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thanks...I would buy a lottery ticket..but there is fuck all to spend my winnings on....
But still..first on a pbcom thread...something to write on my tombstone if I'm whacked by coronavirus...
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1246053315353460737?s=20
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1246053647919788037?s=20
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://labourlist.org/2020/04/the-next-shadow-cabinet-runners-and-riders/
I have an article there due to appear at the weekend, on suggested strategy.
When the lockdown will be loosened it will be important to be able to respond to the inevitable new outbreaks quicker than before. Testing capacity alone doesn't cut it, you have to know who to test.
Tracking of mobile devices might be a very useful tool for that, Apps have already been developed, but the potential for misuse might make it difficult to achieve public consent for that. It really is a significant sacrifice of privacy and data protection, just imagine what Hitchens, Hannan and Toady will say.
It might be advisable to introduce the idea sooner rather than later.
I'll be raising a toast tomorrow to the end of Corbyn...an absolute wanker of ridiculous proportions.....
I'm on a roll.....tomorrow the fuckwit Corbyn will be erased from our collective memories.....
There are also whispers that capacity strain is moving from the NHS to funeral directors.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
On China and the WHO:
Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/
see also, among others:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/
Second the lockdown results will not show for a fortnight by which time our total cases and deaths will be still below Italy, Spain and France and on cases Germany too
Sweden is still pursuing herd immunity for goodness sake.
Spanish unemployment is rising faster than ours
Corbyn and his gang of morons have purged themselves by their utter incompetence...all Keir needs to do is ignore the band of useless fuckwits...
Corbyn is already a wittering irrelevance...it's something that I've never reconciled with people like Nick P...when level headed folk like my good self were saying Corbyn is a disaster....
Slide 5 is interesting as it shows how much the baseline matters. The FT uses 3 daily deaths, the government chooses 50 daily deaths. The interpretation would be quite different, so just a warning about over-interpreting these figures...
Also, in case you didn't see it, slide 4 in that deck is perhaps slightly hopeful, and slide 2 suggests that many people across the UK were changing behaviour well before the lockdown.
I struggle to see how the government does not come out of this whole thing without a mawling. Even if we don't end up the worse or near the worst in Europe there will be plenty of shortcomings and a long economic mess (however necessary people continue to believe that it is, it won't engender positive thinking toward the government as suffering rolls on).
On the other hand their position for 2024 is not hopeless all the same given the starting point, and it's all rosy at the moment politically speaking. But their original strategy for holding on to that positive impression is gone and if we have a really bad outcome from this it weakens a lot of other strategies.
The soundbite...stay indoors...protect the NHS...save lives.....its got all the hallmarks of shit deflection......
Corbyn did actually change during his time as leader, be a bit more shifty and wily (ie like leaders are), albeit not very effectively, so I wonder if he will operate as a backbencher as he used to or not.
The effect is to move the individual countries' curves left or right relative to each other but basically, in the west, we are all following the same curve at the moment.
Let's hope the outbreak remains NHS-manageable. But even if it does, that faffing at the start of March, the time spent even entertaining the notion of "Taking it on the chin" or "Getting more cases out of the way before the winter" looks like a high-cost result of a strategy that might have been too clever by half.
I remember ration books and the late 40's, even the Queen getting married, and I was only 4 plus. Our 6 and 8 year old grandchildren will never forget not being able to hug their grandma either
This is a trauma that will live on in very young minds for their lifetime
And we still get libertarian commentators wibbling their bollocks views across the media.
Since the back bench is an irrelevance in opposition....and only really relevant with a tight majority....Corbyn is done and dusted and cremated...
It's amazing how the West has largely abandoned many of the institutions it created.
Well I guess it's possible but to me the much more mundane and less sexy theory that the virus emerged through poor hygiene and animal welfare standards at the market is the most likely...
We'll probably never know.
Second, the useful idiots in Corbyn's private office need to go; their 2019 performance in the election and over antisemitism could not have been worse if they'd been CCHQ sleepers.
Third, the casual antisemitism of the ex-Militant types, especially in the North West, where on closer examination it was Ed Miliband and not Corbyn who allowed them to reinfect the party.
Night all. Stay safe.
Undoubtedly in the early stages China tried to cover it up.....
Or maybe not ;-)
Perhaps Her Majesty will be able to perk me up on Sunday.
Pleasant dreams all.
For a country with a population of 10 million.
Brave no lockdown it maybe but it would be Sir Humphrey stating that.
However if Sweden does not move much beyond the average increase per head and given it has not tested much relatively either and has few incubators per head it would just say the Government can do sod all to limit the impact of coronavirus
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
It’s Keir FFS Tyson.
K-E-I-R.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/03/boris-johnson-judged-coronavirus-confusion
Realistically, I think we will not get the virus to zero anywhere, but can control its spread (i.e., no hard lockdown) with much higher throughput testing, smart contact tracing and hopefully a better understanding of how to treat patients who do get infected. Are the medics in the NHS already getting more insight on this last front? For example, when to give oxygen / drugs - or is that still too soon?
So what's being alledged, admittedly with scant evidence, is that COVID-19 made the jump from bats to humans, possibly via pangolins (evidence of pangolins being traded in the market is also absent), but nobody has demonstrated that the named animal carriers were sold in the market. It that is the case, then it couldn't have been via the market route, and maybe instead it came from the nearby labs that were researching bat viruses due to a worker at the lab being infected.
You may claim that it's a flawed organisation, but at the height of a global pandemic anyone should be able to see the point of having a WHO.
I thought yesterday's was very high because it included som previously excluded non-hospital C-19 deaths. Does the same apply today?
FT graph doesn't appear to fit with these numbers.
NB. I know yesterday's number includes non-hospital for more than one day. Is FT just ignoring those deaths? Even if they are, what about today's number? FT shows a number under 500 - a huge discrepancy.
Just as I said.
I hear a lot of pessimism about treatment. All sorts of things are tried out of desperation, but people keep on dying. We have no way of controlling this apart from century old public health measures.
In time I think convalescent serum, and synthetic antibodies will be the best bet until we get a vaccine. In the meantime...
But it should be obvious that China has a massive national interest in a huge disinformation campaign here. And that's before you get onto their cultural obsession in government and business of saving face.
The problem of capacity in ICU is that people are not being discharged at the rate that they are arriving, and they need ventilating for weeks. Those beds are going to fill fast.
Leader: Sir Keir Starmer
Deputy Leader: Angela Rayner
Home Office: Yvette Cooper
Chancellor: Rachel Reeves
Foreign: Emily Thornberry
Transport: Andy McDonald
Justice: Lucy Powell
Work and Pensions: Jess Phillips
Environment: Lisa Nandy
Business: Angela Eagle
Education: Stella Creasy
Health: Rosena Allin-Khan
DCMS: Tracey Brabin
Women & Equalities: Debbie Abrahams
International Development: Matthew Pennycook
Leader of the House: Meg Hillier
Leader of the Lords: Angela Smith
Communities & Local Govt: Liz Kendall
Cabinet Office: Andrew Gwynne
Defence: Jonathan Ashworth
Party Chair: Stephen Kinnock
International Trade: Seema Malhotra
Northern Ireland: Louise Haigh
Employment: Anneliese Dodds
Wales: Stephen Doughty
Scotland: Ian Murray
Chief Secretary: Jonathan Reynolds
https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2020/04/iain-dale-which-starmer-will-we-get-as-labours-new-leader-this-weekend-radical-starmer-or-safety-first-starmer.html
It's all about R.
No lockdown means R is 3 (give or take).
A Wuhan-style lockdown, where only one person from each household is allowed out, perhaps twice a week, to buy groceries. And where the definition of essential work is incredibly tightly defined. And everyone outside the house needs to wear masks probably sees R come down to 0.1-0.2 very quickly. You can infect your flatmates or family... and that's about it.
A semiserious lockdown still ends up with an R of less than 1. I suspect we'll end up at 0.3, 0.4. Which means that infections tail off. Just not as rapidly. So you need to have it for longer.
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1246184331313156096?s=21