My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Spain is by a wide margin the most popular destination for Brits in the EU - yet its barely half the number who have gone to Australia (who will almost all have to have been working age, unlike many of their Spanish compatriots) and not far ahead of the number of working age Brits who have gone to each of Canada, and the US. There are more expat Brits in New Zealand and South Africa than our nearest neighbour France - and twice as many as in Germany. People have voted with their feet.
It's hardly surprising that former British colonies have a pull factor and doesn't say anything about how European we are.
Speaking the language (as we see with migrants & asylum seekers) is a tremendous pull for immigrants. Would be interesting to see how many of those UK immigrants to ANZAC speak or are interested in speaking a second language.
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
That's true - though it's still generally a bad idea, and virtually everyone I know is now planning to avoid it, including people who had planned family get-togethers: they are all being cancelled. I'm not sure that political messages are playing a big part - people are just looking at the numbers and thinking urrrgh. The imminence of vaccination is the other spur.
Anecdotally from Surrey, vaccination is now well under way and working smoothly in Horsham and Guildford hospitals, but GP vaccination is still getting off the ground. Generally speaking the programme is getting there.
IIRC Tegnell opposed the Who move to recommend face masks as he believed it would make people think Covid was airborne.
It’s very obviously airborne! Jesus wept.
The papers coming out of S.Korea (where they do /real/ test & trace) demonstrate this without question. You can track who does & doesn’t get infected in a given event by whether they’re sitting downstream of the airflow from the index case for that event.
Are these people simply ignoring this work altogether? What is wrong with them?
That was then, this is now. In the early days it was all about hand sanitising and how we all touch our own faces 300 times a minute.
The amount we have all thought about transmission, from scientist to news indifferent everyman, is probably beyond what we ever thought.
At the scientific end, indoors vs cold, contact vs airborne are still substantially unresolved debates for flu, and I think COVID will give impetus to settling these things more fully.
For the everyman, that a little bit on the edges of how you behave means a lot in terms of infection risk means many people will transmit diseases less in the next few years.
In terms of COVID Vs flu, my layman thought is that there is a great deal of commonality and having planned for flu did get us so far: a flu pandemic would have been quicker spreading (R is in there same ball park, but the generation time is shorter), and quicker and shorter to lock down (vaccines would have landed ahead of the second wave).
Transmission wise my layman feel is that flu is a snottier, more liquid diisease so contact transmission is a bigger factor and washing hands more central. And it is still that kids were less prone to COVID infection - what with immature ACE receptors and contact transmission being a kid biased vector - though secondary school infection rates got somewhat higher than adult rates, the social contact budget to reach that point was massive. That's why I can't quite piece together the new strain, unchanged spike protein, schools mass testing in Kent mix of information.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
So what?
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
Oh they do and of course 70% of Scottish exports go to England which is even more than the less than 50% of UK exports that go to the EU so tariffs will hit them even harder.
Plus Leave arguably only got to 52% of the vote in 2016 UK wide by promising to stay in the single market, it was only FPTP that enabled the Tories to win a UK majority on 43% of the vote to leave the single market as well as the EU in 2019. 43% can win a general election but 43% would not have won a referendum.
In many ways we are more European but there are significant areas where we are closer to the US - dramatic arts and music being the main ones. One can easily imagine someone from the UK or Ireland becoming the host of the biggest US late night talk show a la James Corden, but it is harder to imagine someone from another EU country doing the same. The cinematic versions of all-American comic book heroes like Batman, Spiderman and Superman have all been played by Brits within the last decade. There's a reason why British films are not included in a "foreign" category at the Oscars.
Yes, I don't want to overstate it - language is still an issue, though English is pervasive among Europeans under 40, and Anglo-American music and movies are big across Europe. One can make an argument that English-speaking culture has colonised much of the world with reverse influences more limited - although TV series like The Killing and The Bridge are very successful in relative terms, they are still a niche in British culture.
I was thinking more in terms of social norms, though - attitudes to work, fun, socialising, sex, drinking, drugs, etc. have become more similar across urban Europe in ways that many older folk find partly attractive and partly repellent, but in any case quite similar across European borders. It's interesting to consider why some things travel and some don't. American light entertainment is almost universally enjoyed, while American preoccupation with religion seems eccentric in much of Europe.
This is apparently one of the biggest differences between mainland European countries and English-speaking countries: the inheritance laws.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
The stockpile was there, it was just used up a lot faster than expected.
"The pandemic caught the NHS on the wrong foot. The national stockpile was nowhere near big enough for a coronavirus outbreak - a consequence of the pandemic plans' fixation on influenza," the Labour MP said.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
So what?
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
Oh they do and of course 70% of Scottish exports go to England which is even more than the less than 50% of UK exports that go to the EU so tariffs will hit them even harder.
Plus Leave arguably only got to 52% of the vote in 2016 UK wide by promising to stay in the single market, it was only FPTP that enabled the Tories to win a UK majority on 43% of the vote to leave the single market as well as the EU in 2019. 43% can win a general election but 43% would not have won a referendum.
Quote from the Economist article I linked to below:
"Tellingly, the different systems do not merely clash. They baffle people on each side. For many months the EU's proposal was debated by national experts—lawyers, professors and judges from the 27 member countries. When the English system was explained to continental experts, they found it bizarre and unfair. To English experts the continent's rules seemed no less unjust.
In Europe that level of mutual incomprehension is always worth exploring. On the continent the claim of children to guaranteed, equal shares of an estate feels like a basic human right. A common assumption is that England's different laws exist to protect fusty privilege, such as the birthrights of eldest sons. Those defending continental inheritance laws say they are defending “solidarity within the family”. The English talk about freedom."
Wales' delayed cases have arrived: 11,468. Adding them to the incomplete numbers in the previous four days gives 13,841 across the five days. The corresponding five days in the previous week had 8,923 cases, so that's a 55% increase. Cases per week per 100,000 now at 589. Merthyr Tydfil over 1,000.
Final note on public procurement, I think it shows that both sides now accept that this is going tnbe a fairly standard off the shelf trade deal. Our trade deals with other third countries allow for reciprocal public procurement, it would be odd if the EU one didn't. It's absolutely great for UK companies as they have got 27 governments and the EU to sell to and from what I can tell it was a huge sticking point that the EU wanted one way access for EU companies to be able to get UK public contracts but to lock UK companies out of the single market.
More and more it feels as though the EU has realised that their "consequences for leaving" stance was the roadblock to a deal and are dropping all of these measures and our final deal with the EU is going to look a lot like the Canada/EU deal, almost identical with a few extra lines on shipping and haulage rights.
Jeremy Hunt's (and I believe NP's) area in Surrey is the only one in the county to escape the new tier.
I do suspect we might see nobody going down to Tier 2 just yet. Rates appear to have stopped decreasing in a lot of the North (rates compared with 7 days previous are still going down in places, but on a shorter day-to-day measure things seem to have hit minimum). And that some of the candidates to drop a tier are cities just before Christmas - substantial meal or no - that would give me pause. The existence of London is clearly a possible vector between Essex and Kent (e.g. incoming construction workers taking advantage of tier 2).
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu epidemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
@DougSeal re your post. We Remainers never made the sovereignty argument because never did we imagine the level of insecurity around their nation, and sense of identity that leavers have displayed.
Remainers were and are generally more confident in their (national) skins.
Your "...never did we imagine..." is the issue. That failure of imagination points to a failure to connect with the electorate. It is not "Leavers" we had the problem with, it was the undecided, the nervous, and that is where we failed. "We Remainers were and are generally more confident..." - damn right. But we never tried to bring anyone less confident with us. That's how elections are lost - by assuming that all right thinking people think your way and not bothering with the rest. Succssful politicians bring people on board - they don't play to their own gallery.
I see your point but that would have been to an extent infantilising those people.
Can you rationally explain to someone why being in the EU is nothing like being a slave?
And ok for those not quite as insecure but wavering, perhaps we should have had David Davis on loop reminding us that we were always sovereign, to a background of The British Grenadier.
That flippancy is the problem. You're dismissing (perhaps you're being ironic) even the waiverers as being nationalistic idiots. You're assuming that the benefits are obvious and the fears incabable of being addressed by any rational person. That's why we lost.
Not nationalistic. But what are you going to say to those waverers? We're sovereign, we're proud to be British, what else? Seriously?
I do, and find it’s not too bad. @Dura_Ace recommends Muc-Off spray.
Yep, "Muc Off Anti Fog" is great. I used the other day while doing 95mph (in first gear LOL) on my Fireblade SP2 while it was pissing down and I could clearly see the terror in the eyes of drivers coming the other way.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu epidemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
Again, I'm only talking about PPE here. Your argument would be correct if there were some great difference in the kinds of PPE required to deal with coronaviruses as distinct from flu (or for that matter, any airborne respiratory virus).
If the problem was that we didn't have enough masks, aprons and gowns to give medical staff a certain number of these each per day, then that problem would have arisen with a flu pandemic just as with a coronavirus one.
@OldKingCole I can't even imagine a world without maternity leave. Mad.
I can recall a world where women talked of having to leave their jobs because they'd married. Mother-in-law for one. My mother ran her own pharmacy so the issue didn't arise!
Yes. My father in law also remembers having a round of redundancies where the married women were targeted specifically because it was thought that their income wasn't necessary for their households.
My mother was a teacher before WW2 and had to give up when she married in 1941. She returned in about 1950 when the law was changed. To this day primary school teachers are usually called Miss and I had one male friend who became a primary school teacher in the 1960s and was called Miss.
The two male teachers in the primary I was at in the late 40's, were always called Mr. Must admit I was never in their classes; they taught the less academic, more obstreperous children; I was in the potential-for-grammar school stream.
1. Primary School 1948-54. Remember one teacher, MRS Northey. Was a Mrs and known at the school and amongst all the pupils as Mrs. 2. See latest story is that the EU has set a dealine of Sunday, with the caveat, "for this year". Hey ho, you can just see it, talks to go on into next year, both sides happy with that, new Biden administration wants both both sides to review situation and work towards another Referendum! . Technically a Referendum is only adbisory, so the government could after 5 yerars ignore it, the world had changed etc etc.Farage would scream, the loons on the Tory right would squeal but the puiblic seeing the chaos at the ports and the rising price of food and goods in the shops et etc ...............
Comments
Anecdotally from Surrey, vaccination is now well under way and working smoothly in Horsham and Guildford hospitals, but GP vaccination is still getting off the ground. Generally speaking the programme is getting there.
At the scientific end, indoors vs cold, contact vs airborne are still substantially unresolved debates for flu, and I think COVID will give impetus to settling these things more fully.
For the everyman, that a little bit on the edges of how you behave means a lot in terms of infection risk means many people will transmit diseases less in the next few years.
In terms of COVID Vs flu, my layman thought is that there is a great deal of commonality and having planned for flu did get us so far: a flu pandemic would have been quicker spreading (R is in there same ball park, but the generation time is shorter), and quicker and shorter to lock down (vaccines would have landed ahead of the second wave).
Transmission wise my layman feel is that flu is a snottier, more liquid diisease so contact transmission is a bigger factor and washing hands more central. And it is still that kids were less prone to COVID infection - what with immature ACE receptors and contact transmission being a kid biased vector - though secondary school infection rates got somewhat higher than adult rates, the social contact budget to reach that point was massive. That's why I can't quite piece together the new strain, unchanged spike protein, schools mass testing in Kent mix of information.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
(£)
https://www.economist.com/europe/2009/10/15/where-theres-a-will-theres-a-row
"Where there's a will there's a row
What inheritance laws tell you about Europe and why Britain is the odd man out"
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-spent-ps10bn-extra-on-ppe-due-to-inadequate-stockpile-and-surge-in-demand-report-finds-b78986.html
"The pandemic caught the NHS on the wrong foot. The national stockpile was nowhere near big enough for a coronavirus outbreak - a consequence of the pandemic plans' fixation on influenza," the Labour MP said.
We won't have "membership".
See the difference?
Our FTA looks like the "better deal" that the Tweet said was possible.
"Tellingly, the different systems do not merely clash. They baffle people on each side. For many months the EU's proposal was debated by national experts—lawyers, professors and judges from the 27 member countries. When the English system was explained to continental experts, they found it bizarre and unfair. To English experts the continent's rules seemed no less unjust.
In Europe that level of mutual incomprehension is always worth exploring. On the continent the claim of children to guaranteed, equal shares of an estate feels like a basic human right. A common assumption is that England's different laws exist to protect fusty privilege, such as the birthrights of eldest sons. Those defending continental inheritance laws say they are defending “solidarity within the family”. The English talk about freedom."
The UK is facing the first half of 2021 in a better situation than we could have done.
Health warning on that graph though, the missing Welsh data might be enough to put us above Germany.
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu epidemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
NEW THREAD
If the problem was that we didn't have enough masks, aprons and gowns to give medical staff a certain number of these each per day, then that problem would have arisen with a flu pandemic just as with a coronavirus one.
2. See latest story is that the EU has set a dealine of Sunday, with the caveat, "for this year". Hey ho, you can just see it, talks to go on into next year, both sides happy with that, new Biden administration wants both both sides to review situation and work towards another Referendum! . Technically a Referendum is only adbisory, so the government could after 5 yerars ignore it, the world had changed etc etc.Farage would scream, the loons on the Tory right would squeal but the puiblic seeing the chaos at the ports and the rising price of food and goods in the shops et etc ...............