politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Another evening and another PB NightHawks cafe

A strange day with differing developments. The thing that sriked me as most important has been what has happened in Germany – the European country that seemed to be doing best.
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Oh well. Guess my three year old niece is doing the shopping for the whole family for the foreseeable. She'll be thrilled.
We need to see a plan within the next week even if some of the relaxations care scheduled for June or July
We cannot be sure children don't pass it on.
Remember: it's not zero risk it's tolerable risk.
This easily clears the tolerable threshold.
https://twitter.com/c_drosten/status/1255555995671150597
How many post War (WW2) Labour Chancellor of the Exchequers have there been? For a bonus, name them.
I got the number wrong and correctly named 4.
People can potentially put up with this for a good while longer, but they need hope and a rational plan. If it drags on indefinitely then they'll despair (as we saw with one of our own regular posters on the previous thread,) conclude that they can't tolerate going on like this, and the lockdown will collapse in an uncontrolled fashion.
We're not a police state. The Government doesn't want to try to impose measures upon the population, and it doesn't have the power to do it either if sufficient numbers of us rebel. They need to carry at least the large majority of the people with them, and that necessitates the maintaining of confidence.
Except we know every day it is perfectly normal, and actually required, to test some people more than once. It is actually a good thing if they are getting the people tested multiple times very quickly.
8 in total.
Yes of course.
Opening Spoons in 4-5 weeks seems bonkers idea.
A lot of gyms and pubs have already had it. Big pub chains like Wetherspoons and the tied houses of large breweries might be able to ride it out and come back in a year or two, but a lot of the boozers will inevitably go to the wall. I think with the gyms it depends whether or not they are purpose built and owned by chains, or rented. The former - along with local authority premises - will be back at the end of all of this. The latter will get wiped out.
Gyms could've been designed to propagate this virus: indoor spaces full of people huffing and puffing on closely-packed pieces of machinery. Logically they should be among the very last places that are allowed to reopen.
22 June is plausible albeit optimistic for UK
Only doing half the job is mad. Let's finish it properly.
I was told that in the initial period of lockdown pretty well everyone driving at night turned out to be a criminal. Police raids are going beautifully because everyone is at home.
He’s thoroughly enjoying himself, so far as I can see.
https://twitter.com/xerxesmoarefian/status/1255611240552038402?s=21
City centre Spoons with packed rooms. Nope.
https://twitter.com/Arron_banks/status/1255609015717036037?s=20
I read an article in the Sunday Times at the weekend about companies working on bringing in PPE from China. It wasn't running an agenda it was talking about the mechanics for those working in that business. One of those quoted said that demand for PPE is 20 times normal peak levels for seasonal flu and shipments from China are one fifth of what they used to be because China needs so much for itself. In that context the idea that the government can just turn this stuff up in a month or two is just stupid. Inevitably the gap will be filled but its going to take a bit of time still.
I'm not a believer that this virus was a deliberately released creation but I will say this. In the world of biological and chemical warfare there the concept of sub threshold weapons applies, i.e you can launch an attack and damage your opponents but not invite an equivalent damaging response. Its not overt, its not easily traced as a deliberate attack and it isn't direct but it cripples your opponents in some way. This virus would have made a very good sub threshold weapon. I suspect a few plague warriors are looking at this angle. Development of offensive bio weapon capacity for mass use still goes on there
Question for the all the amateur researchers, has anyone seen anything suggesting that severity of effects of this virus on people may be related to how quickly the body realises its there? I haven't seen anything but this virus is reportedly good at concealing itself to the body early on. It seems logical that an immune system that spots it early is going to result in less severity of impact than one that doesn't.
Where's Kim episode 5. At his retreat at Wonsan staying away from the plebs due to Coronavirus maybe? As it stands there is less suggestion that he is dead. Given his size, satellite pictures of the retreat might pick up the fat lad if went outside....
Looks like yet another blindly-derived model based on a curve fitting tool being applied with no (much-needed) judgment overlaid on top. Or sense checking.
As it is I've been forced to go out running to avoid turning back into a blob, and have discovered that I prefer it. Basically, if other people (and, more specifically, their cars) don't become a serious impediment when this is all over, then I might not bother to go back to the gym either.
Half the office space in central London will be surplus to requirements at the end of all of this - and so will many of the businesses that supported those who used to occupy it. Working from home should disperse a decent slice of London's economic activity out into the Home Counties (and, in the fullness of time, the remainder of the country.) It should do more for rebalancing than any number of Government initiatives.
I would have loved his Just Giving effort to break £30m tomorrow but looks just out of reach
£29,531,000 currently
“It’s gonna go, it’s gonna leave,” Trump said, without explaining his thinking. “It’s gonna be eradicated.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/29/coronavirus-us-economy-covid-19-donald-trump-live
It may well in the future turn people off from accepting invites.
The claims that a Fields medal winner and Dennis from Deepminds would have be bullied into a corner by Big Dom and forced to change their mind against their scientific beliefs doesn't hold much water with me.
Ok.
Many of my colleagues in their 20s went back to their parents' as soon as we went to homeworking. If they stayed there after lockdown, they could be able to afford house purchases years earlier than would otherwise be possible.
Anecdotally, most companies seem to be coping far better than they would've thought last year. However, it's unclear how resilient we are to long term culture effects, like how you manage a business where customer service is paramount, if you can't tell get all your employees together and drill that into them. Over time, you just end up with a collection of individuals, rather than a functioning and coherent team.
Also, we've effectively frozen our summer internship program, because we can't see how we can onboard and train a bunch of students who need a lot of individual attention, remotely. Recruitment of experienced hires is also frozen until the lockdown ends. And we're not really sure how we'd manage our new graduates come September, either. So I think jury still out until those problems are a bit closer to resolved - it works in the short run, but some of the longer term stuff is still untested.
0-14 years - 2
15-44 years - 227
45-64 years - 2,193
65-74 years - 3,294
75-84 years - 6,497
85+ years - 6,899
87% of all fatalities were therefore amongst patients aged 65 or over, which seems broadly comparable with recent statistics I accessed for Italy (broken down into slightly different age cohorts, which showed that 96% of deaths there were amongst the over-60s.)
The figure for the under 15s is 0.01%.
The police have a new plane and it has taken to flying around in circles at about midnight, no doubt monitoring this traffic.
(I do use them a little, I hasten to add, but the lockdown buddy is the main user)
Inbetween will be those that have people working part-time in the office and part-time at home, and those that have employees working most of the time at home but maintain meeting rooms for occasional get-togethers. One would suspect that those two groups of businesses will be the most numerous going forward.