I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
Johnson is a lucky politician, so maybe fortune will once again shine on him. I am not holding my breath. Here in Wales we could be in a second lockdown before we are out of the first.
I have a feeling if a second wave comes quickly after the first, Johnson and Cummings might just think to hell with it, Herd immunity it is. They won't go for that in Wales and Scotland.
She wouldnt, its against party rules surprised a 25 year veteran didn't know that
I personally would be happy to have as many people who are willing to fight for a Labour victory back in the fold, its definitely in the rule book though.
Plus Rochdale is disruptive to local activity if his inability to stop going on and on about the previous regime on here is anything like how he behaves in front of fellow party members.
I would be happy for you to show me the specific clause you refer to here (as it doesn't exist...). I have been booted by the GC's executive override clause allowing them to bar whomever they judge to be unworthy without any route of appeal. The thing cited as the reason (that I was a member of another party before applying to join Labour) is not against rules. It was for example perfectly ok to stand against the Labour Party and then defect to join it as long as you were a Corbynite - Salma Yaqoub as one example.
As for my disruption, you genuinely have no idea. You dislike me because I dislike your precious Jeremy. Happily the lunatics are being weeded out and will soon be as irrelevant to the party as they used to be. "going on and on about the previous regime" - thats the ex Labour voters mate.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
Exactly. Avoiding a second wave is the biggest hope the economy has at the moment.
A second wave hits and all those 'we can just about survive the lockdown' companies in ALL sectors go bust. Overnight.
The owners of companies that have used accumulated capital to get through one lockdown might not have the will or ability to stump up again.
Investment confidence (already low) will hit the floor. IMO social distancing is what saves the rest of the economy; it isn't without costs, but avoiding a second wave is worth the costs. There will no doubt be pressure, rightly, to support struggling industries - and I hope that happens. However, it must be remembered that all business involves risk. No one is guaranteed a profit despite working tremendously hard. Sometimes luck plays a tremendous part, and timing too. Its why I am very pleased the govt. didn't help out Ltd company directors dividends - that would be guaranteeing profit, and wouldn't wash.
Lots of companies I know (outside the hospitality sector) are paying their staff 100% now, but only claiming 80%. Thats what I am doing. I'm pretty realistic that profit, which makes up 80% of my income, is going to be severely down this year. However I'm in a much better position than my staff, and they deserve my loyalty, given they've been loyal to me over the years.
To be honest even 80% to the end of August is pretty generous; remember that many very small businesses won't be paying much employer NI because of the exemption, and many employers will have opted out of pensions too. And then only 10% less in September and only one month at 20% less. I'm (yet again) impressed by the treasury.
I know @Cyclefree has a personal link, but @FF43's comment was pretty accurate - mature businesses who are able (i.e. with a bit of a cash pile, or supportive owners willing to make the investment) will try to keep their staff if they see an end in sight. A second wave that necessitates any form of tightened restrictions changes that. It must be avoided at all costs.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
Johnson is a lucky politician, so maybe fortune will once again shine on him. I am not holding my breath. Here in Wales we could be in a second lockdown before we are out of the first.
I have a feeling if a second wave comes quickly after the first, Johnson and Cummings might just think to hell with it, Herd immunity it is. They won't go for that in Wales and Scotland.
No. I think they eventually appreciated that that option amounted to sheer insanity.
And in the light of the antibody surveys, there is no longer any doubt about how many deaths it would involve.
Breaking news - my application to join the Labour Party has been rejected! *giggles*
I know for a fact that one of the people locally most stridently objecting to me defecting from the LibDems to support Starmer himself defected from the LibDems to support Jezbollah.
Breaking news - my application to join the Labour Party has been rejected! *giggles*
Well I know of one former green party activist in the "ooh Jeremy Corbyn" camp who was admitted to the party in the Autumn of 2015 having stood against the party in local elections in May 2015. She turned out to be all mouth and no trousers, one of those who tries to dominate meetings yet contributes diddly squat on the ground.
She wasn't subject to objections from a local faction more concerned to maintain the ideological purity of their local party than to accept that the party can only win as a coalition of different strands of the left who chooe to concentrate on what unites them. I presume that you were.
It's a shame anyway as you appear to be more supportive of the current leadership than many of those "inspired" by the previous leader.
I know for a fact that one of the people locally most stridently objecting to me defecting from the LibDems to support Starmer himself defected from the LibDems to support Jezbollah.
The difference in your case is likely to be that as a former - and recent - Labour activist, your defection will be seen by longstanding members as an act of betrayal - and agreeing to readmit you so soon might be viewed as offensive and a slap in face to them.Had you never previously been a Labour member but just a LibDem activist for a few years, it would be rather different. Personally I would be far more concerned about people such as Ian Austin, John Woodcock and Gisela Stuart who openly campaigned for Labour voters to support Johnson. They deserve a life ban - as would a BNP member - and to be confronted with the consequences of what they have helped foist on the country.
Its the opposite - most of the big hitter members were fine with it (several actively begging me to "come home"). Its the bitter Corbynites who have done me. Ah well. I hope they pour the same levels of bile on the former Labour voters who went Tory for the first time last year...
Strange days indeed. Twenty or so years ago Peter Temple-Morris was welcomed with open arms.
Out of interest, do any of the PB Tories believe that the government has handled the pandemic (as opposed to the Cummings affair) well?
The reason I ask is that chatting away with 7 or 8 neighbours in the road after the Thursday clap a couple who I know to be Conservative voters weighed into the corona discussion by opining that they were completely embarrassed at the way the government had handled it. I was surprised at the strength of feeling which was unanimous and somebody did say that nobody could think they were doing a good job and it set me to wondering.
I would say that all the component parts of the UK failed collectively at the onset of the crisis. Nicola should and could have dealt with the Nike ground zero outbreak in Edinburgh in February and been more pro - active, and to her credit she admits mistakes were made. All four leaders should have gone into lockdown quicker and defended care homes which across the nation has been a disaster. The football and Cheltenham should have been cancelled as well.
It therefore asks the question, why were they all blindsided and of course the common denominator is Cobra and the advice given and the obvious unanimity on the way forward. There has not been one leader who has demured on the early stages, and to be fair Nicola has accepted that errors were made, but cites the benefit of hindsight
Ulimately, the enquiry that is coming will be very interesting, but I would be very worried about the advice Sage and each PH body gave and just how well they reacted. The big question is how much got lost in the depths of the inner organisation of these bodies, and how long it took for the private sector to be commissioned on PPE etc
And this is my honest opinion and I am not trying to make political points
The UK had a three week warning about what was happening in Italy and two weeks from Spain, they chose to let it rip when they could have locked down. I did suggest they should take advantage of this window on here. They didn’t and subsequently have come over as reactive with no structured forward planning, if it is structured and well planned they have done a poor job of selling it.
If you have a look at when countries reached 100 deaths:
Italy 04/03/20 Spain 12/03/20 UK 17/03/20
it shows that the UK had less warning time than that.
The problem was that the UK thought it had more time than it did have.
That's the kind of figure I was taking into account in the comment Malmesbury was replying to.
No problem - I'm kinda arguing both sides here, really not sure what I think.
Updating the ICL model just now, it suggests today's figure would be 5k/day, while the ONS 8k/day estimate was an average over 26/apr to 24/may. It'll be really interesting to see if the ONS infection estimates are falling when they release the next update (Tuesday?).
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
Johnson is a lucky politician, so maybe fortune will once again shine on him. I am not holding my breath. Here in Wales we could be in a second lockdown before we are out of the first.
I have a feeling if a second wave comes quickly after the first, Johnson and Cummings might just think to hell with it, Herd immunity it is. They won't go for that in Wales and Scotland.
No. I think they eventually appreciated that that option amounted to sheer insanity.
And in the light of the antibody surveys, there is no longer any doubt about how many deaths it would involve.
Cummings is *no laughing at the back* quite a big fan of the general lockdown/restrictions I think. He didn't follow the guidelines but the justification for all his actions was to try and keep 'R' down...
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
I agree that urgent and specific provision to protect the hospitality sector is needed, but one statistic jumped out at me during one of the recent press conferences: 1 metre of separation is 10-30 times as risky as 2 metres.
That makes the decision between them not a trivial matter, despite the economic considerations.
'I ignored my instincts and Mum died alone, in a care home' Sonia Purnell, Boris Johnson's biographer, on her anger at the Dominic Cummings saga, after she was unable to say goodbye to her mother
The Gov't has some horrendous decisions to make around certain parts of the hospitality industry. You'd have thought they'd want to get to those with as much goodwill in the bank as possible, but apparently saving an advisor was deemed more important to use that particular capital on.
Sounds like they've already made their decisions. Any business unable to trade successfully under whatever restrictions are still in force in September will be abandoned to die.
My interpretation is that they feel that they can't keep furlough going indefinitely so they're going to try to tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)
Retail and leisure will simply shrink and shrink and shrink, until the remaining number of providers equals the remaining number of available customers for the remaining permitted activities.
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Yep, that's that plan. Pick a fight with China and say Biden is soft on China, and Biden is China's pick for President. If Trump loses, then contest the election claiming China stole it for Biden.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
The health and safety advice that businesses I know/are involved with have been given is (cut down to a few words), you need a plan detailing your measures, 2m rule unless you have other mitigation in place (screens, PPE etc).
I don't see anyone being allowed to do different to that, in the near future.
If so, let’s be clear on what the consequences of that will be. Let’s stop pretending that such businesses can operate like that. You don’t go to a pub to have a screen between you and other people or to be served someone in a Hazmat suit.
If the government imposes these requirements - whether in law or via the HSE - they are effectively closing down such businesses. That may be the decision the government wants to make. But it needs to be open about it, the sooner the better instead of giving people and businesses false hope.
The government's really grown a pair of [your preferred organs here] this week. At last, and long may it continue!
If we're threatening China by offering citizenship, perhaps we should threaten the EU by offering free movement to its citizens. Get a brain drain going.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
The health and safety advice that businesses I know/are involved with have been given is (cut down to a few words), you need a plan detailing your measures, 2m rule unless you have other mitigation in place (screens, PPE etc).
I don't see anyone being allowed to do different to that, in the near future.
If so, let’s be clear on what the consequences of that will be. Let’s stop pretending that such businesses can operate like that. You don’t go to a pub to have a screen between you and other people or to be served someone in a Hazmat suit.
If the government imposes these requirements - whether in law or via the HSE - they are effectively closing down such businesses. That may be the decision the government wants to make. But it needs to be open about it, the sooner the better instead of giving people and businesses false hope.
The Gov't might know how close we are to a vaccine come October ?
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
That's the kind of figure I was taking into account in the comment Malmesbury was replying to.
No problem - I'm kinda arguing both sides here, really not sure what I think.
Updating the ICL model just now, it suggests today's figure would be 5k/day, while the ONS 8k/day estimate was an average over 26/apr to 24/may. It'll be really interesting to see if the ONS infection estimates are falling when they release the next update (Tuesday?).
Yes, that daily figure is an average over the last month. Although 5k a day seems too low for consistency with the estimate of 133,000 people testing positive (11-24 May), unless people continue to test positive for nearly 4 weeks on average.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
It'd have to be a very long lockdown indeed to have the effect you're looking for.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
Johnson is a lucky politician, so maybe fortune will once again shine on him. I am not holding my breath. Here in Wales we could be in a second lockdown before we are out of the first.
I have a feeling if a second wave comes quickly after the first, Johnson and Cummings might just think to hell with it, Herd immunity it is. They won't go for that in Wales and Scotland.
No. I think they eventually appreciated that that option amounted to sheer insanity.
And in the light of the antibody surveys, there is no longer any doubt about how many deaths it would involve.
Are you sure? I would imagine there are a substantial number of Conservatives, MPs and voters, the latter, as can be seen by some of those posting on PB, would quite happily take a punt on a herd immunity strategy.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
I agree that urgent and specific provision to protect the hospitality sector is needed, but one statistic jumped out at me during one of the recent press conferences: 1 metre of separation is 10-30 times as risky as 2 metres.
That makes the decision between them not a trivial matter, despite the economic considerations.
Why then are all other countries in Europe (other than Spain and one other) using 1 metre?
She's taken a walk in the market. 18 last time I checked.
Harris looking like the one.
While Harris would be a disaster for me personally (not financially, it's just she lives right next to my son's elementary school, and there's only one road in or out the canyon), I think she would be quite a good VP pick.
She won't frighten the horses, but she keeps Biden's promise.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
Is that the 'world beating' fully automated contact tracing app on your phone, or the pencil and paper, voluntary reporting, 'world beating' programme?
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Let me play Devil's Advocate here. Unfortunately, if you take the pessimistic view of this disease then we might be forced to live with social distancing for years. We may even be stuck with Covid-19 as a disruptive influence forever. It's not as if we have a special magic clock that tells us a vaccine or a treatment will come in X-number of months so all we have to do is hang in there. We might be hanging for the rest of human history. You assert that better solutions will be found. They might very well not be.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
Yes, we're a long way from that point due to the following:
a) Locking down late b) Not locking down particularly hard and opening other stuff up earlyish economically and socially which has pushed "R" up (Not over 1) c) Track and trace being half ready on release.
By October that might have changed to allow a 1.5 metre rule or some such with restaurants though.
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
Or a vaccine arrives, I think your last paragraph is correct though.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
That's the kind of figure I was taking into account in the comment Malmesbury was replying to.
No problem - I'm kinda arguing both sides here, really not sure what I think.
Updating the ICL model just now, it suggests today's figure would be 5k/day, while the ONS 8k/day estimate was an average over 26/apr to 24/may. It'll be really interesting to see if the ONS infection estimates are falling when they release the next update (Tuesday?).
Yes, that daily figure is an average over the last month. Although 5k a day seems too low for consistency with the estimate of 133,000 people testing positive (11-24 May), unless people continue to test positive for nearly 4 weeks on average.
5k/day also looks too low based on 2k announced cases today, although tbh I've no idea how the infections-cases relationship would look now (given that we'll be catching increasing numbers of asymptomatics via family testing, which wasn't the case until very recently).
If infection rates are actually no longer dropping we're really screwed - we'd maybe even have to tighten restrictions to escape this, and crush the virus levels down to near nothing. All eyes on next week's ONS figures then.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
Is that the 'world beating' fully automated contact tracing app on your phone, or the pencil and paper, voluntary reporting, 'world beating' programme?
Will contact tracing even work effectively if...
1. A great many cases are asymptomatic? 2. It turns out to be shit at identifying everyone who's been near even a symptomatic case? (Exactly what percentage of the people they were trying to track down from that Seoul nightclub have been found?) 3. The public aren't willing to bend in the required numbers to intrusive state surveillance and heavy criminal punishments for non-compliance with the rules?
Breaking news - my application to join the Labour Party has been rejected! *giggles*
I know for a fact that one of the people locally most stridently objecting to me defecting from the LibDems to support Starmer himself defected from the LibDems to support Jezbollah.
Breaking news - my application to join the Labour Party has been rejected! *giggles*
Well I know of one former green party activist in the "ooh Jeremy Corbyn" camp who was admitted to the party in the Autumn of 2015 having stood against the party in local elections in May 2015. She turned out to be all mouth and no trousers, one of those who tries to dominate meetings yet contributes diddly squat on the ground.
She wasn't subject to objections from a local faction more concerned to maintain the ideological purity of their local party than to accept that the party can only win as a coalition of different strands of the left who chooe to concentrate on what unites them. I presume that you were.
It's a shame anyway as you appear to be more supportive of the current leadership than many of those "inspired" by the previous leader.
I know for a fact that one of the people locally most stridently objecting to me defecting from the LibDems to support Starmer himself defected from the LibDems to support Jezbollah.
The difference in your case is likely to be that as a former - and recent - Labour activist, your defection will be seen by longstanding members as an act of betrayal - and agreeing to readmit you so soon might be viewed as offensive and a slap in face to them.Had you never previously been a Labour member but just a LibDem activist for a few years, it would be rather different. Personally I would be far more concerned about people such as Ian Austin, John Woodcock and Gisela Stuart who openly campaigned for Labour voters to support Johnson. They deserve a life ban - as would a BNP member - and to be confronted with the consequences of what they have helped foist on the country.
Its the opposite - most of the big hitter members were fine with it (several actively begging me to "come home"). Its the bitter Corbynites who have done me. Ah well. I hope they pour the same levels of bile on the former Labour voters who went Tory for the first time last year...
But hardly surprising that it is the leftwingers who hold the strongest views on the matter.
That's the kind of figure I was taking into account in the comment Malmesbury was replying to.
No problem - I'm kinda arguing both sides here, really not sure what I think.
Updating the ICL model just now, it suggests today's figure would be 5k/day, while the ONS 8k/day estimate was an average over 26/apr to 24/may. It'll be really interesting to see if the ONS infection estimates are falling when they release the next update (Tuesday?).
Yes, that daily figure is an average over the last month. Although 5k a day seems too low for consistency with the estimate of 133,000 people testing positive (11-24 May), unless people continue to test positive for nearly 4 weeks on average.
5k/day also looks too low based on 2k announced cases today, although tbh I've no idea how the infections-cases relationship would look now (given that we'll be catching increasing numbers of asymptomatics via family testing, which wasn't the case until very recently).
If it's no longer dropping we're really screwed - we'd have to actually tighten restrictions to escape this, and crush the virus levels down to near nothing. All eyes on next week's ONS figures then.
The number of infections has dropped at the same time lockdown has been lifted and also while much of the economy has restarted.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
Is that the 'world beating' fully automated contact tracing app on your phone, or the pencil and paper, voluntary reporting, 'world beating' programme?
Will contact tracing even work effectively if...
1. A great many cases are asymptomatic? 2. It turns out to be shit at identifying everyone who's been near even a symptomatic case? (Exactly what percentage of the people they were trying to track down from that Seoul nightclub have been found?) 3. The public aren't willing to bend in the required numbers to intrusive state surveillance and heavy criminal punishments for non-compliance with the rules?
The ability of pt 3 to work has been immensely damaged by the Cummings saga methinsk.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
I do. I would prefer lockdown to last longer to really suppress this virus rather than release too early and have that second (or third) wave. And it would be better for business too.
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
I think the only way we could relax social distancing would be to get the numbers down sufficiently for contact tracing to do all the work of suppressing the spread of the virus.
Is that the 'world beating' fully automated contact tracing app on your phone, or the pencil and paper, voluntary reporting, 'world beating' programme?
Will contact tracing even work effectively if...
1. A great many cases are asymptomatic? 2. It turns out to be shit at identifying everyone who's been near even a symptomatic case? (Exactly what percentage of the people they were trying to track down from that Seoul nightclub have been found?) 3. The public aren't willing to bend in the required numbers to intrusive state surveillance and heavy criminal punishments for non-compliance with the rules?
Point 3 would also trigger a vanity by-election in Howden and Haltemprice.
Even with a vaccine coronavirus is here to stay (like measles)
Paywalled but top tip: subscribe to the wapo cv email newsletter and all linked stories are free of charge. It's very USA centric but at least that's a change from ukcentric
Completely off-topic, but I've been watching the BBC's coverage of election nights. During the 2001 election night it strikes me how certain the pundits and politicians were that we were going to have a referendum on joining the Euro.
Anyway, one thing that puzzles me is that Frank Dobson said that joining at the current rate of exchange (around 1.67 to the pound) would be disastrous. Can someone who understands this better than I do, explain why that would have been the case?
Locks in a hugely strong value which would have seen massive movement of business to elsewhere in the EU. It's the opposite of what Germany did, they locked in a weak value and saw a huge boom afterwards.
Yeah but...
Don't forget that that wasn't the view on the DM-Euro exchange rate at the time. If you go back to the turn of the millennium, The Economist was running stories on "The Sick Man of the Euro".
The reality is that the Germany ran a trade deficit, and its economy was not competitive in 1999 because it had a sclerotic labour market and big East German unification bills. In the early 2000s, the Germans overhauled their Labour market to make it a lot more flexible (borrowing hard from the Thatcher/Howe reforms), and it was only then Germany became an export power-house.
Fact for the day: in 1999, Italy's exports as a percentage of GDP were 31%, while Germany's was 27%. It was Italy that was the export powerhouse, and Germany the laggard.
"Massive" Tory @BluestBlue praises the Government over Hong Kong.
Obviously, said poster has little or no knowledge of understanding of history. The late conversions of Patel and Raab to supporting the causes of the Hong Kong people stand in sharp contrast to the late Paddy Ashdown's nearly thirty year campaign to ensure those with BNO passports had the right to settle in the UK.
This call for 300,000 BNO passport holders in Hong Kong to have the right to settle in the UK was roundly rejected by BOTH Conservative and Labour Govenrments.
If you don't believe me, listen to another Conservative - I know most modern Tories don't consider Chris Patten to be a Conservative but he was MP for Bath as a Conservative and Party Chairman until his defeat in the 1992 GE.
This is Patten at the inaugural Hong Kong Watch Lord Ashdown Memorial Lecture on February 6th this year:
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
The health and safety advice that businesses I know/are involved with have been given is (cut down to a few words), you need a plan detailing your measures, 2m rule unless you have other mitigation in place (screens, PPE etc).
I don't see anyone being allowed to do different to that, in the near future.
I would be interested in the PB legal eagles opinion on locality contact tracing.
At our Trust we are planning to swab then isolate for 14 days all our planned admissions and all urgent admissions. Outpatients and daycase procedures not. If the T and T system localises transmission to our outpatients, what is the liability? Presumably the defence would be that we took all reasonable precautions?
Presumably similar issues arise in catering establishments, but by the nature of alcohol induced sociability, may be hard to establish that rules were not bent. Could be an expensive liability.
The UK has experienced its sunniest spring since records began in 1929, the Met Office has said.
The lack of aircraft generating vapour trails has had a big impact
I thought that the main contributory factor was alleged to be a massive drop in air pollution from road traffic, the theory being that the fine particulate matter pumped out by all those dirty shitty cars and trucks had been seeding cloud formation?
But yes, there are hardly any contrails visible around here nowadays. The lack of air traffic is really noticeable, the town being relatively close to both Luton and Stansted.
"Massive" Tory @BluestBlue praises the Government over Hong Kong.
Obviously, said poster has little or no knowledge of understanding of history. The late conversions of Patel and Raab to supporting the causes of the Hong Kong people stand in sharp contrast to the late Paddy Ashdown's nearly thirty year campaign to ensure those with BNO passports had the right to settle in the UK.
This call for 300,000 BNO passport holders in Hong Kong to have the right to settle in the UK was roundly rejected by BOTH Conservative and Labour Govenrments.
If you don't believe me, listen to another Conservative - I know most modern Tories don't consider Chris Patten to be a Conservative but he was MP for Bath as a Conservative and Party Chairman until his defeat in the 1992 GE.
This is Patten at the inaugural Hong Kong Watch Lord Ashdown Memorial Lecture on February 6th this year:
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
I agree that urgent and specific provision to protect the hospitality sector is needed, but one statistic jumped out at me during one of the recent press conferences: 1 metre of separation is 10-30 times as risky as 2 metres.
That makes the decision between them not a trivial matter, despite the economic considerations.
Why then are all other countries in Europe (other than Spain and one other) using 1 metre?
I think Guernsey (and New Zealand, which it copied it from) has a good compromise. 2m distancing in "open" environments (Supermarkets, retail) 1m distancing in "controlled" environments - eg restaurants that log contact details and locations of all clients, so "Track & Test" can quickly identify them.
Said at the time they were fighting the last pandemic...
That is a big story if true
It's very odd. Reading the tweets in that thread it's difficult to understand what was in their minds. On the one hand there is an emphasis on remaining within NHS capacity, which is only common sense. But on the other (not in the tweets) there was the expectation that most of the population would be infected over a two month period. I just don't understand how they thought those two could be reconciled.
Said at the time they were fighting the last pandemic...
That is a big story if true
I'm not sure I follow Carlotta's comments. The read from SAGE prior to lockdown was that the expected path of COVID would be similar to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group's model (which was by no means "the last war" - but rather a scenario with few historical parallels).
Although the government has not released the expectations under the controlled (lockdown) and uncontrolled scenarios adopted in late March, I think we can guess what sort of number was in them. 500,000+ fatalities.
In terms of whether we under or over-reacted, there is a sense that a realistic worse case that high was interpreted like a sort of tidal wave, with most preventative measures the equivalent of building a sandcastle to hold back the waves, so ironically eh worse we thought it would be the less we did.*
So in hindsight it appears this led to something of an under-reaction, followed by a lockdown which may (MAY) have have been an over-reaction.
(*This is consistent with the government's information to hospitals, to assume that they would be over-run, and its policy to clear beds.)
This is interesting. It implies, I think, that the government has decided not to enforce strict enough lockdown measures to get the number of infections to a level where test, track and trace becomes effective. Read whole thread including reply from Patrick Vallance
He can't praise the government because of the stances of previous governments?
As you seem happy to praise the Government whatever they say or do you'll forgive me if I don't take that trite comment too seriously.
I'm just trying to understand the point of your post. You were saying they have no knowledge of history, but I don't see how that is relevant to their praise of the action of the government today.
Said at the time they were fighting the last pandemic...
That is a big story if true
It's very odd. Reading the tweets in that thread it's difficult to understand what was in their minds. On the one hand there is an emphasis on remaining within NHS capacity, which is only common sense. But on the other (not in the tweets) there was the expectation that most of the population would be infected over a two month period. I just don't understand how they thought those two could be reconciled.
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Let me play Devil's Advocate here. Unfortunately, if you take the pessimistic view of this disease then we might be forced to live with social distancing for years. We may even be stuck with Covid-19 as a disruptive influence forever. It's not as if we have a special magic clock that tells us a vaccine or a treatment will come in X-number of months so all we have to do is hang in there. We might be hanging for the rest of human history. You assert that better solutions will be found. They might very well not be.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
That is what I fear.
But just imagine a world without places where people gather together to be close, without many close communal activities, without theatre, without communal singing, without sport and recreational activities. It is inhuman. It goes against the basic instinct of humans - to reach out, to be close to people, to be with people.
It is something we have done throughout recorded history. Do we really think that we can abandon all that?
I know I am going on and, yes, I have a personal connection. But please understand: if we end up going down this route we end up destroying lives too, just as much as letting the virus rip - and I most certainly do not want that.
I'm just trying to understand the point of your post. You were saying they have no knowledge of history, but I don't see how that is relevant to their praise of the action of the government today.
Why don't you read the whole of the post instead of fixating on one sentence? That's a typical tactic to divert attention from the real content.
But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
There have been serious global pandemics at least every century through history. This isn’t even one of the particularly bad ones - although it is the first of the Information Age so we have it reported in real time. Many of the precious diseases are still out there. No pandemic has ever resulted in significant permanent change in human behaviour, which is what you are suggesting might happen. Basic human courtship, marriage, rites of passage - rituals that have anthropological counterparts in nearly every society will not social distance. If we have to live with it then we will live with it. Eating communally is a significant part, and has always been a significant part, of human behaviour. The current crop of restaurants and bars may go bust but they will, eventually, be replaced. And people will want to dance and sing as every society in the world does.
People on this board sometimes forget that social distancing for large parts of the world is utterly impossible. Sadly if no vaccine or treatment is found then it will just slowly work its way through the population with devastating effects on the vulnerable. And then once it has done so, in four or five years at most, there will be some sort of herd immunity.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
BTW my MP Trudi Harrison responded on Cummings by writing a lengthy email setting out his version of events and saying that we should all move on. She didn’t even say that she would have acted differently. To be expected, given that she is Boris’s PPS, I suppose.
I agree that urgent and specific provision to protect the hospitality sector is needed, but one statistic jumped out at me during one of the recent press conferences: 1 metre of separation is 10-30 times as risky as 2 metres.
That makes the decision between them not a trivial matter, despite the economic considerations.
Why then are all other countries in Europe (other than Spain and one other) using 1 metre?
Because in contrast to the UK they aren't blessed with the sort of wazzocks who blithely swan around acting as though 2 metres means 2 feet?
I'm just trying to understand the point of your post. You were saying they have no knowledge of history, but I don't see how that is relevant to their praise of the action of the government today.
Why don't you read the whole of the post instead of fixating on one sentence? That's a typical tactic to divert attention from the real content.
Go on, try it for once.
I read the whole post. It opened with an attack on a poster, criticising their praise and admonishing them for not knowing their history. I simply don't see why the history of this, that you described quite accurately, means that they can't praise the action today.
In Guernsey they report the number of people tested - the CMO once off handedly remarked, "Maybe we should show the number of tests carried out - its a lot more than "people tested"" (at least double).
If anyone wants to know what 2m social distancing in a cinema looks like, here's one that's just re-opened in my neck of the woods. 112 seats, reduced to 32.
They're struggling to fill any seats at all for most performances, a combination of no new releases and people preferring to stay home for a while longer.
Completely off-topic, but I've been watching the BBC's coverage of election nights. During the 2001 election night it strikes me how certain the pundits and politicians were that we were going to have a referendum on joining the Euro.
Anyway, one thing that puzzles me is that Frank Dobson said that joining at the current rate of exchange (around 1.67 to the pound) would be disastrous. Can someone who understands this better than I do, explain why that would have been the case?
Locks in a hugely strong value which would have seen massive movement of business to elsewhere in the EU. It's the opposite of what Germany did, they locked in a weak value and saw a huge boom afterwards.
But one could not know that at the time. The value was the value.
The effects of locking in an exchange rate were know and talked about.
Many in banking were startled that the Germans had managed to lock in such a low rate. There were articles in the Economist etc about the effects on the rest of Europe...
That's simply not true.
Find me a single article saying the Germany exchange rate was too low from the time.
Don't forget that Germany ran a current account deficit in every year from 1991 to 2001. In the late 1990s, Italy was running big surpluses and Germany big deficits.
I read the whole post. It opened with an attack on a poster, criticising their praise and admonishing them for not knowing their history. I simply don't see why the history of this, that you described quite accurately, means that they can't praise the action today.
This is the bear pit - if all a poster ever offers is one-sided partisan comment they can expect to be called out once in a while.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
More importantly, if we get a second wave that looks like Milan or New York City, then people will self isolate anyway. You end up - like Sweden has - with de facto lockdown.
I read the whole post. It opened with an attack on a poster, criticising their praise and admonishing them for not knowing their history. I simply don't see why the history of this, that you described quite accurately, means that they can't praise the action today.
This is the bear pit - if all a poster ever offers is one-sided partisan comment they can expect to be called out once in a while.
What has that got to do with them knowing their history or not? BN(O) rights is hardly a topic that comes up often here, they could have been chomping at the bit for this change for decades for all we know.
In Guernsey they report the number of people tested - the CMO once off handedly remarked, "Maybe we should show the number of tests carried out - its a lot more than "people tested"" (at least double).
The Gov't has some horrendous decisions to make around certain parts of the hospitality industry. You'd have thought they'd want to get to those with as much goodwill in the bank as possible, but apparently saving an advisor was deemed more important to use that particular capital on.
Sounds like they've already made their decisions. Any business unable to trade successfully under whatever restrictions are still in force in September will be abandoned to die.
My interpretation is that they feel that they can't keep furlough going indefinitely so they're going to try to tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)
Retail and leisure will simply shrink and shrink and shrink, until the remaining number of providers equals the remaining number of available customers for the remaining permitted activities.
You may well be right.
But this sentence - “tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)”
Does the government really believe this? What alternative sources of employment, for a start?
Said at the time they were fighting the last pandemic...
Wasn't it obvious almost immediately that it wasn't the same as flu, in that it doesn't affect young people and children as flu does?
Also explains why the at risk groups were based on flu vaccine, despite it being very much not flu. I said a lot at the time about how I thought SAGE were wrong and it gives me no pleasure to find out just how badly. So SAGE screwed up the initial stage into lockdown and government are now screwing up the move out of it. I’ve not commented much in the last few days because all I see is a strategy, such as it is, falling apart and it’s too depressing to watch. God help us if there’s a second wave because I’m not sure I can trust that lessons have been learned.
What has that got to do with them knowing their history or not? BN(O) rights is hardly a topic that comes up often here, they could have been chomping at the bit for this change for decades for all we know.
I really don't care - if you want to discuss the question of whether BNO passport holders in Hong Kong should have the right to settle in the UK and what if anything we can do about the deteriorating position in Hong Kong, I'm happy so to do.
If you're more interested in an aside than the main comment, I'll let it go and hopefully try to find something you will engage on one day though after nearly 50,000 posts I really don't have a feel for your opinions on anything apart from a vague sense you are a partisan Conservative supporter.
The Gov't has some horrendous decisions to make around certain parts of the hospitality industry. You'd have thought they'd want to get to those with as much goodwill in the bank as possible, but apparently saving an advisor was deemed more important to use that particular capital on.
Sounds like they've already made their decisions. Any business unable to trade successfully under whatever restrictions are still in force in September will be abandoned to die.
My interpretation is that they feel that they can't keep furlough going indefinitely so they're going to try to tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)
Retail and leisure will simply shrink and shrink and shrink, until the remaining number of providers equals the remaining number of available customers for the remaining permitted activities.
You may well be right.
But this sentence - “tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)”
Does the government really believe this? What alternative sources of employment, for a start?
It’s delusional if this is their plan.
I grew up in a mining town and turned 16 in 1982. Believe me it would be far from unprecedented.
I think the only workable solution to restaurants and pubs and cinemas and so on is voluntary assumption of risk. Have 2 metre pubs, 1 metre pubs and no limit at all pubs: enter whichever you like at your own risk - if the risks entailed by smoking are still ones one can legally decide to accept, so are these. The older and more cautious can stay in their homes and choose whom to admit on the basis of their declared level of risk in the past month (and don't admit them if you don't trust them). You would obviously have to protect staff in no limit establishments but actually that's not impossible, just double the width of the bar. Society can segregate itself according to risk tolerance and everybody is happy.
What has that got to do with them knowing their history or not? BN(O) rights is hardly a topic that comes up often here, they could have been chomping at the bit for this change for decades for all we know.
I really don't care - if you want to discuss the question of whether BNO passport holders in Hong Kong should have the right to settle in the UK and what if anything we can do about the deteriorating position in Hong Kong, I'm happy so to do.
If you're more interested in an aside than the main comment, I'll let it go and hopefully try to find something you will engage on one day though after nearly 50,000 posts I really don't have a feel for your opinions on anything apart from a vague sense you are a partisan Conservative supporter.
You don't care? Why did you open your post with a tirade about how they didn't understand their history then.
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Let me play Devil's Advocate here. Unfortunately, if you take the pessimistic view of this disease then we might be forced to live with social distancing for years. We may even be stuck with Covid-19 as a disruptive influence forever. It's not as if we have a special magic clock that tells us a vaccine or a treatment will come in X-number of months so all we have to do is hang in there. We might be hanging for the rest of human history. You assert that better solutions will be found. They might very well not be.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
That is what I fear.
But just imagine a world without places where people gather together to be close, without many close communal activities, without theatre, without communal singing, without sport and recreational activities. It is inhuman. It goes against the basic instinct of humans - to reach out, to be close to people, to be with people.
It is something we have done throughout recorded history. Do we really think that we can abandon all that?
I know I am going on and, yes, I have a personal connection. But please understand: if we end up going down this route we end up destroying lives too, just as much as letting the virus rip - and I most certainly do not want that.
Like I said, hopefully there will be a shortcut out of this mess - but if there isn't, then the longer it drags on for the greater the tension between the pro-and anti-lockdown tendencies within society will become.
To put it crudely and brutally, increasing numbers of people will not be prepared to tolerate having their livelihoods laid waste, activities that they view as central to their way of life prohibited (indefinitely, and perhaps forever,) or both, in order to save a cohort of mostly medically vulnerable or frail elderly potential victims, probably representing less than 1% of the population, from death. You can argue the toss over the rights or wrongs of that attitude until the end of time, but it doesn't do anything to change the fact that it exists.
I'm sure that lockdown is already crumbling under the pressure and has been for some time. I was out for a walk today to the local beauty spot on the outskirts of town, lots of people walking about and taking out dogs or having picnics. Apparently most people were still sticking to the social distancing rules - except for the obvious knot of about a dozen young lads all milling about in a group. Who's going to command people like that - especially those in age and health categories who are frankly more likely to be struck by lightning than die of this disease - to spend one year, or five years, or their rest of their lives staying 2m apart from all their friends? Actually, who has the moral right to demand that of them?
Where is this all going to end up? Your guess is as good as mine.
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Let me play Devil's Advocate here. Unfortunately, if you take the pessimistic view of this disease then we might be forced to live with social distancing for years. We may even be stuck with Covid-19 as a disruptive influence forever. It's not as if we have a special magic clock that tells us a vaccine or a treatment will come in X-number of months so all we have to do is hang in there. We might be hanging for the rest of human history. You assert that better solutions will be found. They might very well not be.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
I can certainly see your point - but to take the step of writing off the whole hospitality industry and accepting the permanent end of restaurants and bars and places of entertainment as we know them is, I would argue, very much premature.
It’s been, what, 66 days since we went into lockdown. Less than 10 weeks. A little over 1500 hours. We have something like 70 vaccines in development, many of which look promising, at least one of which could feasibly be with us in a few months. We’ve ruled out some treatments and found others which look promising. A 20-minute test is actively being trialed for mass roll-out.
Allowing that destruction is definitely premature - even creative destruction has major economic frictions and costs at best, and massive personal and social costs for many. Supporting that sector for some more weeks would be easily the better option - rebuilding it after allowing it to collapse would be colossally wasteful and costly.
I presume nice companies with a little cash will stump up the lowish contributions in Aug-Oct to get some income to their furloughed staff, while not so nice companies will cut them off after July.
Oh FFS! It’s not a question of being nice or not nice. It’s a question of not having the income and not being able to afford it. The rules on trading while insolvent have not been abolished.
Even those restaurants and pubs doing takeaways are losing money, just losing it less slowly than they might otherwise.
Is the 2 metre rule written in law anywhere ?
I believe that it would be enforced, as part of a risk assessment/plan, by HSE, on business premises.
And if it is, it means closure of thousands of businesses. Every pub and restaurant, cafe and club for miles around where I am living would have to close. That stuffs the local suppliers, the farmers, the local tourism sector, all the owners of holiday lets and B&B’s and all the local activities which visitors come up here for.
Does the government have any idea of what this means in practice for large areas of the country?
Do you have any idea what a second wave will mean?
Not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the economic effect. Not just on a particular sector, but for the whole economy.
More importantly, if we get a second wave that looks like Milan or New York City, then people will self isolate anyway. You end up - like Sweden has - with de facto lockdown.
Good point. The first wave will have been a dry run (!) for the second wave. Hopefully lessons will have been learnt in the the dress rehearsal.
Completely off-topic, but I've been watching the BBC's coverage of election nights. During the 2001 election night it strikes me how certain the pundits and politicians were that we were going to have a referendum on joining the Euro.
Anyway, one thing that puzzles me is that Frank Dobson said that joining at the current rate of exchange (around 1.67 to the pound) would be disastrous. Can someone who understands this better than I do, explain why that would have been the case?
Locks in a hugely strong value which would have seen massive movement of business to elsewhere in the EU. It's the opposite of what Germany did, they locked in a weak value and saw a huge boom afterwards.
Yeah but...
Don't forget that that wasn't the view on the DM-Euro exchange rate at the time. If you go back to the turn of the millennium, The Economist was running stories on "The Sick Man of the Euro".
The reality is that the Germany ran a trade deficit, and its economy was not competitive in 1999 because it had a sclerotic labour market and big East German unification bills. In the early 2000s, the Germans overhauled their Labour market to make it a lot more flexible (borrowing hard from the Thatcher/Howe reforms), and it was only then Germany became an export power-house.
Fact for the day: in 1999, Italy's exports as a percentage of GDP were 31%, while Germany's was 27%. It was Italy that was the export powerhouse, and Germany the laggard.
I'm just reading the Economist "sick man of the Euro" piece, and it's fascinating how times have changed. The piece praises "the resilience of the German consumer", something which no-one does today.
My main takeaway is not to assume that the world in twenty years time is not necessarily going to look anything like it does today.
It’s essential to continue support to the hospitality sector at least. Otherwise the economic damage there will be staggering. We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them. We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas. We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
Let me play Devil's Advocate here. Unfortunately, if you take the pessimistic view of this disease then we might be forced to live with social distancing for years. We may even be stuck with Covid-19 as a disruptive influence forever. It's not as if we have a special magic clock that tells us a vaccine or a treatment will come in X-number of months so all we have to do is hang in there. We might be hanging for the rest of human history. You assert that better solutions will be found. They might very well not be.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
That is what I fear.
But just imagine a world without places where people gather together to be close, without many close communal activities, without theatre, without communal singing, without sport and recreational activities. It is inhuman. It goes against the basic instinct of humans - to reach out, to be close to people, to be with people.
It is something we have done throughout recorded history. Do we really think that we can abandon all that?
I know I am going on and, yes, I have a personal connection. But please understand: if we end up going down this route we end up destroying lives too, just as much as letting the virus rip - and I most certainly do not want that.
Like I said, hopefully there will be a shortcut out of this mess - but if there isn't, then the longer it drags on for the greater the tension between the pro-and anti-lockdown tendencies within society will become.
To put it crudely and brutally, increasing numbers of people will not be prepared to tolerate having their livelihoods laid waste, activities that they view as central to their way of life prohibited (indefinitely, and perhaps forever,) or both, in order to save a cohort of mostly medically vulnerable or frail elderly potential victims, probably representing less than 1% of the population, from death. You can argue the toss over the rights or wrongs of that attitude until the end of time, but it doesn't do anything to change the fact that it exists.
I'm sure that lockdown is already crumbling under the pressure and has been for some time. I was out for a walk today to the local beauty spot on the outskirts of town, lots of people walking about and taking out dogs or having picnics. Apparently most people were still sticking to the social distancing rules - except for the obvious knot of about a dozen young lads all milling about in a group. Who's going to command people like that - especially those in age and health categories who are frankly more likely to be struck by lightning than die of this disease - to spend one year, or five years, or their rest of their lives staying 2m apart from all their friends? Actually, who has the moral right to demand that of them?
Where is this all going to end up? Your guess is as good as mine.
I think that is right. It would be better if the Government tried to reopen communal spaces where people can congregate safely than wait for the young lads you mention arranging parties and gatherings via social media this winter because it’s too cold to meet outside.
Comments
https://twitter.com/YuanfenYang/status/1266408639390085120?s=20
I have a feeling if a second wave comes quickly after the first, Johnson and Cummings might just think to hell with it, Herd immunity it is. They won't go for that in Wales and Scotland.
As for my disruption, you genuinely have no idea. You dislike me because I dislike your precious Jeremy. Happily the lunatics are being weeded out and will soon be as irrelevant to the party as they used to be. "going on and on about the previous regime" - thats the ex Labour voters mate.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1266441387701964801?s=20
A second wave hits and all those 'we can just about survive the lockdown' companies in ALL sectors go bust. Overnight.
The owners of companies that have used accumulated capital to get through one lockdown might not have the will or ability to stump up again.
Investment confidence (already low) will hit the floor. IMO social distancing is what saves the rest of the economy; it isn't without costs, but avoiding a second wave is worth the costs. There will no doubt be pressure, rightly, to support struggling industries - and I hope that happens. However, it must be remembered that all business involves risk. No one is guaranteed a profit despite working tremendously hard. Sometimes luck plays a tremendous part, and timing too. Its why I am very pleased the govt. didn't help out Ltd company directors dividends - that would be guaranteeing profit, and wouldn't wash.
Lots of companies I know (outside the hospitality sector) are paying their staff 100% now, but only claiming 80%. Thats what I am doing. I'm pretty realistic that profit, which makes up 80% of my income, is going to be severely down this year. However I'm in a much better position than my staff, and they deserve my loyalty, given they've been loyal to me over the years.
To be honest even 80% to the end of August is pretty generous; remember that many very small businesses won't be paying much employer NI because of the exemption, and many employers will have opted out of pensions too. And then only 10% less in September and only one month at 20% less. I'm (yet again) impressed by the treasury.
I know @Cyclefree has a personal link, but @FF43's comment was pretty accurate - mature businesses who are able (i.e. with a bit of a cash pile, or supportive owners willing to make the investment) will try to keep their staff if they see an end in sight. A second wave that necessitates any form of tightened restrictions changes that. It must be avoided at all costs.
And in the light of the antibody surveys, there is no longer any doubt about how many deaths it would involve.
Italy 04/03/20
Spain 12/03/20
UK 17/03/20
it shows that the UK had less warning time than that.
The problem was that the UK thought it had more time than it did have.
Updating the ICL model just now, it suggests today's figure would be 5k/day, while the ONS 8k/day estimate was an average over 26/apr to 24/may. It'll be really interesting to see if the ONS infection estimates are falling when they release the next update (Tuesday?).
That makes the decision between them not a trivial matter, despite the economic considerations.
My interpretation is that they feel that they can't keep furlough going indefinitely so they're going to try to tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)
Retail and leisure will simply shrink and shrink and shrink, until the remaining number of providers equals the remaining number of available customers for the remaining permitted activities.
We can’t let the virus rip anywhere - it would affect everyone (personal responsibility is only valid when the consequences are personally limited; as with drunk driving). In addition, any increase in deaths would see widespread avoidance of them even if they’re open; that’s equally damaging to them.
We can’t accept widespread collapse of our bars, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas.
We therefore have to continue supporting them until better solutions are found - and they will be found.
Sunak not exempting them from this reduction is a major unforced error.
If the government imposes these requirements - whether in law or via the HSE - they are effectively closing down such businesses. That may be the decision the government wants to make. But it needs to be open about it, the sooner the better instead of giving people and businesses false hope.
If we're threatening China by offering citizenship, perhaps we should threaten the EU by offering free movement to its citizens. Get a brain drain going.
https://twitter.com/GroomB/status/1266441978436255752?s=20
Said at the time they were fighting the last pandemic...
Opening up and then having to close again would be dreadful.
I would rather have a longer lockdown and then when we reopen / release we do so properly.
She won't frighten the horses, but she keeps Biden's promise.
In that case what do we do? If we aren't prepared to let the disease do its worst, kill whoever it is going to kill and then move on, then letting most of the hospitality sector turn up its toes and die could be viewed as unavoidable, even necessary. What else are we meant to do with restaurants containing lots of tables all crammed together that can't open for five or ten or a hundred bloody years because of the wretched 2m rule that seems now to be viewed as indispensable?
I mean, personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't be the case - either the theories that suggest the disease is less widely transmissible than thought will prove to be correct, or a vaccine or effective treatment won't take an eternity to turn up, or social distancing can be substantially relaxed without causing a tsunami wave of illness. But what if I'm wrong, and therefore the restaurant trade and many, many other places of entertainment as we know them are absolutely and totally finished (either because Government never lets them trade again, or too many people are too frightened to set foot in them ever again?)
In that case, I'm afraid that the principle of creative destruction asserts itself. There will still be a demand for leisure activities, but they will have to be reinvented to allow for social distancing. And all the businesses that can't function with social distancing in place must necessarily die.
a) Locking down late
b) Not locking down particularly hard and opening other stuff up earlyish economically and socially which has pushed "R" up (Not over 1)
c) Track and trace being half ready on release.
By October that might have changed to allow a 1.5 metre rule or some such with restaurants though.
If infection rates are actually no longer dropping we're really screwed - we'd maybe even have to tighten restrictions to escape this, and crush the virus levels down to near nothing. All eyes on next week's ONS figures then.
1. A great many cases are asymptomatic?
2. It turns out to be shit at identifying everyone who's been near even a symptomatic case? (Exactly what percentage of the people they were trying to track down from that Seoul nightclub have been found?)
3. The public aren't willing to bend in the required numbers to intrusive state surveillance and heavy criminal punishments for non-compliance with the rules?
That can only be viewed as very positive.
Even with a vaccine coronavirus is here to stay (like measles)
Paywalled but top tip: subscribe to the wapo cv email newsletter and all linked stories are free of charge. It's very USA centric but at least that's a change from ukcentric
https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/#/newsletters
Third in the list
Don't forget that that wasn't the view on the DM-Euro exchange rate at the time. If you go back to the turn of the millennium, The Economist was running stories on "The Sick Man of the Euro".
The reality is that the Germany ran a trade deficit, and its economy was not competitive in 1999 because it had a sclerotic labour market and big East German unification bills. In the early 2000s, the Germans overhauled their Labour market to make it a lot more flexible (borrowing hard from the Thatcher/Howe reforms), and it was only then Germany became an export power-house.
Fact for the day: in 1999, Italy's exports as a percentage of GDP were 31%, while Germany's was 27%. It was Italy that was the export powerhouse, and Germany the laggard.
"Massive" Tory @BluestBlue praises the Government over Hong Kong.
Obviously, said poster has little or no knowledge of understanding of history. The late conversions of Patel and Raab to supporting the causes of the Hong Kong people stand in sharp contrast to the late Paddy Ashdown's nearly thirty year campaign to ensure those with BNO passports had the right to settle in the UK.
This call for 300,000 BNO passport holders in Hong Kong to have the right to settle in the UK was roundly rejected by BOTH Conservative and Labour Govenrments.
If you don't believe me, listen to another Conservative - I know most modern Tories don't consider Chris Patten to be a Conservative but he was MP for Bath as a Conservative and Party Chairman until his defeat in the 1992 GE.
This is Patten at the inaugural Hong Kong Watch Lord Ashdown Memorial Lecture on February 6th this year:
https://www.hongkongwatch.org/all-posts/2020/2/6/in-full-lord-pattens-remarks-at-the-paddy-ashdown-memorial-lecture
At our Trust we are planning to swab then isolate for 14 days all our planned admissions and all urgent admissions. Outpatients and daycase procedures not. If the T and T system localises transmission to our outpatients, what is the liability? Presumably the defence would be that we took all reasonable precautions?
Presumably similar issues arise in catering establishments, but by the nature of alcohol induced sociability, may be hard to establish that rules were not bent. Could be an expensive liability.
But yes, there are hardly any contrails visible around here nowadays. The lack of air traffic is really noticeable, the town being relatively close to both Luton and Stansted.
The World Health Organization recommends at least a meter, or a little more than 3 feet. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends six feet. German and Australian authorities split the difference.
https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/one-meter-six-feet-how-social-distancing-guidelines-vary-across-countries-1.625118#correction
I think Guernsey (and New Zealand, which it copied it from) has a good compromise. 2m distancing in "open" environments (Supermarkets, retail) 1m distancing in "controlled" environments - eg restaurants that log contact details and locations of all clients, so "Track & Test" can quickly identify them.
https://twitter.com/commonsstc/status/1266389200888311811?s=21
Although the government has not released the expectations under the controlled (lockdown) and uncontrolled scenarios adopted in late March, I think we can guess what sort of number was in them. 500,000+ fatalities.
In terms of whether we under or over-reacted, there is a sense that a realistic worse case that high was interpreted like a sort of tidal wave, with most preventative measures the equivalent of building a sandcastle to hold back the waves, so ironically eh worse we thought it would be the less we did.*
So in hindsight it appears this led to something of an under-reaction, followed by a lockdown which may (MAY) have have been an over-reaction.
(*This is consistent with the government's information to hospitals, to assume that they would be over-run, and its policy to clear beds.)
It can't have done any harm, but I suspect there were bigger forces at play....
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1266443067479019520
But just imagine a world without places where people gather together to be close, without many close communal activities, without theatre, without communal singing, without sport and recreational activities. It is inhuman. It goes against the basic instinct of humans - to reach out, to be close to people, to be with people.
It is something we have done throughout recorded history. Do we really think that we can abandon all that?
I know I am going on and, yes, I have a personal connection. But please understand: if we end up going down this route we end up destroying lives too, just as much as letting the virus rip - and I most certainly do not want that.
Go on, try it for once.
People on this board sometimes forget that social distancing for large parts of the world is utterly impossible. Sadly if no vaccine or treatment is found then it will just slowly work its way through the population with devastating effects on the vulnerable. And then once it has done so, in four or five years at most, there will be some sort of herd immunity.
In Guernsey they report the number of people tested - the CMO once off handedly remarked, "Maybe we should show the number of tests carried out - its a lot more than "people tested"" (at least double).
They're struggling to fill any seats at all for most performances, a combination of no new releases and people preferring to stay home for a while longer.
Find me a single article saying the Germany exchange rate was too low from the time.
Don't forget that Germany ran a current account deficit in every year from 1991 to 2001. In the late 1990s, Italy was running big surpluses and Germany big deficits.
In contrast say to a supermarket where you might be within 10 yards of 10 people and acting quite legally.
But this sentence - “tough out mass unemployment, let the unlucky workers rot on Universal Credit for a couple of years, and hope that the bombed out sectors are resurrected or replaced by alternative sources of employment after the virus is dealt with (but before the next election.)”
Does the government really believe this? What alternative sources of employment, for a start?
It’s delusional if this is their plan.
If you're more interested in an aside than the main comment, I'll let it go and hopefully try to find something you will engage on one day though after nearly 50,000 posts I really don't have a feel for your opinions on anything apart from a vague sense you are a partisan Conservative supporter.
Believe me it would be far from unprecedented.
To put it crudely and brutally, increasing numbers of people will not be prepared to tolerate having their livelihoods laid waste, activities that they view as central to their way of life prohibited (indefinitely, and perhaps forever,) or both, in order to save a cohort of mostly medically vulnerable or frail elderly potential victims, probably representing less than 1% of the population, from death. You can argue the toss over the rights or wrongs of that attitude until the end of time, but it doesn't do anything to change the fact that it exists.
I'm sure that lockdown is already crumbling under the pressure and has been for some time. I was out for a walk today to the local beauty spot on the outskirts of town, lots of people walking about and taking out dogs or having picnics. Apparently most people were still sticking to the social distancing rules - except for the obvious knot of about a dozen young lads all milling about in a group. Who's going to command people like that - especially those in age and health categories who are frankly more likely to be struck by lightning than die of this disease - to spend one year, or five years, or their rest of their lives staying 2m apart from all their friends? Actually, who has the moral right to demand that of them?
Where is this all going to end up? Your guess is as good as mine.
It’s been, what, 66 days since we went into lockdown. Less than 10 weeks. A little over 1500 hours.
We have something like 70 vaccines in development, many of which look promising, at least one of which could feasibly be with us in a few months. We’ve ruled out some treatments and found others which look promising. A 20-minute test is actively being trialed for mass roll-out.
Allowing that destruction is definitely premature - even creative destruction has major economic frictions and costs at best, and massive personal and social costs for many. Supporting that sector for some more weeks would be easily the better option - rebuilding it after allowing it to collapse would be colossally wasteful and costly.
My main takeaway is not to assume that the world in twenty years time is not necessarily going to look anything like it does today.