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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The NHS “army of volunteers” could be a Cummings masterstroke

The main pandemic story for several of the tabloids this morning is the announcement that the government is building up an army of NHS volunteers to help in the fight against the coronavirus
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There is no need to exchange any banking details with the recipient, you simply 'Ping' the money to their phone number and it hits their account immediately.
Re Trump approval - I do get the sense that most people in the US currently have no idea of the scale of the virus. It is surely going to be a very big moment and a shock to most Americans when they hear the US is top of the table.
A useful lightning rod for Boris.
Obviously deaths trail cases, but USA is still at 3 deaths/1M, which is the same as South Korea, half the UK rate, and 1/40 of the Italian figure.
Daily deaths are around 0.75/1M. Italy has had more than 10 deaths/1M for the last six days, also 10+ in Spain since 3 days.
Countries closer to Spain/Italian levels than the US include the Netherlands (5/1M daily) and France (4/1M).
Some parts of the US are at similar levels, notably Louisana (4/1M/day), and I believe New York City (where the cases are concentrated, not the rural regions) is close to 10/1M/day, although clearly still short of Lombardy levels.
So at the moment the US is far from top of the table, and attention still focused on blue New York. Time will come, but the virus is a way behind Europe in the US.
Cummings is a whole different ball game. He's a sociopath and quite possibly a psychopath. And he's equally reviled on the right by thinking journalists. But the worst thing about him is that he's holding Boris back. If Bojo could just take courage and cut himself free from the ball & chain he would fly and become a truly great Prime Minister.
Dom isn't on the ballot.
Hence 2019 GE result..
Hence 2019 GE result ...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52019509
What a mess
- announce a 25% salary uplift for all NHS workers from 1st March to 31st May (to be extended if required).
- announce a one-off "thank you" payment of £1,000 to all those who have volunteered to help the NHS by 5 pm tonight.
If Govt. thinking is we are through the worst by 1st May, then that will significantly reduce the exposure of the Govt. to the money it will need to extend. Tax receipts can look to be taking a hit, but recover some of those losses over the year (there is going to be a shedload of overtime when we do get back to normality). This gesture will be a drop in the tsunami of cash he was prepared to fund "whatever it takes". But people will remember he did the right thing, at the right time.
Italy has an old population. But on the other hand, it's cases peaked last Friday, and are probably on a downward curve from here. The US, at a guess, is some way from a peak.
And then, perhaps, America will ask "How did this happen?"
And then, perhaps, Donald Trump will be the lightning rod. It will ask itself "If this thing, or something similar, hits us again, who do we want in control?"
https://twitter.com/RamyInocencio/status/1243036560049741824
It'd be like going from London to Edinburgh and passing... almost nothing of note...
But the counter to that is that the US has done bugger all social distancing (outside New York, Washington and California). They have a massive number of people who will go to work whatever, because there's no social system. And there's no public healthcare.
Put those together with a government that is largely in denial, and I think CV-19 could be the first crisis ever that European countries handle better than the US.
https://twitter.com/wendellpotter/status/1242969841528537088
Fully?
No.
I reckon US air travel is down 60-90%.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/coronavirus-update-san-francisco-locks-down-laguna-honda-hospital-after-5-staffers-test-positive/ar-BB11I0M0
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-exposes-the-problems-and-pitfalls-of-modelling
But as infectious disease modellers and public health experts, including the Oxford team themselves, have pointed out, the model used assumptions because there was no hard data.
No one knows what fraction of the public is at risk of serious illness. The study merely demonstrates how wildly different scenarios can produce the same tragic pattern of deaths, and emphasises that we urgently need serological testing for antibodies against the virus, to discover which world we are in.
Paul Klenerman, one of the Oxford researchers, called the 68% figure the most extreme result and explained that “there is another extreme which is that only a tiny proportion have been exposed”. The true figure, which is unknown, was likely somewhere in between, he said.
In other words, the number of people infected in Britain is either very large, very small, or middling. This may sound unhelpful, but that is precisely the point. “We need much more data about who has been exposed to inform policy,” Klenerman said....
... The modelling from Imperial College that underpinned the government’s belief that the nation could ride out the epidemic by letting the infection sweep through, creating “herd immunity” on the way, was more troubling.
The model, based on 13-year-old code for a long-feared influenza pandemic, assumed that the demand for intensive care units would be the same for both infections. Data from China soon showed this to be dangerously wrong, but the model was only updated when more data poured out of Italy, where intensive care was swiftly overwhelmed and deaths shot up.
Nor was that the only shortcoming of the Imperial model. It did not consider the impact of widespread rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation, which can be used in the early stages of an epidemic or in lockdown conditions to keep infections down to such an extent that when restrictions are lifted the virus should not rebound....
Eek......
No.
I reckon US air travel is down 60-90%.
Always amazes me how much flying takes place in the USA tbh. I'm amazed ANYONE is travelling to NY in particular
Not just JFK - La Guardia, Newark, Philly...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/26/coronavirus-measures-could-cause-global-food-shortage-un-warns
Wonder if that will see the same level of interest as the NHS plea for help ....
In the UK the lockdown started on 24 March, so let's say that puts our peak around 7th April as a starting point.
However, the key difference (I hope) in the UK versus Italy, Spain, and the US is that we've had a gradually ramping up series of measures that should have reduced R0, albeit not to the extent a lockdown does. To take previous announcements with their respective '2 weeks time impact':
- 12th March (impact from 26th March): advised that anyone with a new continuous cough or a fever should self-isolate for seven days
- 16th March (impact from 30th March): advised everyone in the UK against "non-essential" travel and contact with others, as well as suggesting people should avoid pubs, clubs and theatres, and work from home if possible
My experience is that these did change behaviour, and so it is reasonable to expect it will have had an impact on the rate at which the virus was transmitted.
If that's the case, over the next few days we can hope that the rate of increase in critical cases slows, but still doesn't peak until the effect of the lockdown comes through over the middle couple of weeks in April.
https://spectator.us/abolish-world-health-organization/
"The WHO has become another pointless organization pandering to the world’s worst actors"
""The world doesn’t need another flaccid deliberative council whose sole intention is pleasing its financial backers. We already have the UN for that.""
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/489482-biden-i-think-weve-had-enough-debates
https://twitter.com/itvjoel/status/1243075763739426816?s=21
You mean apart from the fact they are detecting only a small fraction of cases????
https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1242700623704817664?s=19
From this map we see that Wyoming has 29 cases in a population of 577,000, and California 2,500 in 40 million. Per Capita, that is pretty similar.
U.K.: 83
USA: 82
http://world.bymap.org/UrbanPopulation.html
Sympathies to your wife both for her loss and not having the opporuitry for a full funeral service. The service helped me when i lost my first wife in 2012.
And the other 1% is populated by Aussies.....