I think the only workable solution to restaurants and pubs and cinemas .....
A cinema near here adapted: they're making a drive-in cinema, a la 50s America. Social distancing maintained, and the novelty factor should make it appealing. Also relatively cheap to do I'd have guessed - you could open late night in supermarket carparks, or fields near the edge of town.
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?
Come off it, I grew up in Italy. They are not observing social distancing, whatever the rules might say. Jesus! In parts of Naples there are streets which are barely that wide.
Anyway there seem to be a variety of distances used in Europe contrary to what I initially said.
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.
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.
That's the question which will come up at the Inquiry.
(Disclaimer: I'm a physics PhD who teaches A Level and GCSE. I get numbers, but not the details here.)
Very roughly, the equations behind a pandemic lead to a few stable solutions.
1 "You can't hold it back, because it spreads too quickly". Prepare the field hospitals and mass graves.
2 "You can't stop it, but you can slow it". This is flattening the curve. You do some mitigation measures so that not many people get sick and die each day, but you accept that everyone has got to get it, and lots will still die on the way. This might be better than case 1 if curve-flattening lets you treat some people more effectively.
3 "You can squash it then slow it a lot". Use fairly brutal measures to deal with the initial outbreak, then softer measures to keep the rate linear, not exponential. The thing here is that you can kind of choose your long-term daily rate; the more effort you put into the squashing, the lower the long-term rate is.
4 "Squash it and job done".
At the start, we didn't really know which solution Covid-19 would follow. Knowing what we know now, it looks like it's model 3; you can keep R = 1 with a meaningful and manageable degree of distancing, testing and tracking. We didn't know that back in March- if the parameters of the infection had been a bit different, we might have been stuck with a choice between 1 and 2.
But knowing what we know now, I'm pretty sure we won't get to herd immunity by infection, one way or another.
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?
Come off it, I grew up in Italy. They are not observing social distancing, whatever the rules might say. Jesus! In parts of Naples there are streets which are barely that wide.
Anyway there seem to be a variety of distances used in Europe contrary to what I initially said.
The Italians are being quite good about mask wearing, though, aren't they?
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.
Agreed. But that would involve a level of flexibility in EHO that may not exist unless government intervenes.
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.
Yeah. I find the "people won't put up with a second lockdown" argument a little curious. Most people managed the first. And they'd have a much better idea of coping strategies for a second. Moreover, so will everyone else. In government, business, the media, councils and crucially the health service.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
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.
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
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?
Come off it, I grew up in Italy. They are not observing social distancing, whatever the rules might say. Jesus! In parts of Naples there are streets which are barely that wide.
Anyway there seem to be a variety of distances used in Europe contrary to what I initially said.
The Italians are being quite good about mask wearing, though, aren't they?
Yes - a mystery why we are being such wusses about wearing them. On the one occasion(other than 2 funerals) I have had to leave my home I wore a home-made one. I was the only person.
It seems such a sensible thing to do, even if its effectiveness may be limited. Better than nothing.
You don't care? Why did you open your post with a tirade about how they didn't understand their history then.
Why have you not responded to the main content of the post and have fixated solely on the first two sentences?
As to how I interact with another poster, that's my business, not yours. Who appointed you the moral guardian of this site?
I have responded to that, I said it was an accurate description of the history of the subject. Still don't see why that should prevent someone from praising the decision/plan mooted today.
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.
Yeah. I find the "people won't put up with a second lockdown" argument a little curious. Most people managed the first. And they'd have a much better idea of coping strategies for a second. Moreover, so will everyone else. In government, business, the media, councils and crucially the health service.
Most people already have a 5 year stockpile of pasta and bog roll. And have discovered that they can't bake.
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Where do you get your six months figure from?
SARS and MERS both had strong (albeit on a downward curve) antibody responses out to four years.
The other thing people forget is that this isn't one and zero, where on the 366th day you suddenly become eligible to catch the disease. This is a long sliding scale, and even on day 10,000 you'll probably still have a little bit of immunity. This means both (a) R won't be the same the next time around, and (b) people who do get it won't get it so bad because although their immune system won't be completely primed, nor will it be completely ignorant.
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.
Yeah. I find the "people won't put up with a second lockdown" argument a little curious. Most people managed the first. And they'd have a much better idea of coping strategies for a second. Moreover, so will everyone else. In government, business, the media, councils and crucially the health service.
Most people already have a 5 year stockpile of pasta and bog roll. And have discovered that they can't bake.
I've discovered I don't like my neighbours to be at home ALL THE BLOODY TIME!!
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Of course the herd immunity approach also gives the virus many more opportunities to mutate, not necessarily in a good way.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
It is still plausible by 2024 to blame it on local Labour Party corruption and an intransigent EU. It's the Trump playbook, but it might still work!
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
The pain will be shared around a bit more. No comfort for those affected, of course. But I reckon we're looking at 2-3 million on UC for a good few years. Whatever the government does to be frank.
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
Thanks for that.
The very early stages will be the most interesting. I don't think Boris had his eye on the ball but you may well be right that the the advice from SAGE was incorrect. I still remain intrigued as to why Sturgeon's ratings seem to be doing very well and Johnson's have declined significantly during the crisis. Not sure where Drakeford's polling was before or now to be honest.
I hope that the easing of lockdown hasn't just be an attempt to create a diversion away from the Cummings problem. I am concerned that our infections seem to still be in the thousands every day whereas the Italians, Spanish, French and Germans are in the hundreds. (Even accepting that the Worldometer figures are imperfect)
From what I can see on my limited trips out people don't seem to be taking many precautions. We seem to have far fewer mask wearers than elsewhere - I think RCS commented even in LA 60-70% of people were wearing a mask.
What is going to kill Boris and, more importantly, kill any economic recovery is if we suffer a second wave which others avoid. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we don't.
Thank you for your response and I agree wholeheartedly
This forum is at it's best when arguments are made and discussed and so often we have more that unites us than divides us
Indeed. Difficult to feel optimistic at the moment. What is your son-in-law's (?) take on Airbuses future? We don't live a million miles away from Broughton
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?
Much, much more importantly the flu plan assumed that we would be able to use our tamiflu and other anti-flu stocks to have some positive effect our front line health workers.
That was not an option available to us with corona virus so the let it rip plan so fatally flawed from the off.
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Where do you get your six months figure from?
SARS and MERS both had strong (albeit on a downward curve) antibody responses out to four years.
The other thing people forget is that this isn't one and zero, where on the 366th day you suddenly become eligible to catch the disease. This is a long sliding scale, and even on day 10,000 you'll probably still have a little bit of immunity. This means both (a) R won't be the same the next time around, and (b) people who do get it won't get it so bad because although their immune system won't be completely primed, nor will it be completely ignorant.
An alarmingly short duration of protective immunity to coronaviruses was found by both analyses. We saw frequent reinfections at 12 months post-infection and a substantial reduction in antibody levels as soon as 6 months post-infection.
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
No need to worry about pensions and care homes then.
And there will be far fewer people wanting to study into their mid 20s as opposed to getting paid employment.
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.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Where do you get your six months figure from?
SARS and MERS both had strong (albeit on a downward curve) antibody responses out to four years.
The other thing people forget is that this isn't one and zero, where on the 366th day you suddenly become eligible to catch the disease. This is a long sliding scale, and even on day 10,000 you'll probably still have a little bit of immunity. This means both (a) R won't be the same the next time around, and (b) people who do get it won't get it so bad because although their immune system won't be completely primed, nor will it be completely ignorant.
The ones from the common cold. I believe that the worse the illness, the greater the antibody response, so it should be well above the common cold. But, as the fatality rate is a lot lower than SARS or MERS, it would be reasonable for it to be less than theirs.
I’ll emphasise that I think we’ll get a vaccine or treatment in comparatively short order, but if we’re looking at the worst case, that one has to be on the cards as well. Personally, I think it’s extremely low probability, mainly due to the chance of getting a solution (vaccine, treatment, rapid test), both based on the progress already as well as the unparalleled level of effort and funds being thrown into it.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
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.
Indeed the Economist's lead article on the birth of the Euro was about how it seemed completely tilted in favour of the southern European States.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
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.
Agreed. But that would involve a level of flexibility in EHO that may not exist unless government intervenes.
You would need primary legislation for sure.
There's a long history of segregating social space into smoking or non smoking, 1st 2nd 3rd class and steerage, so this should be a doddle. It should gladden the hearts of Tories because pure market forces will dictate what level of separation thrives and survives.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
There’s a frighteningly significant possibility of many things. Managing to engineer significant, massive, permanent changes to the human behaviour of seven or eight billion people (this is not a problem confined to our little island) to a norm unprecedented in the evolution of our species is not one of them
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?
They must be willing to accept a higher level of risk, unless the difference between the two distances has been overstated. 1 metre would obviously make normal life much easier, but there's also the problem as someone else pointed out that if you tell the public 2 metres, they'll maintain 1m, and if you tell them 1m, they'll maintain nothing...
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Out of interest, do any of the PB Tories believe that the government has handled the pandemic (as opposed to the Cummings affair) well?
As a rightie rather than a pure-bred PB Tory, I would award the government 7/10, the NHS 5/10, PHE 1/10, and the MSM -10/10.
My guess is that a Starmer government would have been broadly similar, though the mistakes would have been different ones.
As a caveat I would not expect any large organisation to better 8/10 - mistakes are inevitably part of any complex process with lots of unknowns. Better to know and accept this at the start, be flexible, absorb the lesson, then move on.
I have always felt that when Johnson took two weeks out at Chevening at the end of February he missed the opportunity for us to be on the front foot, I believe his mind was on other things and he was not focussed on the job he should have been doing. I don't believe Starmer would have made that mistake but it is, of course, all speculation.
Would it not also be fair to say that if, for sake of argument, the NHS and PHE did underperform, the government must bear the responsibility for that given the Conservatives have been in power for the last decade?
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
There’s a frighteningly significant possibility of many things. Managing to engineer significant, massive, permanent changes to the human behaviour of seven or eight billion people (this is not a problem confined to our little island) to a norm unprecedented in the evolution of our species is not one of them
That was where I came in. Accepting a massive change to our social way of life, or accepting widespread deaths are both in the highly unlikely segment, from everything I can see. That’s why I believe that not supporting the hospitality sector for longer than the short time we have so far would be a mistake.
If we are looking at worst-case scenarios, there’s a frighteningly significant possibility that antibody-fuelled immunity will wear off. Somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, looking at other coronaviruses.
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
There’s a frighteningly significant possibility of many things. Managing to engineer significant, massive, permanent changes to the human behaviour of seven or eight billion people (this is not a problem confined to our little island) to a norm unprecedented in the evolution of our species is not one of them
It is interesting how myxamatosis has changed the habits of rabbits in my lifetime. When I were a lad in t'seventies rabbits lived in sodding great 100+ rabbit warrens. Those same warrens are now as defunct as Maiden Castle because the disease wiped out the sociable and spared the solitary.
"Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate."
As is well known, In history many productive people really got moving. Consider Mozart and Shakespeare for example.
I returned to my office in central London for the first time in 11 weeks today to replace my broken (coffee incident) laptop for a new one. The only person I met on the journey was an elderly gent at my station who explained he preferred going into Guys over the local Princess Royal and seemed pretty sanguine about it all. It may have helped that we were the only two on the platform at 9:30 am; it was quieter than 6:30 am was three months ago.
Naturally London Bridge station was deserted but what struck me as I walked to the bridge was what has happened to the Big Issue sellers? My usual one has her own flat so isn't homeless and so won't be in a hotel somewhere but at the same doesn't really have any sort of fixed income to point to when claiming. The works on the bridge have started and the single (eastern) pavement is divided again with an exhortation to keep left. The seven of us on the entire length of the bridge complied.
As for my office there were four people in, a member of the IT team who needs to be in to keep it all going and who was shortly to explain to me why coffee and laptops are estranged, two sales traders and the office cleaner. The lights, which are usually motion activated didn't come on when I approached my (old) desk and so I suppose they are permanently off. All of it, save for my chat with the equities traders, was somber. They were their usual ribald selves but the office reminded me of an abandoned space station in a sci-fi movie: all floating motes and half light.
Eventually I left with a new laptop (I expect some hassle over the coffee disaster), back to the desserted streets to return to London Bridge station. I was pleasantly surprised that Pret was still open especially as I hadn't had any breakfast in my hurry to sort out the IT issue. Other than that the bulk of offices were desserted, all the historic pubs were closed and all the medieval churches were without admirers.
I've been a student history of the City of London all my life, in all its varied states over the last two hundred years from guild city beginnings to imperial grandeur to technocratic heights up to the financial crisis and beyond. It is my fear that I am in at the death of my historial muse.
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?
They think the British public are too stupid to stick to whatever they recommend. If you want them to stick to 1.5 or 1 metres, you have to say 2 metres.
I returned to my office in central London for the first time in 11 weeks today to replace my broken (coffee incident) laptop for a new one. The only person I met on the journey was an elderly gent at my station who explained he preferred going into Guys over the local Princess Royal and seemed pretty sanguine about it all. It may have helped that we were the only two on the platform at 9:30 am; it was quieter than 6:30 am was three months ago.
Naturally London Bridge station was deserted but what struck me as I walked to the bridge was what has happened to the Big Issue sellers? My usual one has her own flat so isn't homeless and so won't be in a hotel somewhere but at the same doesn't really have any sort of fixed income to point to when claiming. The works on the bridge have started and the single (eastern) pavement is divided again with an exhortation to keep left. The seven of us on the entire length of the bridge complied.
As for my office there were four people in, a member of the IT team who needs to be in to keep it all going and who was shortly to explain to me why coffee and laptops are estranged, two sales traders and the office cleaner. The lights, which are usually motion activated didn't come on when I approached my (old) desk and so I suppose they are permanently off. All of it, save for my chat with the equities traders, was somber. They were their usual ribald selves but the office reminded me of an abandoned space station in a sci-fi movie: all floating motes and half light.
Eventually I left with a new laptop (I expect some hassle over the coffee disaster), back to the desserted streets to return to London Bridge station. I was pleasantly surprised that Pret was still open especially as I hadn't had any breakfast in my hurry to sort out the IT issue. Other than that the bulk of offices were desserted, all the historic pubs were closed and all the medieval churches were without admirers.
I've been a student history of the City of London all my life, in all its varied states over the last two hundred years from guild city beginnings to imperial grandeur to technocratic heights up to the financial crisis and beyond. It is my fear that I am in at the death of my historial muse.
Everyone pissed off out of the City (if they could) in 1665 only to rush back as soon as the infection subsided. It’s the fire afterwards that should worry you.
"Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate."
As is well known, In history many productive people really got moving. Consider Mozart and Shakespeare for example.
The present arrangement of long life but not long health is pretty dire and while it would be nice to fix the latter problem rather than the former, a reduction in life expectancy to low to mid 70s would not *of itself* be unbearable. The figures are terrifying: 30 to 40% of care home residents are diagnosed as severely depressed; as diagnosing depression entails a lot of effort, there may be as many again whom no one can be bothered about. And then there's dementia.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
I'm sorry but that's just not accurate. Size and density of population have been crucial factors in facilitating the spread of the virus all across the world, and New Zealand's size and density is simply not comparable to our own in any way.
To put it in perspective:
Auckland is by far their largest and densest settlement, with 2418 / sq km.
The 70th (!) densest conurbation in the UK (Crawley) has 3107 / sq km.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
The big risk for the UK now is a kind of hapennworth-of-tar situation; rather than spending the (substantial) money upfront to get this thing under control now, we do a half-assed thing that leads to us taking longer to get free, so it costs more in the long run.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
NZ is not remotely like UK or Europe. The clue is in the word, remote, and it depends on tourism from across the world plus cruise ships which are not coming back anytime soon. Plus international travel insurance will be fearfully expensive with lots of exlcusions deminishing the number of tourists
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
I'm going to take this a little further. Probably will get banned for it but it;s the cold truth.
If Britain had stood up more to Japan in the Far East in the 1930s, the nationalist government in China never would have been so weakened. It wouldn't have fallen in 1949. And so, only a short seven decades later, all this never would have happened.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
Spain have apparently found an extra 12,000 deaths, although it isn't being reported on sites like John Hopkins yet.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
I'm sorry but that's just not accurate. Size and density of population have been crucial factors in facilitating the spread of the virus all across the world, and New Zealand's size and density is simply not comparable to our own in any way.
To put it in perspective:
Auckland is by far their largest and densest settlement, with 2418 / sq km.
The 70th (!) densest conurbation in the UK (Crawley) has 3107 / sq km.
Overall UK population density: 259 / sq km
Overall NZ population density: 18 / sq km
You're comparing crab-apples to watermelons.
All those megacities in China must have been screwed then.
Out of interest, do any of the PB Tories believe that the government has handled the pandemic (as opposed to the Cummings affair) well?
As a rightie rather than a pure-bred PB Tory, I would award the government 7/10, the NHS 5/10, PHE 1/10, and the MSM -10/10.
My guess is that a Starmer government would have been broadly similar, though the mistakes would have been different ones.
As a caveat I would not expect any large organisation to better 8/10 - mistakes are inevitably part of any complex process with lots of unknowns. Better to know and accept this at the start, be flexible, absorb the lesson, then move on.
I have always felt that when Johnson took two weeks out at Chevening at the end of February he missed the opportunity for us to be on the front foot, I believe his mind was on other things and he was not focussed on the job he should have been doing. I don't believe Starmer would have made that mistake but it is, of course, all speculation.
Would it not also be fair to say that if, for sake of argument, the NHS and PHE did underperform, the government must bear the responsibility for that given the Conservatives have been in power for the last decade?
Re your last paragraph if the minutes from Sage between January and March are to be believed then the advice was wrong and neither Boris, Nicola, Drakesford or Foster could be blamed for that, nor who has been running the NHS over the last decade
I fear Sage are looking at answering some very serious questions
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
Damage has been done - Air New Zealand for instance has cut right back on international route and has now abandoned London. The domestic market will be severely restricted due to social distancing restrictions.
Less than five million people in the whole country so you'd think distancing wouldn't be much of an issue but Auckland has 1.6 million and as others have said there's this whole tourism thing.
The domestic "staycation" market isn't big enough for all the motels, hotels and other attractions to survive. The big market for NZ, apart from cruises, is the Asian tourist market and I suppose South Koreans and Taiwanese visitors with money would make a big difference if the Europeans son't come for a while.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Up to a point, yes. However, the worst affected are most likely to be areas heavily reliant on hospitality and tourism. So city centres yes. But also many smaller market towns, seaside resorts and National Parks. Which will be much less able to cope in the absence of a great deal of alternative employment.
I returned to my office in central London for the first time in 11 weeks today to replace my broken (coffee incident) laptop for a new one. The only person I met on the journey was an elderly gent at my station who explained he preferred going into Guys over the local Princess Royal and seemed pretty sanguine about it all. It may have helped that we were the only two on the platform at 9:30 am; it was quieter than 6:30 am was three months ago.
Naturally London Bridge station was deserted but what struck me as I walked to the bridge was what has happened to the Big Issue sellers? My usual one has her own flat so isn't homeless and so won't be in a hotel somewhere but at the same doesn't really have any sort of fixed income to point to when claiming. The works on the bridge have started and the single (eastern) pavement is divided again with an exhortation to keep left. The seven of us on the entire length of the bridge complied.
As for my office there were four people in, a member of the IT team who needs to be in to keep it all going and who was shortly to explain to me why coffee and laptops are estranged, two sales traders and the office cleaner. The lights, which are usually motion activated didn't come on when I approached my (old) desk and so I suppose they are permanently off. All of it, save for my chat with the equities traders, was somber. They were their usual ribald selves but the office reminded me of an abandoned space station in a sci-fi movie: all floating motes and half light.
Eventually I left with a new laptop (I expect some hassle over the coffee disaster), back to the desserted streets to return to London Bridge station. I was pleasantly surprised that Pret was still open especially as I hadn't had any breakfast in my hurry to sort out the IT issue. Other than that the bulk of offices were desserted, all the historic pubs were closed and all the medieval churches were without admirers.
I've been a student history of the City of London all my life, in all its varied states over the last two hundred years from guild city beginnings to imperial grandeur to technocratic heights up to the financial crisis and beyond. It is my fear that I am in at the death of my historial muse.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
I'm going to take this a little further. Probably will get banned for it but it;s the cold truth.
If Britain had stood up more to Japan in the Far East in the 1930s, the nationalist government never would have been so weakened. It wouldn't have fallen in 1949. And so, only a short seven decades later, all this never would have happened.
How far back do you want to go? If Commodore Perry hadn’t forced Japan out of isolation, they would never have bullied China, thus leading to the events of 1949. So it’s the Americans’ fault? Or do we go further back still?
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
Spain have apparently found an extra 12,000 deaths, although it isn't being reported on sites like John Hopkins yet.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
Spain and us now looking the worst in Europe, +62% and +65% respectively.
Italy at +47% are looking increasingly more like France than us - they contained it in one area.
France at +30% are closer to Germany than to us.
Sweden at +30% but slow decline from peak. Norway next door at +0%, while Denmark are +7%
Belgium's numbers now at +53%, and looking a bit better as time goes on. They had a horrendous peak, particularly per capita, but it's also subsided unbelievably quickly.
Peru at +103% seems to be the hardest hit on the planet, and by a long way. They might not even have peaked either.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
I'm sorry but that's just not accurate. Size and density of population have been crucial factors in facilitating the spread of the virus all across the world, and New Zealand's size and density is simply not comparable to our own in any way.
To put it in perspective:
Auckland is by far their largest and densest settlement, with 2418 / sq km.
The 70th (!) densest conurbation in the UK (Crawley) has 3107 / sq km.
Overall UK population density: 259 / sq km
Overall NZ population density: 18 / sq km
You're comparing crab-apples to watermelons.
All those megacities in China must have been screwed then.
It's amazing what a communist dictatorship with the power of life and death over its citizens can do, quite apart from inventing the figures. We should definitely become more like them.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
NZ is not remotely like UK or Europe. The clue is in the word, remote, and it depends on tourism from across the world plus cruise ships which are not coming back anytime soon. Plus international travel insurance will be fearfully expensive with lots of exlcusions deminishing the number of tourists
45% of overseas tourists in NZ come from Australia.
I'm going to take this a little further. Probably will get banned for it but it;s the cold truth.
If Britain had stood up more to Japan in the Far East in the 1930s, the nationalist government never would have been so weakened. It wouldn't have fallen in 1949. And so, only a short seven decades later, all this never would have happened.
How far back do you want to go? If Commodore Perry hadn’t forced Japan out of isolation, they would never have bullied China, thus leading to the events of 1949. So it’s the Americans’ fault? Or do we go further back still?
As per Trump, nothing is ever the American government's fault (unless under the influence of the Democrats or the Deep State.)
If Britain hadn't passed on its seafaring traditions to its colonies, Perry never would have been in Japan in the first place.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Yep. One of the ironies of this saga is now naturally the UK fits into its peer group of large European nations.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
To simultaneously praise New Zealand, for being a low populated island several hours flight from anywhere, and China, for having to shut down cities so hard families were welded into their homes, require mental gymnastics I can only marvel at.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
NZ is not remotely like UK or Europe. The clue is in the word, remote, and it depends on tourism from across the world plus cruise ships which are not coming back anytime soon. Plus international travel insurance will be fearfully expensive with lots of exlcusions deminishing the number of tourists
On the subject of travel insurance, having just re-booked our transatlantic crossing for next year, I was surprised to find the single trip travel insurance was significantly cheaper than the policy I booked for this year's abortive trip.
(Tbf it has an exclusion for cancellation due to covid-19 but if that cancellation is Cunard's inability to sail I should be covered.)
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
I'm sorry but that's just not accurate. Size and density of population have been crucial factors in facilitating the spread of the virus all across the world, and New Zealand's size and density is simply not comparable to our own in any way.
To put it in perspective:
Auckland is by far their largest and densest settlement, with 2418 / sq km.
The 70th (!) densest conurbation in the UK (Crawley) has 3107 / sq km.
Overall UK population density: 259 / sq km
Overall NZ population density: 18 / sq km
You're comparing crab-apples to watermelons.
All those megacities in China must have been screwed then.
It's amazing what a communist dictatorship with the power of life and death over its citizens can do, quite apart from inventing the figures. We should definitely become more like them.
To simultaneously praise New Zealand, for being a low populated island several hours flight from anywhere, and China, for having to shut down cities so hard families were welded into their homes, require mental gymnastics I can only marvel at.
Cheers for brightening up my day
Neither of them is Britain, and so for certain people they must automatically be a million times better than us by nature...
I'm going to take this a little further. Probably will get banned for it but it;s the cold truth.
If Britain had stood up more to Japan in the Far East in the 1930s, the nationalist government never would have been so weakened. It wouldn't have fallen in 1949. And so, only a short seven decades later, all this never would have happened.
How far back do you want to go? If Commodore Perry hadn’t forced Japan out of isolation, they would never have bullied China, thus leading to the events of 1949. So it’s the Americans’ fault? Or do we go further back still?
As per Trump, nothing is ever the American government's fault (unless under the influence of the Democrats or the Deep State.)
If Britain hadn't passed on its seafaring traditions to its colonies, Perry never would have been in Japan in the first place.
If the French had beaten us in the Seven Years War then we wouldn’t have had any colonies. Pesky French.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Yep. One of the ironies of this saga is now naturally the UK fits into its peer group of large European nations.
If only some bright chap/chapess could think of a way to bring these great nations more together, imagine what they could do, maybe form the largest single market the world has ever seen?
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
Everyone pissed off out of the City (if they could) in 1665 only to rush back as soon as the infection subsided. It’s the fire afterwards that should worry you.
I'm told Canary Wharf is very similar - 120,000 office workers primarily in the financial services industries, all now working from home.
Reconfiguring offices to take social distancing reduces capacity to a maximum of 25-30% and more realistically 15-20% in tall buildings dependent on lift access.
Get 20,000 back and 100,000 still gone and what happens to all the support industries - the cafes, bars, shops, dry cleaners and the rest surviving on a sixth of their previous business.
Yes, people live around Canary Wharf now but as someone once said:
"This town is coming like a Ghost Town All the clubs have been closed down"
Just read the thread and what a pleasure to find so many thoughtful contributions. The site really is at its best when the partisan cheerleading is put to one side and people discuss the issues on their merits.
Well done Team PB!
I'm off to bed now. Keep up the good work. Catch you all in the morning.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
Spain have apparently found an extra 12,000 deaths, although it isn't being reported on sites like John Hopkins yet.
I understood that that was something to do with excess death statistics but I may be wrong.
I returned to my office in central London for the first time in 11 weeks today to replace my broken (coffee incident) laptop for a new one. The only person I met on the journey was an elderly gent at my station who explained he preferred going into Guys over the local Princess Royal and seemed pretty sanguine about it all. It may have helped that we were the only two on the platform at 9:30 am; it was quieter than 6:30 am was three months ago.
Naturally London Bridge station was deserted but what struck me as I walked to the bridge was what has happened to the Big Issue sellers? My usual one has her own flat so isn't homeless and so won't be in a hotel somewhere but at the same doesn't really have any sort of fixed income to point to when claiming. The works on the bridge have started and the single (eastern) pavement is divided again with an exhortation to keep left. The seven of us on the entire length of the bridge complied.
As for my office there were four people in, a member of the IT team who needs to be in to keep it all going and who was shortly to explain to me why coffee and laptops are estranged, two sales traders and the office cleaner. The lights, which are usually motion activated didn't come on when I approached my (old) desk and so I suppose they are permanently off. All of it, save for my chat with the equities traders, was somber. They were their usual ribald selves but the office reminded me of an abandoned space station in a sci-fi movie: all floating motes and half light.
Eventually I left with a new laptop (I expect some hassle over the coffee disaster), back to the desserted streets to return to London Bridge station. I was pleasantly surprised that Pret was still open especially as I hadn't had any breakfast in my hurry to sort out the IT issue. Other than that the bulk of offices were desserted, all the historic pubs were closed and all the medieval churches were without admirers.
I've been a student history of the City of London all my life, in all its varied states over the last two hundred years from guild city beginnings to imperial grandeur to technocratic heights up to the financial crisis and beyond. It is my fear that I am in at the death of my historial muse.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
Thanks for that, its interesting how Eliot was actually a Spanish Flu survivor as well as a City worker. I think in his day even more people than now walked the bridge. In the generations before his the prime method of commuting was on foot even to the stage where there was a city method of walking the pavements with a fast lane and a slow lane.
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
NZ is not remotely like UK or Europe. The clue is in the word, remote, and it depends on tourism from across the world plus cruise ships which are not coming back anytime soon. Plus international travel insurance will be fearfully expensive with lots of exlcusions deminishing the number of tourists
45% of overseas tourists in NZ come from Australia.
And 55% do not and many of them will not be returning soon
My nephew was a professional sky diver in NZ (lived there for 15 years or so)and has just returned home for good as he says there is no hope for tourism in NZ in the next few years
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Belgium and Spain have higher death rates per head than the UK and the UK also has a lower unemployment rate than most of western Europe and the USA now.
Jenkins is wrong
We comfortably have the highest number of deaths in the UK
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
I think a fair way of looking at is the four countries most similar to the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Germany has done much better than the rest of us. The differences between France, Spain, Italy and the UK are too small to be able to be confident about which has done better or worse.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
Yep. One of the ironies of this saga is now naturally the UK fits into its peer group of large European nations.
No. We've done massively worse than Germany, substantially worse than France, significantly worse than Italy (despite the head start) and a bit better than Spain.
Now I like Spain a lot. But it's not well-run, at the best of times, and it hasn't really had a working government for years. A bit better than Spain is not an endorsement.
BTW, did you see Have I Got News For You tonight? They had a lot of angry fun with a story which ought to have died a week ago. But what do they know?
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
Lead a country with a population density barely double that of the Scottish Highlands?
This is a deflection. Most people live in urban areas, same as everywhere else. The fact that there are great swathes where nobody lives is immaterial. What is material is the early decisive action the NZ government took. Taking advantage of their island status to protect the population. We didn't and over 60,000 have lost their lives as a result.
To illustrate this point: New Zealand 86.7% urbanised; UK 83.9% urbanised.
I have several times and it takes 24 hours flying time whichever way you go
And you can drive for miles upon miles and only see sheep
I have been there yes. Both of your points are true but I don't see their relevance to NZ's markedly better handling of Covid-19.
NZ is almost completely disconnected from the world, it is a silly comparison, just like the Guernsey ones one poster loves to make. Why not look at our similar sized neighbours if we must do the comparisons?
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.
And many of the areas devastated then will be devastated a second time, having just elected Tory MPs.
Its the urban areas which will be most affected by the structural changes the service sector seems likely to have.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Wirth all due respect, what were the government supposed to do to mitigate deaths AND keep the economy afloat?
Jacinda Ardern says "Hi!"
She has done the easy bit but trashed her economy beyond belief
That's strange, I thought they were about to open up to Australian tourists. That would be the country where the greatest proportion of their visitors come from. And the locals are all out sipping flat whites and chilled lager.
Yes, they've really screwed up.
NZ is not remotely like UK or Europe. The clue is in the word, remote, and it depends on tourism from across the world plus cruise ships which are not coming back anytime soon. Plus international travel insurance will be fearfully expensive with lots of exlcusions deminishing the number of tourists
On the subject of travel insurance, having just re-booked our transatlantic crossing for next year, I was surprised to find the single trip travel insurance was significantly cheaper than the policy I booked for this year's abortive trip.
(Tbf it has an exclusion for cancellation due to covid-19 but if that cancellation is Cunard's inability to sail I should be covered.)
Excluding covid will revert to normal premiums but what about enforced quarantine and medical cover if you developed it in the USA. I would not take the risk to be fair
Comments
Anyway there seem to be a variety of distances used in Europe contrary to what I initially said.
(Disclaimer: I'm a physics PhD who teaches A Level and GCSE. I get numbers, but not the details here.)
Very roughly, the equations behind a pandemic lead to a few stable solutions.
1 "You can't hold it back, because it spreads too quickly". Prepare the field hospitals and mass graves.
2 "You can't stop it, but you can slow it". This is flattening the curve. You do some mitigation measures so that not many people get sick and die each day, but you accept that everyone has got to get it, and lots will still die on the way. This might be better than case 1 if curve-flattening lets you treat some people more effectively.
3 "You can squash it then slow it a lot". Use fairly brutal measures to deal with the initial outbreak, then softer measures to keep the rate linear, not exponential. The thing here is that you can kind of choose your long-term daily rate; the more effort you put into the squashing, the lower the long-term rate is.
4 "Squash it and job done".
At the start, we didn't really know which solution Covid-19 would follow. Knowing what we know now, it looks like it's model 3; you can keep R = 1 with a meaningful and manageable degree of distancing, testing and tracking. We didn't know that back in March- if the parameters of the infection had been a bit different, we might have been stuck with a choice between 1 and 2.
But knowing what we know now, I'm pretty sure we won't get to herd immunity by infection, one way or another.
Most people managed the first. And they'd have a much better idea of coping strategies for a second.
Moreover, so will everyone else. In government, business, the media, councils and crucially the health service.
Simon Jenkins
Lockdown is likely to go down in history as the UK’s most costly policy failure of modern times"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/29/britain-shame-coronavirus-deaths-economic-collapse
If, as some have said, contracting the virus means doubling your chance of death that year, then contracting the virus annually would lead to something like halving everyone’s remaining life expectancy. Contracting it every two years shaves it down to two-thirds.
Without social distancing (in the permanent absence of any other solution) and letting the virus rip again and again and again would lead to that.
Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate.
If we’re looking at the worst case, we’ve got to bear that possibility in mind. Herd immunity through illness certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to a permanent escape; it is very possible that it would wear off.
Jenkins is wrong
As to how I interact with another poster, that's my business, not yours. Who appointed you the moral guardian of this site?
It seems such a sensible thing to do, even if its effectiveness may be limited. Better than nothing.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1266459851070361601?s=20
SARS and MERS both had strong (albeit on a downward curve) antibody responses out to four years.
The other thing people forget is that this isn't one and zero, where on the 366th day you suddenly become eligible to catch the disease. This is a long sliding scale, and even on day 10,000 you'll probably still have a little bit of immunity. This means both (a) R won't be the same the next time around, and (b) people who do get it won't get it so bad because although their immune system won't be completely primed, nor will it be completely ignorant.
It is perhaps ironic that the structural changes which manufacturing experienced in the 1980s had the most detrimental effects in Labour's then industrial heartland while the structural changes in the service sector in the 2020s will probably have the most detrimental effects in Labour current urban heartlands.
Personally, I've always liked the words of MJ Hibbert on this issue:
"But to put the blame on agencies outside won't help
We've got to take responsibility for ourselves"
https://mjhibbett.bandcamp.com/track/do-more-eat-less
The pain will be shared around a bit more. No comfort for those affected, of course.
But I reckon we're looking at 2-3 million on UC for a good few years.
Whatever the government does to be frank.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/29/people-shielding-coronavirus-feeling-left-behind-lockdown-measures2/
To provide some context for the current debate on Hong Kong.
The late Lord Ashdown was a tireless advocate for the rights of the 300,000 BNO passport holders in Hong Kong to settle permanently in the UK.
If you don't believe me, listen to another Conservative - Lord Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong.
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
That was not an option available to us with corona virus so the let it rip plan so fatally flawed from the off.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341467148_Human_coronavirus_reinfection_dynamics_lessons_for_SARS-CoV-2
An alarmingly short duration of protective immunity to coronaviruses was found by both analyses. We saw frequent reinfections at 12 months post-infection and a substantial reduction in antibody levels as soon as 6 months post-infection.
And there will be far fewer people wanting to study into their mid 20s as opposed to getting paid employment.
Neither will BluestBlue (see below) and HYUFD and BigG (see above).
I believe that the worse the illness, the greater the antibody response, so it should be well above the common cold. But, as the fatality rate is a lot lower than SARS or MERS, it would be reasonable for it to be less than theirs.
I’ll emphasise that I think we’ll get a vaccine or treatment in comparatively short order, but if we’re looking at the worst case, that one has to be on the cards as well. Personally, I think it’s extremely low probability, mainly due to the chance of getting a solution (vaccine, treatment, rapid test), both based on the progress already as well as the unparalleled level of effort and funds being thrown into it.
There's a long history of segregating social space into smoking or non smoking, 1st 2nd 3rd class and steerage, so this should be a doddle. It should gladden the hearts of Tories because pure market forces will dictate what level of separation thrives and survives.
And that hand sanitiser gel is now in the supermarkets.
On the other hand shower spray seems to be very rare of the ground.
Is it possible that the shower spray production lines have been switched to something more profitable ?
Yes, they've really screwed up.
Would it not also be fair to say that if, for sake of argument, the NHS and PHE did underperform, the government must bear the responsibility for that given the Conservatives have been in power for the last decade?
Accepting a massive change to our social way of life, or accepting widespread deaths are both in the highly unlikely segment, from everything I can see. That’s why I believe that not supporting the hospitality sector for longer than the short time we have so far would be a mistake.
"Living past your early sixties would be rare. Those who are forty today with maybe forty years of life expectancy ordinarily would now expect 20 more years instead - and to be horribly ill for several days every year. Those who are twenty today would expect maybe 30 more years of life - with that annual fate."
As is well known, In history many productive people really got moving. Consider Mozart and Shakespeare for example.
Naturally London Bridge station was deserted but what struck me as I walked to the bridge was what has happened to the Big Issue sellers? My usual one has her own flat so isn't homeless and so won't be in a hotel somewhere but at the same doesn't really have any sort of fixed income to point to when claiming. The works on the bridge have started and the single (eastern) pavement is divided again with an exhortation to keep left. The seven of us on the entire length of the bridge complied.
As for my office there were four people in, a member of the IT team who needs to be in to keep it all going and who was shortly to explain to me why coffee and laptops are estranged, two sales traders and the office cleaner. The lights, which are usually motion activated didn't come on when I approached my (old) desk and so I suppose they are permanently off. All of it, save for my chat with the equities traders, was somber. They were their usual ribald selves but the office reminded me of an abandoned space station in a sci-fi movie: all floating motes and half light.
Eventually I left with a new laptop (I expect some hassle over the coffee disaster), back to the desserted streets to return to London Bridge station. I was pleasantly surprised that Pret was still open especially as I hadn't had any breakfast in my hurry to sort out the IT issue. Other than that the bulk of offices were desserted, all the historic pubs were closed and all the medieval churches were without admirers.
I've been a student history of the City of London all my life, in all its varied states over the last two hundred years from guild city beginnings to imperial grandeur to technocratic heights up to the financial crisis and beyond. It is my fear that I am in at the death of my historial muse.
To put it in perspective:
Auckland is by far their largest and densest settlement, with 2418 / sq km.
The 70th (!) densest conurbation in the UK (Crawley) has 3107 / sq km.
Overall UK population density: 259 / sq km
Overall NZ population density: 18 / sq km
You're comparing crab-apples to watermelons.
Its meant to reduce the need for cleaning but I have doubts about that.
https://www.mrmuscleclean.com/en-gb/products/bath/mr-muscle-shower-shine
We also have the 3rd highest rates of death in Europe and given that we are gaining on Spain we could well soon have a worse rate than them. We have gradually overtaken every other European country.
Genuine question. Do you believe that if we end up with the most deaths per million anywhere in Europe except Belgium then that is a good outcome and something for our government to be proud of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
If Britain had stood up more to Japan in the Far East in the 1930s, the nationalist government in China never would have been so weakened. It wouldn't have fallen in 1949. And so, only a short seven decades later, all this never would have happened.
I fear Sage are looking at answering some very serious questions
Less than five million people in the whole country so you'd think distancing wouldn't be much of an issue but Auckland has 1.6 million and as others have said there's this whole tourism thing.
The domestic "staycation" market isn't big enough for all the motels, hotels and other attractions to survive. The big market for NZ, apart from cruises, is the Asian tourist market and I suppose South Koreans and Taiwanese visitors with money would make a big difference if the Europeans son't come for a while.
Like that stuff people put on their windscreens.
It's a different world.
But also many smaller market towns, seaside resorts and National Parks.
Which will be much less able to cope in the absence of a great deal of alternative employment.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
https://www.ft.com/content/6b4c784e-c259-4ca4-9a82-648ffde71bf0
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
Spain and us now looking the worst in Europe, +62% and +65% respectively.
Italy at +47% are looking increasingly more like France than us - they contained it in one area.
France at +30% are closer to Germany than to us.
Sweden at +30% but slow decline from peak. Norway next door at +0%, while Denmark are +7%
Belgium's numbers now at +53%, and looking a bit better as time goes on. They had a horrendous peak, particularly per capita, but it's also subsided unbelievably quickly.
Peru at +103% seems to be the hardest hit on the planet, and by a long way. They might not even have peaked either.
We are in the pack, admittedly miles behind Germany, but in line with the majority of our peer group. Not great, but it doesnt help to over play how bad it is either.
If Britain hadn't passed on its seafaring traditions to its colonies, Perry never would have been in Japan in the first place.
As a matter of interest have you been to NZ
I have several times and it takes 24 hours flying time whichever way you go
And you can drive for miles upon miles and only see sheep
Cheers for brightening up my day
(Tbf it has an exclusion for cancellation due to covid-19 but if that cancellation is Cunard's inability to sail I should be covered.)
Reconfiguring offices to take social distancing reduces capacity to a maximum of 25-30% and more realistically 15-20% in tall buildings dependent on lift access.
Get 20,000 back and 100,000 still gone and what happens to all the support industries - the cafes, bars, shops, dry cleaners and the rest surviving on a sixth of their previous business.
Yes, people live around Canary Wharf now but as someone once said:
"This town is coming like a Ghost Town
All the clubs have been closed down"
Well done Team PB!
I'm off to bed now. Keep up the good work. Catch you all in the morning.
My nephew was a professional sky diver in NZ (lived there for 15 years or so)and has just returned home for good as he says there is no hope for tourism in NZ in the next few years
Now I like Spain a lot. But it's not well-run, at the best of times, and it hasn't really had a working government for years. A bit better than Spain is not an endorsement.
BTW, did you see Have I Got News For You tonight? They had a lot of angry fun with a story which ought to have died a week ago. But what do they know?