population of 66 million and that is assuming 100% catch Covid 19 which is unlikely (plus it is less than 0.5%)
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
Indeed but most of those will be over 70 and about half over 80, so it is the old we need to focus on protecting.
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
your right because they cant infect anyone else or take up hospital beds ...
Oh wait
As I have already said we should lockdown pre peak but no further, otherwise mass test and isolate the oldest
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
Perhaps it is time to switch over to ConHome to get a more balanced critique of the Government's Coronavirus programme.
Let us see how public opinion goes.
It shouldn't be about political point scoring.
When it is all over questions will need to be answered.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
You astound me, @Big_G_NorthWales. And there was I expecting you to be Boris Johnson’s harshest critic.
I leave that to others, most who are remainers and Boris has upset them
Oh well, a few thousand dead people are a price you have to pay for your loyalty.
Ease up, Alastair. PB-ers are now losing parents, and it will probably get worse. We can all be a bit kinder
Thanks eadric
Alastair's brutal and vindictive attitude has become a very upsetting feature of his posts
And it is not necessary
You are blindly defending a Prime Minister whose failings are obvious because... well because he’s a Conservative. And you have the gall to be upset because this is pointed out?
I have no problem with those having a go over my support for HMG
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
Apart from the lying I could beat Boris every time.
I have to say Big G you're as bad as I used to be with Corbyn. As somebody who's been there, I would advise just a tad of introspection might help. I say this respectfully.
The UK government (right or wrongly ) deliberately killed 25,000 in the fire bombing of Dresden in one night. Not sure why we are destroying the economy and kids lives to protect against a virus that will need to be got by a large amount of the population anyway before it goes away.
So recommendation is no precautions should be taken at all then?
The best policy may have been a lockdown for people in the most vulnerable categories and allowing everyone else to go about their lives as normal. A bit like Sweden in other words. But we won't know for a long time which countries made the best decisions.
yes jail the sick and the elderly so some feckless halfwits can go to the pub
I have to say Big G you're as bad as I used to be with Corbyn. As somebody who's been there, I would advise just a tad of introspection might help. I say this respectfully.
I sense a Remainer agenda in that Sunday Times article. A lot of comments about Brexit, some of them tellingly irrelevant
Nonetheless it is depressing that the UK would probably have been better off with me, paranoid and drunk, as the prime minister since early February.
The Sunday Times article also includes plenty of snide comments about the PM and seems to be largely sourced from an unnamed "Downing Street Adviser" who seems to be blaming the PM personally for the perceived errors in the government's response to the virus.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the article it reads like a hatchet job.
Either he attended the Feb Cobra meetings or he didn't. Must be easy to verify one way or the other.
Not sure it matters - He had no immediate decision to make in Feb other than let the experts advise and gather stats
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Boris is the first PM in years to believe in delegation and to be honest in February it was a public health issue for the Health Minister, Matt Hancock
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
I remain convinced that most of our previous PMs would have been more diligent. I don't dislike Johnson, he is a likeable person but I don't see him as a PM with much gravitas and I admit that the ST article just confirms my worst suspicions.
Jeremy Hunt would have done better. That seems utterly obvious.
The SoS for Health that didn't act upon Exercise Cygnus?
Is this good news in terms of achieving herd immunity?
It might be. There is much dispute on Twitter over this report
It doesn't change the debate on herd immunity because it assumes a fatality rate of 1.4% - so the number of deaths required to achieve herd immunity are unchanged by this analysis.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
As is France.
Like I said earlier, it is probable that, in the end, large European nations will see death tolls in six figures. If we don’t get a vaccine or antivirals before 2022.
This will happen no matter what any country does. No country can lock down forever, and the maths of the coronavirus fatality rate is remorseless
It looks to me like the deaths from the lockdown recession will also be in six figures. Figures from the Euro crisis in Greece show annual excess deaths of 15-20k per year. Adjusting for the UK's population indicates a death toll of 100-135k per year. It's difficult to see how the recession could be less severe if there is an intermittent lockdown into 2021 whilst a vaccine is sought.
Comments
No country is an island and all countries will take a hit however they perform due to this collapse
I felt like I had access to a secret hideaway whether I would tell people to meet there, its like they wouldn't believe it could exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xr9-CkZZRk
Hopefully a vaccine will be found in a year or two, SARs eventually petered out even without a vaccine
If not her, then....someone did a hell of a job.
Better to have a single, longer one, and an exit strategy based on e.g. phone app contact tracing, mass community testing, or ideally a vaccine.
So as the worldwide situation deteriorated throughout February our PM didn't think it might be worth attending one of the Cobra meetings to find out for himself what the situation was. It's a view I suppose but it plays right into his reputation for being lazy and unconcerned with details.
Mass testing and tracing is fine to get business going again in between peaks but as we near peaks we must lockdown
It does seem to be a hatchet job by the Sunday Times and they will need to stand up their evidence
You also miss the point that Cobra is a cross UK body with the SNP, Labour and the DUP, carrying out the recommendations virtually in unison
The Sunday Times need to provide evidence that scientific advice within Cobra was overruled by Hancock, Boris or the cabinet to sustain their accusations
There are many with their own agendas in this crisis, but I cannot see Boris resigning over this even if many do not like him or more, as I suspect, his attitude to the EU
We may just have to adapt to it being a part of life for several years to come as we get hit with new waves of it. Life will not fully return to pre-virus "normal" until an effective vaccine has been found and mass produced. That could easily be at least a couple of years away
So much of this is hindsight and to be honest, I do not see any other politician, or party, having done any better
When it all comes out in the wash in years to come mistakes will be evidenced but not one person on this forum or outside could say that they would have done any better with any certainty
When we looked to get vaccines for coronaviruses in pets we succeeded, and I think we want this even more than those.
What their analysis does imply is that, based on known delays between case identification and death, the UK likely already has enough infections to make 40,000 deaths unavoidable, and it could be that we are already destined to suffer 161,000 coronavirus deaths.
(In slightly better news, it has incentivised me to lose 6 lbs so far during lockdown. After all, that’s pretty much the only risk factor I can have any influence over. Getting younger, no matter how hard I try, just isn’t happening)
888 people died of Covid-19 just in the UK today.
Also, he had a number of very good suggestions before the official government policy, like keep schools open for only key workers and close old people's home to any visitors.
The first priority in all of this is to educate the children. If we then take it as read that we have no idea when we'll be able to abandon social distancing (and it could be years); that it is impossible to implement social distancing in the school environment; and that equipping every child and teacher with disposable full-body hazmat suits would result in an impossibly large requirement both for fresh PPE and the disposal of contaminated waste; then whatever solution to providing education that then remains, however radical, must be correct?
School's out forever it is, then.
Without being funny, Linus Tech Tips are doing 700 a day and they are just some randoms off the internet. A guy from the Czech Republic open sourced the design.
3D printing is really too slow and costly. Surely we have injection mould capabilities?
And as for applying lockdown measures earlier, that presumably would have meant going against scientific advice. Now, that may have been the right thing to do. But I am struggling to imagine Jeremy Hunt being the one to make such a bold play.
Specifically he would have focused on testing much earlier, as he warned. He would also have involved the private sector much earlier.
And the government went ok...and then they found that the Chinese were billy bullshitting and didn't work.
By which stage we hadn't developed a second strand. No call to all the private and uni labs in the country to say we need your machines, we need your staff etc. Which is what we are doing now.
In the meantime they said, policy change, no contact tracing (problem too big now), 100% hospital admissions. And no staff testing. I said at the time, this seems like a big call.
I don't know to this day why we didn't repeat the same approach as with ventilators. Lets order some, lets make more, lets get private companies to see what they can do.
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tomswalkforthenhs
The chair of committee declined to comment on that.
You have a very vindictive streak and it is not nice to see in anyone
That Jeremy Hunt?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/labour-urges-government-publish-findings-2016-pandemic-drill
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/the-clock-is-ticking-on-this-crisis-the-next-four-weeks-are-critical-a4386736.html
Under 50s have a mortality rate of less than 0.5% so outside the peak should get back to work unless they have a serious health condition
Alastair's brutal and vindictive attitude has become a very upsetting feature of his posts
And it is not necessary
Oh wait
When it is all over questions will need to be answered.
But you are off the scale of vindictiveness
But yes, I think he would have responded better.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60250-6/fulltext