We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has ne.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
Which happened.
Very interesting.
Be careful about posting such fact or logic in the twattersphere.
They'll try and twist it into saying you've done a racism.
WP is clear on the subject "As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion"
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
It was always built on a lie, and the hollowness of it all is being revealed.
Biggest take always are don’t eat bats and don’t believe authoritarian governments like China.
Slightly more to it. The first duty of government is to protect its citizens. By any objective measure our government has failed. Now is not the time as they stitch together a last minute response, but there must be a reckoning.
Utter nonsense. Pretending that the UK governement is somehow uniquely bad in this crisis is garbage. How childish you are.
Most governments have failed. They knew what was happening in China, saw the spread to other parts of Asia and failed to prepare. They have been playing catch-up since. That applies to the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland and many others - and the US above all. The childish thing is not to acknowledge that.
I think that the underlying assumption there is that a competent government could somehow have prevented this. Last time I checked Covid 19 was in about 120 countries. There is no way of preventing it whilst remaining a part of the modern world. I was one screaming for the government to be more aggressive in the containment phase but I now accept that the Chief Scientific Advisor was right and I was wrong. Containment was never going to work.
No doubt with the benefit of hindsight some things could have been done better but the reality is that the government has to react to each development as best as they can. They have clearly been caught out by the spread in London being way faster than the models projected. This has pushed them into doing a lot of things much faster and before they were ready. But it’s wrong to criticise them for this. They just have to react to events and they have.
The financial step on wages yesterday was bold and broadly welcomed. I think that the self employed and the gig workers will still need more help but the priority is to get schemes up and running. You cannot wait for every detail to be in place or you don’t act fast enough.
Overall I would give the government 8/10 on this which is pretty good.
I am not criticising the government’s response, just noting it failures on this are common to almost all governments. Overall, its handling of the crisis has been good, though less decisive than I would have liked. There’s still more to do, though. The self-employed are going to need more help, as are those on zero-hours arrangements. That will happen. There is no choice.
I am still not clear what you consider a failure.
I agree that the self employed and gig workers in particular need more help but the steps that could be taken in relation to businesses where HMRC has some knowledge needed taken immediately. There is a lot more to do here. So many of the loans offered early last week in the £330bn package will not be taken up because the last thing companies need is more debt, especially if they have to offer security for it. Grants are what will be required. Deferring tax for 6 months has a cash flow advantage but my wife is already worrying about what will happen next January. This really doesn't solve anything.
It was always built on a lie, and the hollowness of it all is being revealed.
Biggest take always are don’t eat bats and don’t believe authoritarian governments like China.
Slightly more to it. The first duty of government is to protect its citizens. By any objective measure our government has failed. Now is not the time as they stitch together a last minute response, but there must be a reckoning.
Utter nonsense. Pretending that the UK governement is somehow uniquely bad in this crisis is garbage. How childish you are.
Most governments have failed. They knew what was happening in China, saw the spread to other parts of Asia and failed to prepare. They have been playing catch-up since. That applies to the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland and many others - and the US above all. The childish thing is not to acknowledge that.
I think that the underlying assumption there is that a competent government could somehow have prevented this. Last time I checked Covid 19 was in about 120 countries. There is no way of preventing it whilst remaining a part of the modern world. I was one screaming for the government to be more aggressive in the containment phase but I now accept that the Chief Scientific Advisor was right and I was wrong. Containment was never going to work.
No doubt with the benefit of hindsight some things could have been done better but the reality is that the government has to react to each development as best as they can. They have clearly been caught out by the spread in London being way faster than the models projected. This has pushed them into doing a lot of things much faster and before they were ready. But it’s wrong to criticise them for this. They just have to react to events and they have.
The financial step on wages yesterday was bold and broadly welcomed. I think that the self employed and the gig workers will still need more help but the priority is to get schemes up and running. You cannot wait for every detail to be in place or you don’t act fast enough.
Overall I would give the government 8/10 on this which is pretty good.
I agree, I think to make the argument govts have failed it needs to be clear what the alternative response would have been. Presumably that is implement the restrictions that have been made a month earlier? A week or twos difference is hard to describe as failure, and would be hard to prove it would have been better.
If we had implemented restrictions a month earlier, yes fewer coronavirus cases would be present, but we would still have no good solution. Big economic costs would be 1 month more, so 25-33% additional costs (or less generous compensation for employees and businesses).
Most importantly if we were to have locked down the economy as we have done a month ago, how would we have known we didnt need to do so during Zika, Ebola, Swine Flu and SARS? Or should we have had several shutdowns to protect the risk against those?
8/10 is a fair assessment, the government have done well in a high pressure scenario.
Penultimate para asks a very fair question. Of course, if more money had been spent on the NHS over the previous 10 years of Tory Government.........
In turn, if only Labour hadn't buggered the economy by ending boom and bust....
Do you think the financial crisis presents a model for how this government should be treated through the current crisis?
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
"North Korea announced it would be holding a session of the Supreme People's Assembly, the country's parliament, on 10 April. Analysts say the meeting will involve almost 700 of the country's leaders in one spot.
Rachel Minyoung Lee, from North Korea monitoring website NK News said on Twitter that the meeting would "be the ultimate show of (North Korea's) confidence in managing the coronavirus situation"."
The anti-aircraft guns are going to be busy in about 10 days time....
King Cole, the dopey pension contribution changes are the criticism I'd level (not Health-specific, but it did affect doctors and encourage early retirement).
Be grateful that the pension changes also removed the obligation to take an annuity on retirement, which - under the old system - would have crucified anyone due to retire right now.
That was a great reform and a great example of a very positive coalition policy.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
We say there are lots of reasons for Italy being especially susceptible to Covid-19. Do those reasons manifest themselves in a very high death toll in a bad flu year, I wonder?
But... the nation is barely 1 day into a barely there lockdown and people are already saying it is too much?
We've been through the numbers before.
500,000 deaths as the point estimate if we do nothing.
260,000 deaths if we continued as we were last weekend.
The plan now is 20,000 deaths if we are lucky.
There are huge uncertainties in the numbers above but the uncertainty is on the upside. 500,000 deaths, with a systematic breakdown of the health service and society, could quickly turn into millions.
A young adult has a 1/5 chance of spending weeks in hospital with this. So if you are in a couple, you are close to a head-toss in probability terms that one of you will need to go in. Now think of that for people in your street. For people in your borough. For all your mates and their families and their extended families.
Do you think our hospitals will cope with any of that given they can barely cope year-to-year?
The only sensible approach to the problem is to lockdown and develop the technologies for beating it in the safety of the lockdown.
As for Matthew Parris, well he cried about Brexit and went mad by it. Clearly he has no comprehension of the scale of problems. Brexit is a gnat on an elephant's backside compared to this virus.
A doctor in one of the affected hospitals in London last night was already talking about not allowing ANYONE over 60 into ICU. Just think about that for a moment. Parris should think about it too.
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Virtually, on Zoom.
Any other type risks Boris turning up and spilling red wine on your sofa.
We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has ne.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
Which happened.
Very interesting.
Be careful about posting such fact or logic in the twattersphere.
They'll try and twist it into saying you've done a racism.
WP is clear on the subject "As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion"
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
Which means that - if globalisation totally broke down and we regressed back to a survival of the fittest type human society - then in 20-30,000 years everyone in the UK would be white again and everyone in Africa and Australia black.
Governments are at least as likely to choose one of their other options for getting rid of debt: printing money or direct default. Given that most developed countries are going to be in a very similar position, a concerted move is going to be very tempting after this is over.
I think that’s right. And on that basis, it’s hard to see offshoring being left untargeted.
We will all be paying a lot more tax. Possibly a specific corona tax.
Why do I get the impression you and @SouthamObserver are so excited by that?
Because you’re weird. Who on Earth is excited about any of this? It’s a total catastrophe.
Well, indeed.
I'm not talking about the virus or the catastrophic effects - I'm talking about your excitement of putting taxes up after.
I find that weird.
FWIW the emotion I am feeling right now is anger. My view is that this was avoidable or at the very least could have been less harmful.
I don't think you are right (I don't see many good examples around at the moment, certainly not in largish open countries like ours). But your comment is important because lots of people will feel the same - especially, I am thinking, people whose own businesses are lost during the pandemic - and this will surely play out into society and politics afterwards somehow.
My son was in his GCSE year. The grown ups have let his generation down. We could have done things differently. Even policy changes as late as Jan and Feb could have made a big difference.
In the middle of January this was the WHO position:
My company was taking significant action in December and January before the PHEIC declaration. If private enterprise can do it, so can governments.
Governments are beholden to voters, not shareholders - remarkable that your company was taking "significant action" in December since the WHO was only told about it on the 31st.
I would mark the government 7/10. This is very hard to respond to and the government needs to be given a lot of leeway. It initially took a bold but ultimately incorrect decision to let the outbreak run. It was running to catch up with events all last week with its financial package and it still hasn’t got there yet. Boris Johnson is fundamentally too unserious and too incoherent to communicate clear public health announcements: he has got in the way of the experts with his muddled messaging (eg his comments about Mother’s Day).
But taken as a whole, it has tried hard to rectify its mistakes and overall it is doing ok.
I wouldn't quibble between a 7 and a 8. I think Boris has done pretty well in his daily press conferences despite some really stupid questions, not just from Peston either. Every now and again his inner Boris breaks out but he has controlled himself on the whole.
What the government is seeking to do financially is like nothing any British government has ever done before. Subsiding and providing liquidity to the banks in 2008 was an absolute dawdle by comparison. Instead of dealing with a couple of dozen serious players they are dealing with tens of thousands with all their own complications. It will be incredible if numerous mistakes are not made. In fact I would go so far as to say that if hundreds of mistakes are not made they are simply not moving fast enough.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Virtually, on Zoom.
Any other type risks Boris turning up and spilling red wine on your sofa.
Remember when Boris and Carrie having a lover's tiff was the biggest news of the day ? Bring back the Brexit rows even !
We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has never been a better time to quit smoking, get your blood pressure under control, make sure that if you have diabetes it's well controlled, and -- yes -- get regular physical activity. (Being active outside for at least 15 minutes a day also helps with vitamin D levels. Of all of the various proposed measures to increase your resistance to infection, regular physical activity and adequate vitamin D levels probably have the most scientific evidence to support them -- and can be done safely.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
In colder climbs, yes. Black people living in Northern Europe are particularly prone to illnesses stemming from lack of Vitamin D. Just as ginger people living in Africa must stay out of the sun, because their thin skin (I believe they have one layer less to let in more sunshine) will sizzle to a crisp.
I'm at work, first day of four to do. It's surreal. We're in lock down. No unnecessary movement off station, only responding to emergencies. No visitors allowed on station. Just four of us, eyeing each other up with suspicion every time someone coughs or sniffles. We share BA sets and masks between nearly thirty people on station so first task was to check and disinfect the set assigned to me today, then disinfect the station. The fear is that we spread the virus around station, which if you replicate that around the county means that we could have very few pumps on the run in short order. We expect it to get bad. Over the last few years we have made "gaining entry" a key part of our job. If the ambulance or police want to get in a locked building-say 90 year old Ethel has missed a hospital appointment, she's not been seen for a few days, family can't get hold of her- we get called to break in. Mostly, they're either out shopping, or asleep, but we find a fair few that have passed away. With the elderly and vulnerable locked away, we expect to be doing a lot of this over the next few months..... The supermarket over the road is heaving. I was going to pop in there tonight after work to get a few essentials. I guess that will be a waste of time.
But... the nation is barely 1 day into a barely there lockdown and people are already saying it is too much?
We've been through the numbers before.
500,000 deaths as the point estimate if we do nothing.
260,000 deaths if we continued as we were last weekend.
The plan now is 20,000 deaths if we are lucky.
There are huge uncertainties in the numbers above but the uncertainty is on the upside. 500,000 deaths, with a systematic breakdown of the health service and society, could quickly turn into millions.
A young adult has a 1/5 chance of spending weeks in hospital with this. So if you are in a couple, you are close to a head-toss in probability terms that one of you will need to go in. Now think of that for people in your street. For people in your borough. For all your mates and their families and their extended families.
Do you think our hospitals will cope with any of that given they can barely cope year-to-year?
The only sensible approach to the problem is to lockdown and develop the technologies for beating it in the safety of the lockdown.
As for Matthew Parris, well he cried about Brexit and went mad by it. Clearly he has no comprehension of the scale of problems. Brexit is a gnat on an elephant's backside compared to this virus.
A doctor in one of the affected hospitals in London last night was already talking about not allowing ANYONE over 60 into ICU. Just think about that for a moment. Parris should think about it too.
The curve seems to suggest to me about 10-15,000 UK deaths in the first wave.
We have to hope the second wave is far milder or - even better - there are no such waves.
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
Much love. It was bad enough losing Mum at Xmas, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone now. At least you can hug your wife.
Someone in my team lost their father yesterday. Not clear if it was CV related, but I doubt it. Trouble is the death was abroad (Aus). My colleague cannot travel. He cannot see friends. Consoling home over Slack and video calls was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
But... the nation is barely 1 day into a barely there lockdown and people are already saying it is too much?
We've been through the numbers before.
500,000 deaths as the point estimate if we do nothing.
260,000 deaths if we continued as we were last weekend.
The plan now is 20,000 deaths if we are lucky.
There are huge uncertainties in the numbers above but the uncertainty is on the upside. 500,000 deaths, with a systematic breakdown of the health service and society, could quickly turn into millions.
A young adult has a 1/5 chance of spending weeks in hospital with this. So if you are in a couple, you are close to a head-toss in probability terms that one of you will need to go in. Now think of that for people in your street. For people in your borough. For all your mates and their families and their extended families.
Do you think our hospitals will cope with any of that given they can barely cope year-to-year?
The only sensible approach to the problem is to lockdown and develop the technologies for beating it in the safety of the lockdown.
As for Matthew Parris, well he cried about Brexit and went mad by it. Clearly he has no comprehension of the scale of problems. Brexit is a gnat on an elephant's backside compared to this virus.
A doctor in one of the affected hospitals in London last night was already talking about not allowing ANYONE over 60 into ICU. Just think about that for a moment. Parris should think about it too.
The curve seems to suggest to me about 10-15,000 UK deaths in the first wave.
We have to hope the second wave is far milder or - even better - there are no such waves.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
Your wife will eventually have the comfort of knowing she did exactly the right thing. And the memorial service will be all the more rewarding for that.
I hope she finds some comfort in that. Best wishes to her.
Governments are at least as likely to choose one of their other options for getting rid of debt: printing money or direct default. Given that most developed countries are going to be in a very similar position, a concerted move is going to be very tempting after this is over.
I think that’s right. And on that basis, it’s hard to see offshoring being left untargeted.
We will all be paying a lot more tax. Possibly a specific corona tax.
Why do I get the impression you and @SouthamObserver are so excited by that?
Because you’re weird. Who on Earth is excited about any of this? It’s a total catastrophe.
Well, indeed.
I'm not talking about the virus or the catastrophic effects - I'm talking about your excitement of putting taxes up after.
I find that weird.
FWIW the emotion I am feeling right now is anger. My view is that this was avoidable or at the very least could have been less harmful.
I don't think you are right (I don't see many good examples around at the moment, certainly not in largish open countries like ours). But your comment is important because lots of people will feel the same - especially, I am thinking, people whose own businesses are lost during the pandemic - and this will surely play out into society and politics afterwards somehow.
My son was in his GCSE year. The grown ups have let his generation down. We could have done things differently. Even policy changes as late as Jan and Feb could have made a big difference.
In the middle of January this was the WHO position:
My company was taking significant action in December and January before the PHEIC declaration. If private enterprise can do it, so can governments.
Governments are beholden to voters, not shareholders - remarkable that your company was taking "significant action" in December since the WHO was only told about it on the 31st.
My company serves scientists and medics in China.
Did they inform the government?
I assume so, people work closely with government agencies around the world. FWIW it kicked off for me personally in Jan. I have a team member in Shanghai and we were making changes to the product in the run up to the PHEIC declaration.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has ne.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
Which happened.
Very interesting.
Be careful about posting such fact or logic in the twattersphere.
They'll try and twist it into saying you've done a racism.
WP is clear on the subject "As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion"
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
Which means that - if globalisation totally broke down and we regressed back to a survival of the fittest type human society - then in 20-30,000 years everyone in the UK would be white again and everyone in Africa and Australia black.
Not sure about Canada and the US.
Sadly I won't live long enough to see the nastier Afrikaners get darker.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
Much love. It was bad enough losing Mum at Xmas, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone now. At least you can hug your wife.
Someone in my team lost their father yesterday. Not clear if it was CV related, but I doubt it. Trouble is the death was abroad (Aus). My colleague cannot travel. He cannot see friends. Consoling home over Slack and video calls was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
The indirect human cost of this is massive.
The only comfort of losing our mums over Christmas is that we have been spared the sickening worry of the weeks to come that many others will have - will our loved aged parent get through this unscathed? We could still do all the formalities as normal when they passed on - many will not have that option.
We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has ne.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
Which happened.
Very interesting.
Be careful about posting such fact or logic in the twattersphere.
They'll try and twist it into saying you've done a racism.
WP is clear on the subject "As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion"
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
Which means that - if globalisation totally broke down and we regressed back to a survival of the fittest type human society - then in 20-30,000 years everyone in the UK would be white again and everyone in Africa and Australia black.
Not sure about Canada and the US.
Sadly I won't live long enough to see the nastier Afrikaners get darker.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
I can only see one example of absurd, insane, pitiable decline in this thread, and it's not England.
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
Your wife will eventually have the comfort of knowing she did exactly the right thing. And the memorial service will be all the more rewarding for that.
I hope she finds some comfort in that. Best wishes to her.
Totally agree. If it's consolation, as your MiL was elderly your, and your wife's humanity will cause you to recall the good times.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
eh? you can invite people for dinner but cant have a coffee at a neighbours?
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
I think inviting people around for a house party is all but verboten in the current climate.
I am a bit worried by what I read about Spain and France regarding arrests and punishments.
Some in their Governments seem to be relishing the chance to put on the jackboots.
We need to increase the resilience of both our people and our health care facilities, as rapidly as possible. Increase personal health resilience: Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has ne.)
The bit about vitamin D is interesting. Last year I ended up in hospital with pneumonia and on discharge I was sent away with a supply of high strength vitamin D supplements as I was deficient. I wonder if that is one of the reasons we get more colds and flu in the winter: low vitamin D levels?
A number of senior medical people I have known, including the Professor who for a while was leading on my condition, are of the view that low Vitamin D is one of the most significant deficiencies we can have, with all sorts of medical consequences. He put me on daily tablets (the standard dose in the Boots Vit D-only tablets) and advised remaining so for life.
The bad news is that it takes a long time for the body to restore its levels - a blood test after being on the tablets for six months found me only half way back to normal.
An interesting feature of Vitamin D is that although the body needs it to turn calcium into bone, we don't manufacture it without sunlight, which is one of the reasons that as our ancestors migrated north out of Africa they lost their skin colour, and a reason for the development of rickets in children with both inadequate calcium intake and inadequete sunlight.
And through evolution the only way that would work was for those people with randomly lighter skin, and hence more vit D, having a survival advantage over those with darker.
Which happened.
Very interesting.
Be careful about posting such fact or logic in the twattersphere.
They'll try and twist it into saying you've done a racism.
WP is clear on the subject "As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion"
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
Which means that - if globalisation totally broke down and we regressed back to a survival of the fittest type human society - then in 20-30,000 years everyone in the UK would be white again and everyone in Africa and Australia black.
Not sure about Canada and the US.
Sadly I won't live long enough to see the nastier Afrikaners get darker.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
eh? you can invite people for dinner but cant have a coffee at a neighbours?
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
That was Plan A. Until they did the sums on the likely load on the NHS all coming at once, even with the large majority of people not needing the hospital.
He's assuming there's no "catch up" element in the recent days' data, though. Whereas surely there is, since they were hardly testing anyone until recently.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
It is an inevitable consequence of what you are arguing for that things would become worse, whether or not that is your intention.
In other news, I want to thank - once more - all those who responded to my post yesterday about my mother-in-law’s funeral. I did have that conversation with my wife and it was very hard to do. But we got through it and the upshot is that the funeral will now be just 10 of us at the graveside, spaced apart, no physical contact and nothing afterwards, with a memorial ceremony to follow when all this is over. It sounds easy when written down, but to accept that through the pain of deep grief is something extraordinary. But that is my wife. I am so unbelievably lucky. More broadly, spare a thought for all those going through something similar now and for the next few months. At least my MiL was an old woman who’d lived a good, long life and whose time had come. For many others it won’t be like that, but the restrictions will be the same. This virus is a bastard in so many ways.
Much love. It was bad enough losing Mum at Xmas, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone now. At least you can hug your wife.
Someone in my team lost their father yesterday. Not clear if it was CV related, but I doubt it. Trouble is the death was abroad (Aus). My colleague cannot travel. He cannot see friends. Consoling home over Slack and video calls was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
The indirect human cost of this is massive.
The only comfort of losing our mums over Christmas is that we have been spared the sickening worry of the weeks to come that many others will have - will our loved aged parent get through this unscathed? We could still do all the formalities as normal when they passed on - many will not have that option.
Absolutely. The rituals did make a difference, I can’t imagine how hard it must be now. I try to remember that every death statistic is going through that experience
Still grieving I must confess to being a bit scarred and there are resonances with the current crisis. My mother died of Neutrapoenic sepsis in the end. I spent the last three months in masks and clothes and the last week in ICU. To think that could be about to happen to tens of thousands In the UK is beyond terrifying.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
I think inviting people around for a house party is all but verboten in the current climate.
I am a bit worried by what I read about Spain and France regarding arrests and punishments.
Some in their Governments seem to be relishing the chance to put on the jackboots.
Another reason to be thankful Mrs May is gone. What with her fondness for footwear, and all.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
Yes. There may be a case for asking those only those at risk totally isolate - that would ease the pressure on delivery services and other necessary elements. Let everyone else gradually catch it, and build massive capacity for cases to be treated in temporary hospitals. You would hope that treatment protocols improve daily.
He's assuming there's no "catch up" element in the recent days' data, though. Whereas surely there is, since they were hardly testing anyone until recently.
You're assuming that all the 'catch-up' will be 'caught up' by Thursday, which I doubt.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
I think inviting people around for a house party is all but verboten in the current climate.
I am a bit worried by what I read about Spain and France regarding arrests and punishments.
Some in their Governments seem to be relishing the chance to put on the jackboots.
You are sensible and law abiding, you probably didn’t go to the pub last night the current police actions are entirely proportional get caught and you get fined. There are enough law Enforcement officers out here to make it work. Just watching Australians going to the beach on Sky that’s what they do if you let them. People can be stupid.
I have friend whose father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January with four months to live. My friend dare not visit. What can these last four months be like?
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
That's what the modelling by Imperial tested for.
Locking the oldies away but keeping things on the road as much as possible. It was 260k under that scenario. The authors didn't report deaths by age-group but presumably there will be further Appendices not released for public consumption showing a decent wedge of those 260K being good fit and healthy young'uns.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
eh? you can invite people for dinner but cant have a coffee at a neighbours?
No you can in the UK INVITE...... I can’t
oh yes, sorry i misunderstood the previous comments.
have to say i am absolutely terrified of the total lockdown we very likely to have in a week or two. i need social interaction. as a carer my interaction is already low. any lower is going to have really serious effect on my mental health.
When we look back on the early 21st Century will the symbol of hubris be the Airbus A380? As more and more airlines lay their fleets up I have to ask if they will ever fly again - will there be enough of a market for ultra-high capacity / high largesse flying after this?
Heathrow Runway 3 was mentioned up thread, can see it quietly dropped alongside HS2. Capacity increases that were needed a few weeks ago may not be needed in the new normal.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
So Scottish nationalism is great but English nationalism is a complete no no?
When we look back on the early 21st Century will the symbol of hubris be the Airbus A380? As more and more airlines lay their fleets up I have to ask if they will ever fly again - will there be enough of a market for ultra-high capacity / high largesse flying after this?
Heathrow Runway 3 was mentioned up thread, can see it quietly dropped alongside HS2. Capacity increases that were needed a few weeks ago may not be needed in the new normal.
Flying has got worse and worse (as a customer experience) over the last 20 years unless you pay Uber prices to fly business or first.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
I think inviting people around for a house party is all but verboten in the current climate.
I am a bit worried by what I read about Spain and France regarding arrests and punishments.
Some in their Governments seem to be relishing the chance to put on the jackboots.
You are sensible and law abiding, you probably didn’t go to the pub last night the current police actions are entirely proportional get caught and you get fined. There are enough law Enforcement officers out here to make it work. Just watching Australians going to the beach on Sky that’s what they do if you let them. People can be stupid.
I'd take Australia and the UK's approach to this virus over France and Spain any day of the week.
Governments are at least as likely to choose one of their other options for getting rid of debt: printing money or direct default. Given that most developed countries are going to be in a very similar position, a concerted move is going to be very tempting after this is over.
I think that’s right. And on that basis, it’s hard to see offshoring being left untargeted.
We will all be paying a lot more tax. Possibly a specific corona tax.
Why do I get the impression you and @SouthamObserver are so excited by that?
Because you’re weird. Who on Earth is excited about any of this? It’s a total catastrophe.
Well, indeed.
I'm not talking about the virus or the catastrophic effects - I'm talking about your excitement of putting taxes up after.
I find that weird.
It is an opportunity to press pause and re-evaluate. Taxes going up is not a bad thing if it leads to a more equal, more contented society.
Taxes could more likely choke off investment and growth.
You can't tax yourself into prosperity.
I am not sure that’s right. It depends how the taxing is done and how the revenue raised is used.
What you need is high growth and wealth creation.
So far all the evidence I've seen is that for that to take place taxation needs to be moderate and competitive.
On a values point of view I don't think it's right that people cannot keep less than 50% of the income they have worked hard for.
American GDP per person grew faster and was more evenly distributed between 1950 and 1980 with massively high taxes than between 1980 and 2010 with vastly lower taxes.
That's when American bestrode the world like a colossus.
And it was starting to look rather ropey by the mid to late 70s, which was why Reagan won of course.
I'm at work, first day of four to do. It's surreal. We're in lock down. No unnecessary movement off station, only responding to emergencies. No visitors allowed on station. Just four of us, eyeing each other up with suspicion every time someone coughs or sniffles. We share BA sets and masks between nearly thirty people on station so first task was to check and disinfect the set assigned to me today, then disinfect the station. The fear is that we spread the virus around station, which if you replicate that around the county means that we could have very few pumps on the run in short order. We expect it to get bad. Over the last few years we have made "gaining entry" a key part of our job. If the ambulance or police want to get in a locked building-say 90 year old Ethel has missed a hospital appointment, she's not been seen for a few days, family can't get hold of her- we get called to break in. Mostly, they're either out shopping, or asleep, but we find a fair few that have passed away. With the elderly and vulnerable locked away, we expect to be doing a lot of this over the next few months..... The supermarket over the road is heaving. I was going to pop in there tonight after work to get a few essentials. I guess that will be a waste of time.
Our main Tescos is now getting 4 deliveries a day so you can never tell. Once the morning panic is over they may restock.
He looks over 20 to me, and male. I have no idea what his blood type is but if it's A that's another risk. Has he had his blood pressure checked recently ? Hypertension can be present even in apparently otherwise (very) healthy individuals.
I am not inclined to join the Sunak love-in but he communicates well (touch of the Blairs) and his package yesterday lived up to the hype in most respects.
As soon as Johnsons has finished taking credit for the C19 response the next thing on his to-do list will have to be do destroy Sunak. He can't have such an obvious and ambitious successor so early in his reign.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Look at the state of Italy's hospitals and morgues. That is with massive economy-destroying control and mitigation measures, without which things would be hugely worse. No one could accept that.
I'm not saying this to be callous but Italy still has only 3-4,000 dead and most of them elderly. That's terrible but its not an extinction event.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
Read Gideon Wise's post at 9.30, and the reports coming out of Italy. Your problem is a lack of imagination. I do not think you will be looking at this country in a fortnight and thinking we should have let things be twenty times worse.
I'm not arguing for things to become worse. I'm arguing for containing and isolating the elderly and vulnerable and allowing others to work under restriction with managed exposure.
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
Will be interesting to see how long Holland can continue with its herd immunity approach while most of the rest of the world moves towards lockdown if it is not already there
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
Every country on Earth beyond micro states, including Scotland, is an agglomeration of countries that no longer exist. And if you want regionalism, the way the Northern Italians talk about those in the South would make even the most jingoistic southerner here blush.
I have friend whose father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January with four months to live. My friend dare not visit. What can these last four months be like?
Truly appalling.
Indeed; has his father, or anyone in his household, got FaceTime or similar?
I'm at work, first day of four to do. It's surreal. We're in lock down. No unnecessary movement off station, only responding to emergencies. No visitors allowed on station. Just four of us, eyeing each other up with suspicion every time someone coughs or sniffles. We share BA sets and masks between nearly thirty people on station so first task was to check and disinfect the set assigned to me today, then disinfect the station. The fear is that we spread the virus around station, which if you replicate that around the county means that we could have very few pumps on the run in short order. We expect it to get bad. Over the last few years we have made "gaining entry" a key part of our job. If the ambulance or police want to get in a locked building-say 90 year old Ethel has missed a hospital appointment, she's not been seen for a few days, family can't get hold of her- we get called to break in. Mostly, they're either out shopping, or asleep, but we find a fair few that have passed away. With the elderly and vulnerable locked away, we expect to be doing a lot of this over the next few months..... The supermarket over the road is heaving. I was going to pop in there tonight after work to get a few essentials. I guess that will be a waste of time.
Our main Tescos is now getting 4 deliveries a day so you can never tell. Once the morning panic is over they may restock.
I remember visiting Romania in 1983, you could be walking down an almost deserted high street, when suddenly people would appear from nowhere and a long queue would form outside a shop. Half an hour or so later it would just as suddenly disperse, with glum faces from those who had joined too late. It simply meant a food delivery had arrived. Hopefully things won’t get that bad for us. Despite the dreams of that policy genius in Downing Street, we still have farms and fishing boats.
How many of the deaths would have died in the next 12-18 months anyway?
How many suicides will be caused by the depression and economic crisis?
How many lives will be ruined for good that have decades left to run?
I'm yet to see an analysis on this. All should be factored in.
Yes but we live in a "something must be done" era, and cannot turn the clock back to a time when people simply accepted random disaster as part of life (or deflected their thoughts and emotions into a variety of objectively bizarre belief systems)
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
Have a house party?
Yes you can invite people round to do what you would have done in the pub or have a dinner party. I can’t have another person in the car when I go to the supermarket, I can’t pop over to the neighbours for coffee, walking the dog has to be within 50 meters of the house. Now would I get arrested if I did the above, well I’d probably be caught with more than I person in the car, some of this is unenforceable but as a community we’re sticking to the letter of the law because it’s for our own good. Can’t speak for the rest of Spain but many like me are waiting for other medical issues to be treated and have a vested interest in the health serve not collapsing.
eh? you can invite people for dinner but cant have a coffee at a neighbours?
No you can in the UK INVITE...... I can’t
oh yes, sorry i misunderstood the previous comments.
have to say i am absolutely terrified of the total lockdown we very likely to have in a week or two. i need social interaction. as a carer my interaction is already low. any lower is going to have really serious effect on my mental health.
People still go to work in a variety of occupations.
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
So Scottish nationalism is great but English nationalism is a complete no no?
Right. Got it.
I don't think nationalism of any flavour is great. I wouldn't vote for the SNP or Scottish independence if I had the opportunity to - I am a federalist. But people feel better and secure when they know who they are, and my point was about identity. Scotland has worked hard to push an identity. The English identity is what? Gammony drunks? Metropolitan liberals? The two extremes largely hate each other.
England's basic problem is that it doesn't know what England or English is. We confuse England for Britain as if they are interchangeable. We don't even have a national anthem and our flag has become synonymous with racists and drunks. We propagandise people who aren't very bright with messages that the schools are against them and then wonder why educational attainment is so low.
None of these are "nationalism". Brexit was a vote of the lost recognising they were lost wanting to forge a new identity of their own. I think my epiphany - having voted for a different kind of Brexit to what we are/were heading for - was that the Britain/England they have been told to want looks repulsive.
An obvious point that I'm sure has been made already but is still, for me, a remarkable feature of this crisis and at the same time a measure of how serious it is -
The thing that has occupied us to the exclusion of almost everything else over the last 4 years - whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU - seems now to be a matter of the utmost triviality.
Who cares? It just does not matter. Which in a sense means that it never did.
I have friend whose father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January with four months to live. My friend dare not visit. What can these last four months be like?
Truly appalling.
I don't know the case, of course, and apologies if this is silly, but would visiting be such a risk? His father might contract the virus, but the balance of probability (if they're both careful) is still that he wouldn't, and if he did, would it be so much worse than dying of cancer? Your friend should avoid visiting anyone if he's himself got virus sypmatoms, but otherwise visiting his father wouldn't be so bad.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
Every country on Earth beyond micro states, including Scotland, is an agglomeration of countries that no longer exist. And if you want regionalism, the way the Northern Italians talk about those in the South would make even the most jingoistic southerner here blush.
Have a look at Norman Davies' "The Forgotten Kingdoms of Europe". And a look at a map of Central Europe pre-1870.
I am the very model of effective social distancing!
I listen to the experts on the topic of resistance-ing; I know that brunch and yoga class aren’t nearly as imperative As doing what I can to change the nation’s viral narrative. I’m very well acquainted, too, with living solitarily And confident that everyone can do it temporarily: Go take a walk, or ride a bike, or dig into an unread book; Avoid the bars and restaurants and carry out, or learn to cook. There’s lots of stuff to watch online while keeping safe from sinus ills (In this case, it’s far better to enjoy your Netflix MINUS chills)! Adopt a pet, compose a ballad, write some earnest doggerel, And help demolish Trump before our next event inaugural. Pandemics are alarming, but they aren’t insurmountable If everybody pitches in to hold ourselves accountable. In short, please do your part to practice prudent co-existence-ing, And be the very model of effective social distancing
From a choirmaster (not me!) with a penchant for G and S!
I have friend whose father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January with four months to live. My friend dare not visit. What can these last four months be like?
Truly appalling.
Indeed; has his father, or anyone in his household, got FaceTime or similar?
But, TBH, I think I'd say sod it and visit.
He is self isolating for two weeks and then going home. Apparently they go for picnics in the car. It’s heartbreaking.
It was always built on a lie, and the hollowness of it all is being revealed.
Biggest take always are don’t eat bats and don’t believe authoritarian governments like China.
Slightly more to it. The first duty of government is to protect its citizens. By any objective measure our government has failed. Now is not the time as they stitch together a last minute response, but there must be a reckoning.
Utter nonsense. Pretending that the UK governement is somehow uniquely bad in this crisis is garbage. How childish you are.
Most governments have failed. They knew what was happening in China, saw the spread to other parts of Asia and failed to prepare. They have been playing catch-up since. That applies to the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland and many others - and the US above all. The childish thing is not to acknowledge that.
I think that the underlying assumption there is that a competent government could somehow have prevented this. Last time I checked Covid 19 was in about 120 countries. There is no way of preventing it whilst remaining a part of the modern world. I was one screaming for the government to be more aggressive in the containment phase but I now accept that the Chief Scientific Advisor was right and I was wrong. Containment was never going to work.
No doubt with the benefit of hindsight some things could have been done better but the reality is that the government has to react to each development as best as they can. They have clearly been caught out by the spread in London being way faster than the models projected. This has pushed them into doing a lot of things much faster and before they were ready. But it’s wrong to criticise them for this. They just have to react to events and they have.
The financial step on wages yesterday was bold and broadly welcomed. I think that the self employed and the gig workers will still need more help but the priority is to get schemes up and running. You cannot wait for every detail to be in place or you don’t act fast enough.
Overall I would give the government 8/10 on this which is pretty good.
I'd agree.
It's also worth noting that it's more urgent to act for PAYE vs self-employed or gig employees.
If a firm sacks someone, that's it. They're done. So you stop that immediately.
If it takes a week extra, say, to get a package in for the self-employed then they may have lost 2% of their annual income. It's not pleasant but should be surviviable.
Given the stresses on the government they are triaging
Someone trying to answer the question I keep asking. How many would have died anyway? Apparently the reason Germany’s death rate is so low is they only treat it as death by Coronavirus if they didn’t already have flu or pneumonia etc, and almost all of Italian deaths were pretty gravely ill
I just wonder if there are alternative strategies to locking down the whole country.
You are not really locked down though are you.? You can go to B&Q buy a new bed, go to Primart, take a car ride in the country, have a house party etc etc you have a long way to go to true lockdown
People are already losing their shit. And this clearly is just an interim stage before the actual lock-down kicks in. I'm not sure that a society as pig ignorant and self-centred as 2020 England will cope (the other less shit nations in the UK will be fine). Expect Peter Hitchens pieces in the Hate Mail telling people that Boris is a Fascist and that we should resist authoritarianism. Feral parents round here will still be drunk letting their feral kids out to create havoc, and that's before the Facebook rumors kick in that Other People have something You haven't got and the riots start.
You ain't seen nothing yet...
If you hate your own country so much why don't you go and live somewhere else?
I wouldn't describe it as hate. More like pity. England used to be something. Look what we've reduced ourselves to. As for moving, plans were in progress, now delayed thanks to Coronavirus.
Where were you moving to?
Nothing fixed, but was looking at houses up near my brother in Aberdeenshire. Again, its not hate. But you can't deny that the level of stupid in England really has dialled up to 11. I hear commentators talk about British exceptionalism - its *English* exceptionalism. We're arrogant / stupid enough to think the rules don't apply to us as we're Better than everyone else. Morons voted for Brexit to stop freedom of movement then moan when their freedom of movement is stopped. Apparently the rules are only for foreigners...
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
So Scottish nationalism is great but English nationalism is a complete no no?
Right. Got it.
I don't think nationalism of any flavour is great. I wouldn't vote for the SNP or Scottish independence if I had the opportunity to - I am a federalist. But people feel better and secure when they know who they are, and my point was about identity. Scotland has worked hard to push an identity. The English identity is what? Gammony drunks? Metropolitan liberals? The two extremes largely hate each other.
England's basic problem is that it doesn't know what England or English is. We confuse England for Britain as if they are interchangeable. We don't even have a national anthem and our flag has become synonymous with racists and drunks. We propagandise people who aren't very bright with messages that the schools are against them and then wonder why educational attainment is so low.
None of these are "nationalism". Brexit was a vote of the lost recognising they were lost wanting to forge a new identity of their own. I think my epiphany - having voted for a different kind of Brexit to what we are/were heading for - was that the Britain/England they have been told to want looks repulsive.
What is Germany getting apparently so right? Lots of testing, lots of cases. Very few deaths. Is there something to learn from it?
They have been incredibly lucky that 70% of their cases are under 50 year olds.
How do you get that lucky? You make your own luck. How did they make that?
Well their initial outbreaks were youth carnival events at a time when this virus was known to be in Europe. That was lucky. And then they tested basically everybody who went to those events.
That isn't to say the German's aren't doing really well, just pointing out their initial big outbreak was quite different to Italy.
Italy have the opposite, they were incredibly unlucky that it hit an area where lots of old people live and in multi-generational households. And it is thought it circulating among commuting younger people who brought it back to those outlying towns.
Catholic Mass may turn out to be an absolute killer.
How many Italians, and Spanish for that matter, still go to Mass ?
I suspect that Mass goers are predominantly older.
5:55 the reason for the outbreak being so dire in Italy ?
Bl**dy hell - that is creepy! If anyone else made a video about how good it was to eat someone else, they could expect a visit from PC Plod and their social media accounts cleaned out.
In Catholic doctrine not only is the body of Christ present in the bread of the Eucharist but Christ as a whole
"... you touch him, you eat him... he gives himself to you to be your food and nourishment ..."
If it was said in any video other than a church video, there would be arrests.
I doubt it, unless they were actually eating someone.
The church maintains that is exactly what you are doing. Now as an atheist, I personally believe that they are just much munching sub-standard bread and probably 2nd rate wine, but the message, to me, is one step from promoting cannibalism.
Yes, but you aren't actually doing it, are you?
The Church of England position on the eucharist, insofar as it has one, is that the wafer and wine represent the body and blood of Christ. It is a metaphor, if you like. The Roman Catholic doctrine, known as transubstantiation, is that the wafer and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. That is the crucial point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
The phrase for Protestants (and Anglicans get to be both Protestants and Catholics, naturally :-) ) is 'in remembrance'. So I would go with memorial not metaphor, that is still a means of grace.
Nah, Anglicans are definitely members of the "universal Catholic church". Not protesting at all.
Governments are at least as likely to choose one of their other options for getting rid of debt: printing money or direct default. Given that most developed countries are going to be in a very similar position, a concerted move is going to be very tempting after this is over.
I think that’s right. And on that basis, it’s hard to see offshoring being left untargeted.
We will all be paying a lot more tax. Possibly a specific corona tax.
Why do I get the impression you and @SouthamObserver are so excited by that?
Because you’re weird. Who on Earth is excited about any of this? It’s a total catastrophe.
Well, indeed.
I'm not talking about the virus or the catastrophic effects - I'm talking about your excitement of putting taxes up after.
I find that weird.
It is an opportunity to press pause and re-evaluate. Taxes going up is not a bad thing if it leads to a more equal, more contented society.
Taxes could more likely choke off investment and growth.
You can't tax yourself into prosperity.
I am not sure that’s right. It depends how the taxing is done and how the revenue raised is used.
What you need is high growth and wealth creation.
So far all the evidence I've seen is that for that to take place taxation needs to be moderate and competitive.
On a values point of view I don't think it's right that people cannot keep less than 50% of the income they have worked hard for.
American GDP per person grew faster and was more evenly distributed between 1950 and 1980 with massively high taxes than between 1980 and 2010 with vastly lower taxes.
That's when American bestrode the world like a colossus.
And it was starting to look rather ropey by the mid to late 70s, which was why Reagan won of course.
An obvious point that I'm sure has been made already but is still, for me, a remarkable feature of this crisis and at the same time a measure of how serious it is -
The thing that has occupied us to the exclusion of almost everything else over the last 4 years - whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU - seems now to be a matter of the utmost triviality.
Who cares? It just does not matter. Which in a sense means that it never did.
That line of argument would conclude that all manner of things don’t matter, when clearly they do. It’s no different to when someone becomes seriously ill; their work problems don’t matter any more.
An obvious point that I'm sure has been made already but is still, for me, a remarkable feature of this crisis and at the same time a measure of how serious it is -
The thing that has occupied us to the exclusion of almost everything else over the last 4 years - whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU - seems now to be a matter of the utmost triviality.
Who cares? It just does not matter. Which in a sense means that it never did.
We had to leave the EU because we couldn't control our borders and stop people coming in. And yet the EU states have controlled their borders and stopped people coming in and taken back control UK has not.
Brexit has become a foot note because the thing we were leaving turns out not to work as claimed and won't work that way in future, and the "we'll be the exception and do it our way on our own" idea doesnt sound tok different to what every country is trying to do.
The world will look very different. Do we need Brexit to achieve that any more?
The Columbia University model that was in the New York Times yesterday said that the spread could only be explained if there were 11 times as many cases as detected. If that's correct there will be 1 million cases in the US by the end of next week.
Governments are at least as likely to choose one of their other options for getting rid of debt: printing money or direct default. Given that most developed countries are going to be in a very similar position, a concerted move is going to be very tempting after this is over.
I think that’s right. And on that basis, it’s hard to see offshoring being left untargeted.
We will all be paying a lot more tax. Possibly a specific corona tax.
Why do I get the impression you and @SouthamObserver are so excited by that?
Because you’re weird. Who on Earth is excited about any of this? It’s a total catastrophe.
Well, indeed.
I'm not talking about the virus or the catastrophic effects - I'm talking about your excitement of putting taxes up after.
I find that weird.
It is an opportunity to press pause and re-evaluate. Taxes going up is not a bad thing if it leads to a more equal, more contented society.
Taxes could more likely choke off investment and growth.
You can't tax yourself into prosperity.
I am not sure that’s right. It depends how the taxing is done and how the revenue raised is used.
What you need is high growth and wealth creation.
So far all the evidence I've seen is that for that to take place taxation needs to be moderate and competitive.
On a values point of view I don't think it's right that people cannot keep less than 50% of the income they have worked hard for.
American GDP per person grew faster and was more evenly distributed between 1950 and 1980 with massively high taxes than between 1980 and 2010 with vastly lower taxes.
That's when American bestrode the world like a colossus.
And it was starting to look rather ropey by the mid to late 70s, which was why Reagan won of course.
If you cut taxes and massively ramp up government spending, it increases economic growth? That’s amazing.
Of course, it did also add the small matter of $1.873 trillion to the US national debt....
The 1981 tax cuts also took the US out of the recession and actual negative growth it had hit by 1980.
No the 1981 Reagan tax cuts did not significantly add to the national debt either, especially as they increased tax revenues, the further 1986 Reagan tax cuts maybe but not the first wave
It's also worth noting that it's more urgent to act for PAYE vs self-employed or gig employees.
If a firm sacks someone, that's it. They're done. So you stop that immediately.
If it takes a week extra, say, to get a package in for the self-employed then they may have lost 2% of their annual income. It's not pleasant but should be surviviable.
Given the stresses on the government they are triaging
I went for a haircut today (given I don’t know what will happen in the next ten days). My hairdresser was pretty stressed about things. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be allowed to remain open, or how he will afford to keep closed.
I paid him double, but that won’t help much in the grand scheme of things.
Comments
And it cuts both ways, since people with lighter skin are at a significant evolutionary disadvantage in the tropics: "Light-skinned people who live near the equator with high sunlight are at an increased risk of folate depletion. As consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage, birth defects, and numerous types of cancers, especially skin cancer"
You ain't seen nothing yet...
I agree that the self employed and gig workers in particular need more help but the steps that could be taken in relation to businesses where HMRC has some knowledge needed taken immediately. There is a lot more to do here. So many of the loans offered early last week in the £330bn package will not be taken up because the last thing companies need is more debt, especially if they have to offer security for it. Grants are what will be required. Deferring tax for 6 months has a cash flow advantage but my wife is already worrying about what will happen next January. This really doesn't solve anything.
For a full "let rip" scenario (which I'm not advocating) what I'd really like to see is real true data coming out of Iran.
"North Korea announced it would be holding a session of the Supreme People's Assembly, the country's parliament, on 10 April. Analysts say the meeting will involve almost 700 of the country's leaders in one spot.
Rachel Minyoung Lee, from North Korea monitoring website NK News said on Twitter that the meeting would "be the ultimate show of (North Korea's) confidence in managing the coronavirus situation"."
The anti-aircraft guns are going to be busy in about 10 days time....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51984344
But... the nation is barely 1 day into a barely there lockdown and people are already saying it is too much?
We've been through the numbers before.
500,000 deaths as the point estimate if we do nothing.
260,000 deaths if we continued as we were last weekend.
The plan now is 20,000 deaths if we are lucky.
There are huge uncertainties in the numbers above but the uncertainty is on the upside. 500,000 deaths, with a systematic breakdown of the health service and society, could quickly turn into millions.
A young adult has a 1/5 chance of spending weeks in hospital with this. So if you are in a couple, you are close to a head-toss in probability terms that one of you will need to go in. Now think of that for people in your street. For people in your borough. For all your mates and their families and their extended families.
Do you think our hospitals will cope with any of that given they can barely cope year-to-year?
The only sensible approach to the problem is to lockdown and develop the technologies for beating it in the safety of the lockdown.
As for Matthew Parris, well he cried about Brexit and went mad by it. Clearly he has no comprehension of the scale of problems. Brexit is a gnat on an elephant's backside compared to this virus.
A doctor in one of the affected hospitals in London last night was already talking about not allowing ANYONE over 60 into ICU. Just think about that for a moment. Parris should think about it too.
Any other type risks Boris turning up and spilling red wine on your sofa.
Not sure about Canada and the US.
What the government is seeking to do financially is like nothing any British government has ever done before. Subsiding and providing liquidity to the banks in 2008 was an absolute dawdle by comparison. Instead of dealing with a couple of dozen serious players they are dealing with tens of thousands with all their own complications. It will be incredible if numerous mistakes are not made. In fact I would go so far as to say that if hundreds of mistakes are not made they are simply not moving fast enough.
Bring back the Brexit rows even !
We expect it to get bad. Over the last few years we have made "gaining entry" a key part of our job. If the ambulance or police want to get in a locked building-say 90 year old Ethel has missed a hospital appointment, she's not been seen for a few days, family can't get hold of her- we get called to break in. Mostly, they're either out shopping, or asleep, but we find a fair few that have passed away. With the elderly and vulnerable locked away, we expect to be doing a lot of this over the next few months.....
The supermarket over the road is heaving. I was going to pop in there tonight after work to get a few essentials. I guess that will be a waste of time.
We have to hope the second wave is far milder or - even better - there are no such waves.
Someone in my team lost their father yesterday. Not clear if it was CV related, but I doubt it. Trouble is the death was abroad (Aus). My colleague cannot travel. He cannot see friends. Consoling home over Slack and video calls was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
The indirect human cost of this is massive.
Good post - but where are you getting your 20% chance of a young adult needing weeks in hospital with this?
I hope she finds some comfort in that. Best wishes to her.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm
I am a bit worried by what I read about Spain and France regarding arrests and punishments.
Some in their Governments seem to be relishing the chance to put on the jackboots.
https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1241297796839456768?s=20
Maybe Holland will be a good comparator for us.
To me that says that 20% of those hospitalized are young adults.
Which is not the same as what you said - that young adults have a 20% chance of being hospitalized.
Still grieving I must confess to being a bit scarred and there are resonances with the current crisis. My mother died of Neutrapoenic sepsis in the end. I spent the last three months in masks and clothes and the last week in ICU. To think that could be about to happen to tens of thousands In the UK is beyond terrifying.
I'm not remotely saying Scotland is perfect or immune to our madness. But from what I can see its better. And I think a decent part of that is that they kind of have a mojo about what it is to be Scottish. That was the SNP project more than anything else. England could fix itself, but I think that it will need regionalism as a solution as "England" is at best an amorphous blob of different kingdoms glued together that don't entirely get on. The nice thing about Yorkshire as opposed to my native Lancashire is that there is a proper regional identity. Same in Cornwall. More of that.
Truly appalling.
Locking the oldies away but keeping things on the road as much as possible. It was 260k under that scenario. The authors didn't report deaths by age-group but presumably there will be further Appendices not released for public consumption showing a decent wedge of those 260K being good fit and healthy young'uns.
That's why we changed plan.
have to say i am absolutely terrified of the total lockdown we very likely to have in a week or two. i need social interaction. as a carer my interaction is already low. any lower is going to have really serious effect on my mental health.
Heathrow Runway 3 was mentioned up thread, can see it quietly dropped alongside HS2. Capacity increases that were needed a few weeks ago may not be needed in the new normal.
Right. Got it.
No tears from me.
https://twitter.com/mnrrntt/status/1241298946506534917?s=20
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=1984&locations=US&start=1979
He looks over 20 to me, and male. I have no idea what his blood type is but if it's A that's another risk. Has he had his blood pressure checked recently ? Hypertension can be present even in apparently otherwise (very) healthy individuals.
But, TBH, I think I'd say sod it and visit.
Think I've got the plague.
England's basic problem is that it doesn't know what England or English is. We confuse England for Britain as if they are interchangeable. We don't even have a national anthem and our flag has become synonymous with racists and drunks. We propagandise people who aren't very bright with messages that the schools are against them and then wonder why educational attainment is so low.
None of these are "nationalism". Brexit was a vote of the lost recognising they were lost wanting to forge a new identity of their own. I think my epiphany - having voted for a different kind of Brexit to what we are/were heading for - was that the Britain/England they have been told to want looks repulsive.
The thing that has occupied us to the exclusion of almost everything else over the last 4 years - whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU - seems now to be a matter of the utmost triviality.
Who cares? It just does not matter. Which in a sense means that it never did.
I listen to the experts on the topic of resistance-ing;
I know that brunch and yoga class aren’t nearly as imperative
As doing what I can to change the nation’s viral narrative.
I’m very well acquainted, too, with living solitarily
And confident that everyone can do it temporarily:
Go take a walk, or ride a bike, or dig into an unread book;
Avoid the bars and restaurants and carry out, or learn to cook.
There’s lots of stuff to watch online while keeping safe from sinus ills
(In this case, it’s far better to enjoy your Netflix MINUS chills)!
Adopt a pet, compose a ballad, write some earnest doggerel,
And help demolish Trump before our next event inaugural.
Pandemics are alarming, but they aren’t insurmountable
If everybody pitches in to hold ourselves accountable.
In short, please do your part to practice prudent co-existence-ing,
And be the very model of effective social distancing
From a choirmaster (not me!) with a penchant for G and S!
It's also worth noting that it's more urgent to act for PAYE vs self-employed or gig employees.
If a firm sacks someone, that's it. They're done. So you stop that immediately.
If it takes a week extra, say, to get a package in for the self-employed then they may have lost 2% of their annual income. It's not pleasant but should be surviviable.
Given the stresses on the government they are triaging
https://twitter.com/bipolarrunner/status/1241300450768572417?s=21
https://twitter.com/declamare/status/1241277424500957184?s=21
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says
This year’s university graduates are screwed.
Of course, it did also add the small matter of $1.873 trillion to the US national debt....
Brexit has become a foot note because the thing we were leaving turns out not to work as claimed and won't work that way in future, and the "we'll be the exception and do it our way on our own" idea doesnt sound tok different to what every country is trying to do.
The world will look very different. Do we need Brexit to achieve that any more?
Luckily for me law firms tend to recruit 2 years in advance so worst case, they can do double recruitment next year I guess.
12% of the 4,226 cases were hospitalized. *Of those*, 20% were aged 18-44 years.
No the 1981 Reagan tax cuts did not significantly add to the national debt either, especially as they increased tax revenues, the further 1986 Reagan tax cuts maybe but not the first wave
I paid him double, but that won’t help much in the grand scheme of things.