Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Wrong. Most of those admitted to hospital with covid are in their fifties or younger. The overwhelming majority of these had no serious co-morbidities. In addition, the majority were not obese.
Of the children unfortunate enough to be admitted to hospital with covid, the majority had no co-morbidities, and the most common co-morbidity out of those who did have one was asthma.
That's hardly "keeping sick oldies alive a few more months." Nor "... obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly."
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
How many of their parents and grandparents have died?
Perhaps its the parents and grandparents who need to take some responsibility.
So - should parents and grandparents all stay away from their children? Require their children to wear masks at all times at home. One might wonder what you sweep up in the statement "take some responsibility."
Hmm, looks like kinabalu was right and I was wrong about the severity of the consequences of Corbyn's suspension.
We'll see. I'd rather you were right. And the power of the Left in the party does tend to get overstated these days.
The statement from the Unions is bizarre. It was Corbyn who was undermining party unity and the opportunity to move forward and solve the antisemitism issue by releasing his statement that minimised the scale of the problem. The breach can only be healed once Corbyn admits to that error.
I'm reminded of Harry Potter's invitation to Lord Voldemort to feel some remorse. If Corbyn can feel more remorse for the victims of antisemitism within the Labour party than he does for his own treatment then there is a way forward. But, just as with Trump, it's all about Corbyn in his eyes.
Yes. He should have restricted his formal response to an apology for hurt caused and support for the recommendations of the report. But he was never going to say that he agreed 100% with all of the findings of the report, because he doesn't.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
The Muhlenberg College (Rated A+) poll for PA posted earlier is interesting, cross tabs show Trump actually losing slightly with the over 65s in PA. Again it shows his losses with women are hurting him badly. It also shows how the Covid crisis is what is going to sink him most likely, As has been mentioned by others, this poll again indicates the economy is the most important single thing to voters (though not much more than health and Covid) and that more people feel better off under Trump than worse off. Overall the +5 lead for Biden sounds about right to me , Trump has a chance but not much of one there. And it will be his position and response to Covid which will cost him. https://www.muhlenberg.edu/media/contentassets/pdf/about/polling/surveys/pennsylvania/FINAL_PA_ELEC2020_LATE_OCT_REPORT (1) (1).pdf
The odd thing is that his laissez-faire handling of the pandemic was completely unnecessary even from his point of view. It didn't benefit him politically or financially. It didn't assist Republican policies. It hasn't paid off for Russia. It hasn't even helped white supremacists. It wass just a straightforward unforced error, repeated over months for no reason whatever that I can see.
The thing is that after he caught the symptoms, how he handled it and the aftermath could very well have gained him a little sympathy and certainly some votes. His 'I had it and am ok and immune , so its nothing and not important' was a serious error of judgement, even if in keeping with his character. I am amazed that his 'smart' advisors didnt advise him (or did and were ignored) that some humility after so personal a brush with the virus (something for all his faults Boris showed after), would allow some voters to see him in a kinder more humble view. Even if that kind of response is not in his nature (and its not) he could have at least used his own experience to understand the suffering of so many better, instead of focussing on his own 'immunity' and nothing else.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
China says weld people in their homes for months on end and already spies on all its citizens as a matter of routine. They already have networks of facial recognition cameras monitoring everybodies movements, automatically track their car journeys, track who visits whose homes. That isn't so much track and trace, that's just continued state surveillance. I have a feeling the following isn't going to fly in the West.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
You want a totalitarian communist state approach? Not many others do.
How would you feel if Boris Johnson used those words at 4pm today?
I'd feel they were totally justified - if Keir Starmer had spent the last few weeks relentlessly chanting without a shred of evidence that he (BJ) was planning to shut down the country and the economy and induce with great relish a 1920s style Great Depression.
Note the presser has been pushed back to 5pm
Gives Bozo an extra hour to come up with a policy.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
The only way "test, track and trace" can work is with a mass testing programme that routinely tests large numbers of people, regardless of symptoms or not. It evidently can't work, with this virus, if testing only routinely happens with symptomatic people.
At present, it's basically a system designed at present for a different virus (as, incidentally, is much of the guidance about how to avoid catching it, which prioritises social distancing over avoid crowded spaces per se (over extended periods), and washing hands despite the near zero evidence of surface transmission.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
It was OK for Dorset to be locked down in the Spring because London had a problem.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
Good for you. Given that the new strain appears to be from Spain it appears to have done wonders for the country, too.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
Yes, I run a translation business now, in addition to managing the UK arm of a large charity, and I published a successful magazine for 17 years, though none of those are or were in the retail sector. Clearly it's inconvenient if you can't operate for a fortnight, but if you know it's coming you can plan around it, as most businesses do every Christmas/New Year. If lockdown simply hits you at random intervals you're totally screwed - I imagine Cyclefree's daughter never knows when to order more beer, for example.
And I'd argue that your customers will be so unnerved that your business will do worse as well than if they know that there's a pattern to it. I've got friends I'd like to have a meal with, and we'll happily organise it when we know it'll work, but at the moment we've just given up trying to plan it.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
This idea of regular 2 week shutdowns. If its such a good idea, much better than either living with a range of restrictions over the course of 1-2 years or having longer lockdowns every 6 months, its very strange how not a single other countries has deployed this.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
It was OK for Dorset to be locked down in the Spring because London had a problem.
They will also benefit if there is less pox commuting home to Poole and Dorchester South on the former LSWR.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
Look at the graph of UK Covid deaths* on, say, Worldometer:
The up-curve of each wave is steep, the down-curve is shallow, the valley bottom was broad. For the UK those stages were approximately 3 weeks, 10 weeks and 10 weeks. One week's increase takes approximately 3 weeks to remove.
It therefore makes sense to apply lock-down very early in the rise of each wave, since it can be applied for less time. Each week earlier a lockdown is applied, saves three weeks of lockdown.
Of course, we have missed that chance in wave 2 despite the scientists proposing it.
(*Sadly, deaths are more useful here than cases because case numbers are afftected by testing levels.)
Well, the earlier you apply a new lockdown the less time you have spent out of lockdown. The earlier you impose a new lockdown the closer you get to being in lockdown all the time.
And, in any case, it's not like we were able to enjoy life out of lockdown in between. We didn't have mass spectator sport back as they do in Australia and New Zealand. What proportion of the time do you think we'd have to spend in lockdown?
I just don't see it as a sustainable plan. The longer it goes on the more wild the excesses will be in the windows between lockdown, and the faster a new lockdown would have to be imposed.
Isolate the infectious instead of isolating everyone.
It's not an either or - I'd advocate both. Unfortunately HMG have put a numpty in charge of test and trace (but hey, at least she's 'one of us').
Also, you miss the point that we ran for 10-12 weeks through the summer with low levels of infection. No reason to think we wouldn't have had a similar 'quiet' period if we had locked down at the start of March and reduced the peak, and therefore the time to get the nubers right back down, by half or two-thirds.
Instead of 3 weeks rise, 9 weeks fall and 10-12 weeks relative abeyance, we could have had a pattern of 1:3:10. So say 4 weeks in lock down out of 14 rather than 12 out of 24.
And btw, anyone who thinks this next lockdown is now going to be just a few weeks is deluded.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
Once again, nobody has explained what lockdown 2 is going to solve. We're run by a government of c***s. Absolutely fucking clueless and they're going to destroy what's left of the economy and we will be back where we are today a few weeks after it ends or in a more realistic scenario it doesn't end in 4 weeks, it ends in April because the government haven't got a clue.
"Something must be done" even if it is useless or counter-productive.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
Look at the graph of UK Covid deaths* on, say, Worldometer:
The up-curve of each wave is steep, the down-curve is shallow, the valley bottom was broad. For the UK those stages were approximately 3 weeks, 10 weeks and 10 weeks. One week's increase takes approximately 3 weeks to remove.
It therefore makes sense to apply lock-down very early in the rise of each wave, since it can be applied for less time. Each week earlier a lockdown is applied, saves three weeks of lockdown.
Of course, we have missed that chance in wave 2 despite the scientists proposing it.
(*Sadly, deaths are more useful here than cases because case numbers are afftected by testing levels.)
Well, the earlier you apply a new lockdown the less time you have spent out of lockdown. The earlier you impose a new lockdown the closer you get to being in lockdown all the time.
And, in any case, it's not like we were able to enjoy life out of lockdown in between. We didn't have mass spectator sport back as they do in Australia and New Zealand. What proportion of the time do you think we'd have to spend in lockdown?
I just don't see it as a sustainable plan. The longer it goes on the more wild the excesses will be in the windows between lockdown, and the faster a new lockdown would have to be imposed.
Isolate the infectious instead of isolating everyone.
It's both. Do as much as possible to find and isolate the infectious, and apply restrictions on everyone such that R stays just under 1. If that means the only thing that can be open is primary schools and essential shops, that's awful but it's what we have to do. But indications are there's room for a bit more.
Over the summer we got overconfident and ignored the tyranny of the R rate. Opening the schools should have been first, and then other stuff one-by-one as data permitted.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Wrong. Most of those admitted to hospital with covid are in their fifties or younger. The overwhelming majority of these had no serious co-morbidities. In addition, the majority were not obese.
Of the children unfortunate enough to be admitted to hospital with covid, the majority had no co-morbidities, and the most common co-morbidity out of those who did have one was asthma.
That's hardly "keeping sick oldies alive a few more months." Nor "... obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly."
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
How many of their parents and grandparents have died?
Perhaps its the parents and grandparents who need to take some responsibility.
So - should parents and grandparents all stay away from their children? Require their children to wear masks at all times at home. One might wonder what you sweep up in the statement "take some responsibility."
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
Unfortunately our quest is for the least grim of the grim options available. The Covid delta between Dorset and Manchester is a matter of a few short weeks. If we wait for Dorset to become Manchester before acting it just means that the action needed ends up being tougher and longer.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
It was OK for Dorset to be locked down in the Spring because London had a problem.
To be fair, we had almost no testing capacity so didn't really know where the (potential) problems were.
Dorset didn't need it in March, and don't need it now. I suspect any imposition now will be largely ignored. Local lockdowns need to be given a shot. Tier 4 or 5 if needs be. But shutting down everywhere is madness.
Breaking: new case rates are now declining in both Wales and NI
Can you post a link to the report? I don't see the new numbers on the dashboard, but then I also think you couldn't make that statement based the figures from a single day.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
It was OK for Dorset to be locked down in the Spring because London had a problem.
They will also benefit if there is less pox commuting home to Poole and Dorchester South on the former LSWR.
Surprisingly little commuting to Town from Dorset. Winchester and Soton yes, Bmth, Poole and further, little. I know because I used to do it, and there were only 5 or 6 regulars on each of the morning/evening trains.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
Good for you. Given that the new strain appears to be from Spain it appears to have done wonders for the country, too.
I believe the Defendant's travels were in Italy, m'lud.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
Good for you. Given that the new strain appears to be from Spain it appears to have done wonders for the country, too.
I believe the Defendant's travels were in Italy, m'lud.
So? It could have easily been from there. Anyway, I'm talking generally, not specifically.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
Unfortunately our quest is for the least grim of the grim options available. The Covid delta between Dorset and Manchester is a matter of a few short weeks. If we wait for Dorset to become Manchester before acting it just means that the action needed ends up being tougher and longer.
What makes you think Dorset levels are going to get to Manchester levels? Given its a largely rural county this seems very unlikely to me.
If mask wearing is so great at stopping Covid spreading, why not keep all shops open and make masks mandatory? I can understand the theory behind pubs and restaurants/places where masks have to be removed being closed, but why close shops? Or offices where people can wear them all the time too?
My missus has to go to work in the office of a school no matter what, and there are hundreds of inner city kids floating about there
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
This idea of regular 2 week shutdowns. If its such a good idea, much better than either living with a range of restrictions over the course of 1-2 years or having longer lockdowns every 6 months, its very strange how not a single other countries has deployed this.
Not really. The pandemic is developing. This could be an idea whose time has come.
This idea of regular 2 week shutdowns. If its such a good idea, much better than either living with a range of restrictions over the course of 1-2 years or having longer lockdowns every 6 months, its very strange how not a single other countries has deployed this.
Not really. The pandemic is developing. This could be an idea whose time has come.
Having seen the modelling produced for SAGE, their evidence wasn't convincing at all. We could literally be talking about increasing deaths due to it, when direct COVID lives saved for such an intervention could be as low as 1000 has to be weighed against all the disruptive factors that leads to deaths from other causes.
If I had been Boris, I would demand a more work on that idea before being able to properly assess if it is a reasonable strategy. I highly doubt other developed countries haven't also had a look at similar ideas and quite telling they haven't even publicly entertained them. Are we really to believe that the likes of Germany hasn't had a proper good look at strategy, given in general they have been pretty good at planning ahead.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
You want a totalitarian communist state approach? Not many others do.
No of course not. But we should treat this like a war - time-limited restrictions, properly enforced.
Would you have been complaining about rationing, black-out curtains, requisitioning of land for airfields, conscription etc. etc. in 1940. I doubt it.
Of course this isn't 1940 and Covid-19 isn't the Nazis... but we need to show some determination here.
Government ineptitude, wooliness, mixed messages (and yes Cummingsgate) have made a bad situation much worse.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
Unfortunately our quest is for the least grim of the grim options available. The Covid delta between Dorset and Manchester is a matter of a few short weeks. If we wait for Dorset to become Manchester before acting it just means that the action needed ends up being tougher and longer.
What makes you think Dorset levels are going to get to Manchester levels? Given its a largely rural county this seems very unlikely to me.
Because the virus spreads quickly once it gets going. Also, rural places have less NHS capacity, therefore hit crisis point before big cities.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Nick, can I ask if you've ever run a business?
It doesn't work with such regularity as the public sector. Lots of fortuitous purchases in retail, leisure etc. In some sectors it isn't possible to keep running up and down for long periods. EG Pubs, restaurants. And that is before the problem of public reluctance to shop/spend/eat out is taken into account.
I am aghast at the notion of a national lockdown. It simply wont be well observed. How fair is it for the good folk of Dorset to be locked down because Manchester has a problem?
Yes, I run a translation business now, in addition to managing the UK arm of a large charity, and I published a successful magazine for 17 years, though none of those are or were in the retail sector. Clearly it's inconvenient if you can't operate for a fortnight, but if you know it's coming you can plan around it, as most businesses do every Christmas/New Year. If lockdown simply hits you at random intervals you're totally screwed - I imagine Cyclefree's daughter never knows when to order more beer, for example.
And I'd argue that your customers will be so unnerved that your business will do worse as well than if they know that there's a pattern to it. I've got friends I'd like to have a meal with, and we'll happily organise it when we know it'll work, but at the moment we've just given up trying to plan it.
Christmas closures for retail lasts literally 1 day. Most hospitality continues throughout. Its a busy time. Terrible comparison.
Regular lockdowns are no better than any other type - it still causes wastage, and probably causes more anxiety and lowers retail/leisure/hospitality sales.
I assume this is the UK? The NZ one shows it is due to the various distancing measures rather than people getting Covid instead of the flu, because no one in NZ got Covid.
This idea of regular 2 week shutdowns. If its such a good idea, much better than either living with a range of restrictions over the course of 1-2 years or having longer lockdowns every 6 months, its very strange how not a single other countries has deployed this.
Not really. The pandemic is developing. This could be an idea whose time has come.
Like Lent, and intermittent fasting, and weekends. If it looks like it works, it could be scheduled years in advance - first 2 weeks of every [other] month, or whatever.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
You want a totalitarian communist state approach? Not many others do.
No of course not. But we should treat this like a war - time-limited restrictions, properly enforced.
Would you have been complaining about rationing, black-out curtains, requisitioning of land for airfields, conscription etc. etc. in 1940. I doubt it.
Of course this isn't 1940 and Covid-19 isn't the Nazis... but we need to show some determination here.
Government ineptitude, wooliness, mixed messages (and yes Cummingsgate) have made a bad situation much worse.
But why is Europe also in the same, if not worse position, even without the comments in your last sentence, (not that I disagree with them)
Any update from the boffins in Oxford? I thought we would have seen the end of the phase 3 trials by now at least.
Agreed - progress as regards signing-off the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine appears to have come to a dead stop, accompanied by a recent period of total silence. In view of the terrible fate seemingly awaiting many teens of thousands, plus a likely collapse of our economy, let's hope that the delays in approving the vaccine aren't simply a matter of red tape. Time is of the essence here.
Remember the somewhat bizarre statement from Nancy Pelosi about not trusting the Oxford vaccine - because of Brexit?
To the Democrats, any vaccine announcement before the end of voting will be counted as an October Surprise.
Given that, the short number of days involved & the current polls.... if I was running a pharmaceutical company I would have the policy of - "Take your time, chaps. In fact, double check all your sums. No hurry before, say, 6th November".
I assume this is the UK? The NZ one shows it is due to the various distancing measures rather than people getting Covid instead of the flu, because no one in NZ got Covid.
I am not sure, I assumed the same.
Yeah I guess we know how to stop the spread of flu now! Every cloud...
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Wrong. Most of those admitted to hospital with covid are in their fifties or younger. The overwhelming majority of these had no serious co-morbidities. In addition, the majority were not obese.
Of the children unfortunate enough to be admitted to hospital with covid, the majority had no co-morbidities, and the most common co-morbidity out of those who did have one was asthma.
That's hardly "keeping sick oldies alive a few more months." Nor "... obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly."
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
How many of their parents and grandparents have died?
Perhaps its the parents and grandparents who need to take some responsibility.
So - should parents and grandparents all stay away from their children? Require their children to wear masks at all times at home. One might wonder what you sweep up in the statement "take some responsibility."
Intensive care, and what happens if it’s overwhelmed by numbers, are nothing to you, are they? As long as you can just parrot the same cherrypicked pieces, the overall reality will crumble against your desire.
Breaking: new case rates are now declining in both Wales and NI
Can you post a link to the report? I don't see the new numbers on the dashboard, but then I also think you couldn't make that statement based the figures from a single day.
Northern Ireland has reported a further 649 infections, down from its record rise of more than 1,000 announced earlier this month.
Wales, which is a week into its “fire break” lockdown, has reported another 1,301 new infections. This is down from a record high of 1,414 announced on Wednesday
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
Yes. Was walking down Northumberland Street Thursday. A large gaggle of 30-40 young people stood out. Thought there had been an incident of some kind. A queue for the fancy dress shop.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
Not at all.
The curfew is designed to stop socialising in the evening while social distancing shopping can continue throughout daytime
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
You want a totalitarian communist state approach? Not many others do.
No of course not. But we should treat this like a war - time-limited restrictions, properly enforced.
Would you have been complaining about rationing, black-out curtains, requisitioning of land for airfields, conscription etc. etc. in 1940. I doubt it.
Of course this isn't 1940 and Covid-19 isn't the Nazis... but we need to show some determination here.
Government ineptitude, wooliness, mixed messages (and yes Cummingsgate) have made a bad situation much worse.
You can only go to war if there is the will for sacrifice. I don't think that that will is widespread at the moment. I don't think the majority of people see this as something that really threatens them, in the way that Operation Sealion did.
Again the inability to make clear Halloween isn't a thing this year way ahead of time, instead the government is all reactive.
At the start of the rule of 6 they should have laid out what events just aren't going to be having e.g. Halloween, bonfire nights, ski trips, etc etc etc.
Harsh, draconian sounding, but the only way to handle this pandemic.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Wrong. Most of those admitted to hospital with covid are in their fifties or younger. The overwhelming majority of these had no serious co-morbidities. In addition, the majority were not obese.
Of the children unfortunate enough to be admitted to hospital with covid, the majority had no co-morbidities, and the most common co-morbidity out of those who did have one was asthma.
That's hardly "keeping sick oldies alive a few more months." Nor "... obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly."
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
How many of their parents and grandparents have died?
Perhaps its the parents and grandparents who need to take some responsibility.
So - should parents and grandparents all stay away from their children? Require their children to wear masks at all times at home. One might wonder what you sweep up in the statement "take some responsibility."
Intensive care, and what happens if it’s overwhelmed by numbers, are nothing to you, are they? As long as you can just parrot the same cherrypicked pieces, the overall reality will crumble against your desire.
What surprised me the other day, was to hear that NHS ICU's were almost half full. I think I heard it on the tv or radio, so maybe I have misheard and this is all nonsense, but I thought, if they are only half full in the event of an unprecedented pandemic, maybe there are too many of them
Reading that back it could be one of the deliberately absurd comments in Viz's Letterbocks!
Breaking: new case rates are now declining in both Wales and NI
Can you post a link to the report? I don't see the new numbers on the dashboard, but then I also think you couldn't make that statement based the figures from a single day.
Northern Ireland has reported a further 649 infections, down from its record rise of more than 1,000 announced earlier this month.
Wales, which is a week into its “fire break” lockdown, has reported another 1,301 new infections. This is down from a record high of 1,414 announced on Wednesday
A link would be nice, not that I don't believe the copy and paste.
Again the inability to make clear Halloween isn't a thing this year way ahead of time, instead the government is all reactive.
At the start of the rule of 6 they should have laid out what events just aren't going to be having e.g. Halloween, bonfire nights, ski trips, etc etc etc.
Harsh, draconian sounding, but the only way to handle this pandemic.
Breaking: new case rates are now declining in both Wales and NI
Can you post a link to the report? I don't see the new numbers on the dashboard, but then I also think you couldn't make that statement based the figures from a single day.
Northern Ireland has reported a further 649 infections, down from its record rise of more than 1,000 announced earlier this month.
Wales, which is a week into its “fire break” lockdown, has reported another 1,301 new infections. This is down from a record high of 1,414 announced on Wednesday
And this will be falsely reported as circuit breaker having worked.
I assume this is the UK? The NZ one shows it is due to the various distancing measures rather than people getting Covid instead of the flu, because no one in NZ got Covid.
I am not sure, I assumed the same.
Yeah I guess we know how to stop the spread of flu now! Every cloud...
I was actually wondering if it might be suppressing flu enough to actually make some strains disappear from general circulation.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
What about the health of others?
All good.
The beauty of COVID is that you could have had it, completely asymptomatically, passed in on to tons of people. etc etc.
You have no way of knowing, short of an antibody test.
This idea of regular 2 week shutdowns. If its such a good idea, much better than either living with a range of restrictions over the course of 1-2 years or having longer lockdowns every 6 months, its very strange how not a single other countries has deployed this.
Not really. The pandemic is developing. This could be an idea whose time has come.
Like Lent, and intermittent fasting, and weekends. If it looks like it works, it could be scheduled years in advance - first 2 weeks of every [other] month, or whatever.
I like it. Only semi-joking in fact. If it's going to change the world, let's shape the change.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
What's scary about where we are now is where the trajectory is heading. A firebreak sets the trajectory back. After a while, it returns and you need another firebreak.
That's why I've been arguing for some time that we should have two-week lockdowns every two months, preplanned so people can organise their lives and businesses around them. Even if you really suffer in lockdowns, they won't feel so awful if you know their duration and regularity. It'd be far better then our current approach of telling people it'll probably be all right, then doing a panicky lockdown for a bit, then relaxing for a bit, etc.
Yes, I'm surprised that that idea hasn't been more widely discussed or (as far as I know) implemented anywhere.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
You want a totalitarian communist state approach? Not many others do.
No of course not. But we should treat this like a war - time-limited restrictions, properly enforced.
Would you have been complaining about rationing, black-out curtains, requisitioning of land for airfields, conscription etc. etc. in 1940. I doubt it.
Of course this isn't 1940 and Covid-19 isn't the Nazis... but we need to show some determination here.
Government ineptitude, wooliness, mixed messages (and yes Cummingsgate) have made a bad situation much worse.
But why is Europe also in the same, if not worse position, even without the comments in your last sentence, (not that I disagree with them)
Because the same issue of failing to institute lock-downs early has applied across Europe.
Let's not forget that compared to Italy, France and Spain we had a couple of weeks' warning. Which Boris and co. squandered.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
What a load of twaddle. BigG clearly means a nighttime curfew, as anyone who read the comment thread with an open mind can see.
I've yet to understand what the problem with shops is. Does anyone catch this in shops????
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
What about the health of others?
All good.
The beauty of COVID is that you could have had it, completely asymptomatically, passed in on to tons of people. etc etc.
You have no way of knowing, short of an antibody test.
So I had a test, two days before I set off. Returned with no symptoms and, despite not needing to quarantine, was very careful about keeping distance from people for ten days or so after I returned. I think I am good.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
Not sure you understand the curfew
It is designed to stop people socialising in the evening but allowing normal social distancing shopping
France has introduced one between 9.00pm and 6.00am
Breaking: new case rates are now declining in both Wales and NI
Can you post a link to the report? I don't see the new numbers on the dashboard, but then I also think you couldn't make that statement based the figures from a single day.
Northern Ireland has reported a further 649 infections, down from its record rise of more than 1,000 announced earlier this month.
Wales, which is a week into its “fire break” lockdown, has reported another 1,301 new infections. This is down from a record high of 1,414 announced on Wednesday
A link would be nice, not that I don't believe the copy and paste.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
So the system magically fixes itself? If it was possible to do it then it would have happened by now.
I know things are very bad with the virus and the PM's announcement coming, but I took a moment today to feel pleased that we live in a country where people believe and know their vote is counted and the level of intimidation around polling stations is basically zero.
And we seem to have had smooth handovers of power.
Unlike what we are about to see in the US, which is supposed to be the shining beacon of democracy.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
Getting track and trace to work is the new unicorn poo. Two week break to "sort it", is horseshit. The reality is it isn't possible to do this manually. The way the disease is, by the time you have a test, its been 4-5 days of infecting other people, then a day to get the results, then at least another day to start to try and work out who you spent any time with over the past week, and you won't know the people you sat next to on the Tube, its easy to forget your neighbour popped round for a quick chat, who that person who was in the gym getting changed next to you.
And nobody is suggesting we do much more than change from a central system to a local run by local authorities involving door knocking, which maybe be better at actually contacting some people, but is even slower to go on foot door to door.
A working test, track and trace system capable of reacting to this required 5 years of development in South Korea, one if not the most technologically advanced nations on earth.
China says Hi.
We shouldnt be taking China as a guide on anything IMO.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
What a load of twaddle. BigG clearly means a nighttime curfew, as anyone who read the comment thread with an open mind can see.
I've yet to understand what the problem with shops is. Does anyone catch this in shops????
Wimmen mainly... They're the people in shops... (I'll now hide for 100 years)
I know things are very bad with the virus and the PM's announcement coming, but I took a moment today to feel pleased that we live in a country where people believe and know their vote is counted and the level of intimidation around polling stations is basically zero.
And we seem to have had smooth handovers of power.
Unlike what we are about to see in the US, which is supposed to be the shining beacon of democracy.
In the US, whoever wins, they have a massive task trying to short of the shit. The extremes on both sides who have been emboldened by Trump and the failure of the likes of Wheeler in Portland aren't going to go away quietly. This has been building for years.
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
Look at the graph of UK Covid deaths* on, say, Worldometer:
The up-curve of each wave is steep, the down-curve is shallow, the valley bottom was broad. For the UK those stages were approximately 3 weeks, 10 weeks and 10 weeks. One week's increase takes approximately 3 weeks to remove.
It therefore makes sense to apply lock-down very early in the rise of each wave, since it can be applied for less time. Each week earlier a lockdown is applied, saves three weeks of lockdown.
Of course, we have missed that chance in wave 2 despite the scientists proposing it.
(*Sadly, deaths are more useful here than cases because case numbers are afftected by testing levels.)
Or we actually get a grip of what is actually causing new transmissions and concentrate on how to eliminate it. Applying lockdown at the rise of every new wave means we will never really be out of it and the economic and social costs are going to destroy the life chances of a generation. Fine for me because I'm married, have a good job and own my own home. Not so much for young people who are just starting out and facing this without anyone in power thinking about how these lockdowns affect them and instead feathering their own nests.
At this point in time it's not worth doing anything because we'll be exactly where we are now two or three weeks after the four weeks are over and then the scientists will be asking for another 4 weeks and so on. It's time to tell them to come up with real solutions or shut up.
Here's a question Peston and co might like to ask today:
Can you tell me how many in the 0-19 age group have died in English hospitals during the last month ?
The answer is zero.
And a total of one during the last four months.
If they ask it, they'll deserve a contemptuous response. By now, any journalist should understand that you can be a vector of a deadly disease even if you don't die from it yourself.
So the young are to have their future destroyed to keep sick oldies alive a few more months and so that obese slobs can have their risks reduced slightly.
Lockdown the young now because we allowed holidays to Spain in July.
Presumably the young weren't among those taking advantage of being allowed to take holidays to Spain in July so are absolved of all responsibility.
I don't condemn people for holidaying in Spain, or Greece. Both countries have had a really torrid time in recent years. I was astonished to learn just how important British tourism is to each of their economies (the absence of foreign holidays has been a big factor in the UK trade surplus).
I dunno. To take a foreign holiday in the middle of a global pandemic is pretty dumb.
It did wonders for my mental health. And I had a great time, at negligible risk to my health.
What about the health of others?
All good.
The beauty of COVID is that you could have had it, completely asymptomatically, passed in on to tons of people. etc etc.
You have no way of knowing, short of an antibody test.
So I had a test, two days before I set off. Returned with no symptoms and, despite not needing to quarantine, was very careful about keeping distance from people for ten days or so after I returned. I think I am good.
Well EYE think you are essentially good, Ian, too. When the times comes you will pass the pearly gates.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
Not sure you understand the curfew
It is designed to stop people socialising in the evening but allowing normal social distancing shopping
France has introduced one between 9.00pm and 6.00am
Will this be an enforced curfew or one of them cuddly, voluntary ones?
Utterly predictable we would end up in national lockdown. Boris has wasted weeks dithering and kidding himself all would be fine.
Not sure Drakeford is wise either to promise what will happen post- firebreak.
At some point politicians need to understand - the virus sets the timetable, not them.
Yep Drakeford is trying to get political "credit" for acting early. But come next week Wales is going to be on a par, at best, with middle of the road English regions. So quite why they will be in a position to say a decisive "no" to a longer lockdown, as England enters one, isn't clear.
Sturgeon also seems to be claiming that she might not need to follow England because "the signs are that transmission in Scotland is coming down". Well exactly the same is true in England on their published data. R number falling. Almost below 1 in the North West - the area with the harshest restrictions. Quite why we are publishing data in England when the scientists seems to dismiss everything it is saying in favour of their own models, who knows?
Drakeford deserves a bit of credit for recognising the obvious a few weeks earlier than Boris (or Sturgeon...)
I suspect the firebreak will have a big impact and will reduce infections substantially. Time will tell.
Unless Drakeford has data to back him up we haven't seen, it's foolish to promise what he will do after the firebreak.
And then what? We stay in those measures forever because as soon as they are relaxed we're back to where we are now in a few short weeks.
If we can get cases down to the point where track, trace, isolate can cope, then we can control the epidemic and we won't need more lockdowns.
In addition - more time gives us chance to improve TTI system, gets us closer to a vaccine and better treatments, AND prevents the inevitable Christmas increase in contacts from being quite so devastating.
So the system magically fixes itself? If it was possible to do it then it would have happened by now.
Indeed.
It would be fascinating to see what approach would be taken if there was no real expectation of a vaccine before next March.
Either your suggested isolation approach (which is a great idea but logistically difficult in a way that govt won't like - i.e. it needs physical provision rather than money/systems) or a 'live with it' common cold like approach, with great efforts made to expand field hospital approaches.
The continued promise of a vaccine is clouding our approach, and meaning the West ends up with stay at home orders. Lockdown's shouldn't be a policy decision. They're the destination of the path of least resistance up to now. But I do wonder if they'll be ignored in future.....and thus prove to be useless.
The focus on absolute capacity of walk-in testing and what percentage of track and trace is managing to find, is like focusing on Cheltenham as the major cause of the first wave. It looking at totally the wrong issue, if you having to test 500k a day and trying to trace them, you have already failed. And two weeks off from this will do very little. Its a bit like sticking your fingers in a bucket filled with hole in the bottom, while a hosepipe continues to fill it. The two weeks is a bit like having a mate come along with a small cup and do some bailing out of the water in the bucket to help.
Sky reporting from Liverpool just now showing a queue for a Halloween fancy dress shop.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
So rather than lockdown the shops, have a strictly policed curfew? For someone who needed regular inhalations of smelling salts just 'cos of the great Drakeford repression of toaster sales, you have a strangely inconsistent position on authoritarian measures.
In the areas that need it...
So allow shops to stay open but use (scarce) police resources to keep people off the streets so those shops don't make sales anyway?
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
Not sure you understand the curfew
It is designed to stop people socialising in the evening but allowing normal social distancing shopping
France has introduced one between 9.00pm and 6.00am
In France you can't leave your home without telling the government online where you are going, when and why.
That's a level of lockdown we never had even in March.
Comments
0-19 21
19-39 231
40-59 2,476
60-79 12,565
80+ 17,562
Covid is not a non-discriminatory killer.
I am amazed that his 'smart' advisors didnt advise him (or did and were ignored) that some humility after so personal a brush with the virus (something for all his faults Boris showed after), would allow some voters to see him in a kinder more humble view.
Even if that kind of response is not in his nature (and its not) he could have at least used his own experience to understand the suffering of so many better, instead of focussing on his own 'immunity' and nothing else.
How China Tracks Everyone - 23 Dec 2019
https://youtu.be/CLo3e1Pak-Y
At present, it's basically a system designed at present for a different virus (as, incidentally, is much of the guidance about how to avoid catching it, which prioritises social distancing over avoid crowded spaces per se (over extended periods), and washing hands despite the near zero evidence of surface transmission.
And I'd argue that your customers will be so unnerved that your business will do worse as well than if they know that there's a pattern to it. I've got friends I'd like to have a meal with, and we'll happily organise it when we know it'll work, but at the moment we've just given up trying to plan it.
None will publicly say as much but it would certainly encourage the young to restrict their activities.
Instead we had warnings of "don't kill granny" and "beware long covid" and they haven't worked.
Also, you miss the point that we ran for 10-12 weeks through the summer with low levels of infection. No reason to think we wouldn't have had a similar 'quiet' period if we had locked down at the start of March and reduced the peak, and therefore the time to get the nubers right back down, by half or two-thirds.
Instead of 3 weeks rise, 9 weeks fall and 10-12 weeks relative abeyance, we could have had a pattern of 1:3:10. So say 4 weeks in lock down out of 14 rather than 12 out of 24.
And btw, anyone who thinks this next lockdown is now going to be just a few weeks is deluded.
Over the summer we got overconfident and ignored the tyranny of the R rate. Opening the schools should have been first, and then other stuff one-by-one as data permitted.
Dorset didn't need it in March, and don't need it now. I suspect any imposition now will be largely ignored. Local lockdowns need to be given a shot. Tier 4 or 5 if needs be. But shutting down everywhere is madness.
The reporter commented that on speaking to those in the queue they want to get their fancy dress for their parties tonight and have no intention of following the rules
No matter what Boris does or anyone else fighting this pandemic until a strictly policed stay at home curfew is introduced this pandemic will continue unchecked
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1322239794416652289?s=20
My missus has to go to work in the office of a school no matter what, and there are hundreds of inner city kids floating about there
https://thetab.com/uk/bristol/2020/10/31/bristol-director-of-public-health-says-covid-is-a-gift-to-students-42727
If I had been Boris, I would demand a more work on that idea before being able to properly assess if it is a reasonable strategy. I highly doubt other developed countries haven't also had a look at similar ideas and quite telling they haven't even publicly entertained them. Are we really to believe that the likes of Germany hasn't had a proper good look at strategy, given in general they have been pretty good at planning ahead.
Would you have been complaining about rationing, black-out curtains, requisitioning of land for airfields, conscription etc. etc. in 1940. I doubt it.
Of course this isn't 1940 and Covid-19 isn't the Nazis... but we need to show some determination here.
Government ineptitude, wooliness, mixed messages (and yes Cummingsgate) have made a bad situation much worse.
Regular lockdowns are no better than any other type - it still causes wastage, and probably causes more anxiety and lowers retail/leisure/hospitality sales.
To the Democrats, any vaccine announcement before the end of voting will be counted as an October Surprise.
Given that, the short number of days involved & the current polls.... if I was running a pharmaceutical company I would have the policy of - "Take your time, chaps. In fact, double check all your sums. No hurry before, say, 6th November".
Yeah I guess we know how to stop the spread of flu now! Every cloud...
As long as you can just parrot the same cherrypicked pieces, the overall reality will crumble against your desire.
Wales, which is a week into its “fire break” lockdown, has reported another 1,301 new infections. This is down from a record high of 1,414 announced on Wednesday
A queue for the fancy dress shop.
The curfew is designed to stop socialising in the evening while social distancing shopping can continue throughout daytime
At the start of the rule of 6 they should have laid out what events just aren't going to be having e.g. Halloween, bonfire nights, ski trips, etc etc etc.
Harsh, draconian sounding, but the only way to handle this pandemic.
Reading that back it could be one of the deliberately absurd comments in Viz's Letterbocks!
But as suspected, from a single day.
You have no way of knowing, short of an antibody test.
I'm sure Boris wouldn't mind floating a shoot-to-kill policy to enforce a curfew for mawkishly sentimental Scousers and 'a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
Total Early Votes: 90,012,433
In-Person Votes: 32,663,560 •
Mail Ballots Returned: 57,348,873 •
Mail Ballots Outstanding: 33,680,976
Sadly not promiscuous though.
Let's not forget that compared to Italy, France and Spain we had a couple of weeks' warning. Which Boris and co. squandered.
https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1322544806590111744
I've yet to understand what the problem with shops is. Does anyone catch this in shops????
It is designed to stop people socialising in the evening but allowing normal social distancing shopping
France has introduced one between 9.00pm and 6.00am
And we seem to have had smooth handovers of power.
Unlike what we are about to see in the US, which is supposed to be the shining beacon of democracy.
Min - Biden 54 .. Trump 43 - 770 LV - 29/30 Oct
Texas - Biden 50 .. Trump 48 - 775 LV - 28/29 Oct
...............................................................................
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MinnesotaResultsOctober2020.pdf
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/TexasResultsOctober2020.pdf
I realize a couple of states are very low but think we could be circa 70% by the time all the returns are tallied
At this point in time it's not worth doing anything because we'll be exactly where we are now two or three weeks after the four weeks are over and then the scientists will be asking for another 4 weeks and so on. It's time to tell them to come up with real solutions or shut up.
It would be fascinating to see what approach would be taken if there was no real expectation of a vaccine before next March.
Either your suggested isolation approach (which is a great idea but logistically difficult in a way that govt won't like - i.e. it needs physical provision rather than money/systems) or a 'live with it' common cold like approach, with great efforts made to expand field hospital approaches.
The continued promise of a vaccine is clouding our approach, and meaning the West ends up with stay at home orders. Lockdown's shouldn't be a policy decision. They're the destination of the path of least resistance up to now. But I do wonder if they'll be ignored in future.....and thus prove to be useless.
Maybe they are in the post?
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1322562692771696640
Biden likely to the most voted for candidate in US history.
That's a level of lockdown we never had even in March.