Covid-19 Virus

The Government needs to ensure that demand doesn’t fall, so when mothballed businesses reemerge they have customers. You do that by protecting incomes, as it has done and needs to do some more. It should be able to do that for a sufficient period required to suppress the virus. Reemergence should begin end of May/June.

There will be a rebalancing. It’s hard to imagine tourism and hospitality, for example, picking up exactly where it left off, unless we can promote a huge holiday at home programme. You couldn’t launch that now with confidence. But if there is still money in their pockets, people will spend it like it’s going out of style in quarters two, three and four.

However, if the virus is not sent into sufficient retreat, bars, restaurants and events won’t get people back through the door. Confidence won’t be there. So we need to win now and quickly.

 

Went for a run today and bumped into one of my daughter's friend's mum who's a senior nurse at North Middlesex hospital. Said it's horrific, absolutely full and running out of ventilators. Mostly old people but certainly not just them. All but 2 wards have the virus. Most are shipped off to the excel centre where army medics triage them - basically sort out who gets treatment and who is going to die, so don't bother. They've given that job to the army to keep NHS staff out of it.

It's difficult to imagine when I've seen nothing of it, but it's clearly another level.

 

I ran into an old neighbour walking the dog today, she works at Glenfield hospital up here which specialises in cardio and respiratory conditions. Basically said it’s a **** show and she can’t bring herself to talk about it.

On the other hand my future mother in law works as a podiatrist at the hospital in Melton, on the other side of the county. Her service has been temporarily cut so she’s making busy work, mostly cleaning around the hospital. They’re all twiddling their thumbs waiting for the onslaught with equipment just gathering dust.

 

London peak is in 2 weeks apparently. Though she was sceptical about modelling.

 

Talking of equipment gathering dust, those who are complaining that we just did not have enough equipment to cope with this virus, of course we didn't, why would we? Because even if we had got enough equipment the chances are that that is exactly what it would be doing, GATHERING DUST.

Furthermore I would not be surprised if a lot of it would have been out of date having been in storage for years if not decades. Nobody has excess capacity of something they are very unlikely to ever need, do they?

Hindsight makes things easy for those that are complaining about how our country is coping with this virus, but their complaining helps NO ONE, so please whoever you are JUST STOP ALL THE WHINING and do your best to help beat this virus in anyway you can.

However if you feel you really must snipe and complain about how things are being done, just save it until after this pestilence is dead and gone.

 

Strange, news reporters at the Nightingale Hospital (the Excel) are saying it isn't taking patients yet.

Sounds like it can't come soon enough, though.

 

It’s a democracy. End of, unless you want a list of all the things you moan about.

The Government dithered over this. Most of our advance warning was used up with Boris boasting about how he had shaken hands with people infected, playing it down. No apparent strategy emerged until we already had it galloping through the community.

It’s worth a mention because there could well be more than one wave and we need to be better prepared.

 

Yeah I made this point in the NHS thread, this is a once in a century situation. The NHS is essentially a free service, it will always be run close to capacity that just stands to reason. It would be a massive waste of money and resources if it was capable of dealing with a global pandemic at the drop of a hat. Likewise it’s obviously not practical or possible to have 60 million tests sitting round for something that doesn’t yet exist. Global pandemic is the key, the whole world needs tests and PPE, it’s just not that simple. Full disclosure I’ve never voted Tory, but I’m inclined to believe what Matt Hancock has said, they ordered what 9 different tests, but most of them didn’t work properly. And they have enough PPE but the problem is simply getting it to every corner of the NHS that needs it regularly enough and in the right quantities. You can point to Germany and how they’ve developed a test, but their is nothing wrong with holding out hands up and saying we simply don’t have the same capability as them, and why would we necessarily?

 

Do not resuscitate orders (DNRs) for disabled people causing much concern. A head of a Learning Disability Service reporting that a number of GP surgeries have informed them that all the people they support will be considered DNR.

Resuscitation is a big deal, highly invasive and traumatising. However to deny it on the blanket basis of a protected characteristic seems wholly wrong. Surely it needs to be case by case like for everyone else and bearing in mind how safely for staff it can be administered.

https://twitter.com/voyageceo/status/1245415024396587008?s=21

 

We didn't ever need to load up the NHS beyond it's capacity

We should have:
* Not trusted what the Chinese state was saying
* Stopped all inbound travel very early on, and set up a single point of entry (perhaps a military airfield) with testing and quarantine for every traveller; cover the costs of backed up UK citizens in line
* Had teams aggressively chase down and quarantine every report and every contact
* Move the high risk into protective quarantine, either in their existing accommodation or by taking over hotels
* Put in place financial assistance for workers in industries affected
* Learned that uncontrolled NL globalisation has left us overly reliant on imports of everything and we must be self sufficient in key items. President Macron made a similar point this week. I've been banging on about uncontrolled globalisation for years.

On that basis the economy could have continued to function and millions will not / haven't lost their jobs

 

Fully agree that’s what we should’ve done in hindsight, but nobody actually did that certainly not in Europe. The main issue for me is that China did not admit that human to human contact was possible until 21st January. Up until then the WHO believed them, even tweeting as much. I’ve just checked and on the 22nd of January China only declared having 500 cases at that point. That’s the point the whole world should’ve panicked and done something about it, but China only had (declared) a handful in cases so it’s understandable that nobody did panic.

 

Not much to disagree with but the poster was talking about it being a good time to sell a house. The economy will have had 5-10% taken off it so I would disagree.

 

Tell me about it. I put my house up for sale at the start of March. Prices peaked in February and there was a mini boom with Brexit being temporarily behind us. The agent told me I’d most likely get 5 viewings booked in for the following Saturday and get at least a couple of offers. The **** then immediately hit the fan and I didn’t get one viewing before lockdown made it impossible anyway. Best estimates at the moment are that we might see a 10-20% fall in prices, but nobody knows at the moment. Not that it’s really possible to move at the moment but most lenders have dropped their LTVs to 75% or even 60%, because it’s impossible to actually value a property at the moment, nobody actually knows what they’re worth right now. The best case scenario is that everything is just paused and then carries on fairly normally, but there aren’t many arguments to suggest it’s going to be good for selling a house.

 

No it wouldn't seem like a good time to sell a house. There won't be many buyers so prices will fall.

But it also depends on what you think will happen after. If we are about to go into a sustained recession prices could dive.

 

The issues with China goes much deeper than that.

The SARS outbreak started in their animal meat markets, and here we are years later, f-all has been done about them, and lo and behold another killer virus following the same route.

The first case was very late Nov. You can forgive no one recognising it, but by late Dec Drs in Wuhan were getting concerned. The state silenced them.

Then as you say it wasn’t until late Jan that they finally admitted cv19 could be transmitted human to human by which time it had spread internationally.

Since then I think it pretty obvious China is still lying about cases and deaths. I’d bet my shirt on it.

 

To clarify I was talking specifically putting the house on the market at the very early stages of recovery, when we can finally all get back to some normality.

People usually don't put their houses on the market when, as you put it, they have psychologically lost 5-10% on paper. Same thing happened in 08-09 & this is a much bigger Black Swan event. It can create a situation where there is little to no market housing stock, as people batten down the hatches & in theory the govt will have to make these vast QE measures so the banks are instructed to lend with that money to keep the whole economy wheel turning.

I can actually see the potential for a small early rise in house prices & then the real economy dip drips through to us all a few months later. Just a theory, but I am increasingly warming to the sound of it.

 

Yes this article makes pretty depressing reading in hindsight, for the rest of the world this could’ve been so easily prevented: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....preads-to-beijing-as-china-confirms-new-cases

What I don’t get is that they published the virus’s DNA structure at the start of January, yet only admitted human to human transmission was possible about three weeks later. I’m certainly no expert but I would assume that would’ve been fairly obvious from that information?

China has a lot to answer for, but I think the WHO have to take massive responsibility for all this too. Based on China’s track record they shouldn’t have been taking their word for anything.

 

My mate is a copper and said that domestic violence is through the roof. Perhaps inevitable really.

 

‘Tom Mimnagh’ on Twitter.

Saw "Naga" trending. Clicked. Saw a man claiming that Naga Munchetty would be better off praising the government than asking difficult questions. Clicked his profile. Picture of a yacht and a Porsche emblem. Sounds about right.
https://twitter.com/tommimnagh/status/1245967465521319941?s=21

 

You can guarantee that his Fartbook profile is either him holding a fish, him on or near a motorbike, or with the kids he only sees for an hour at weekends. These being the only skills you are taught at the School of Hard Knocks and the University of Life.

 

No, he wasn't complaining about her asking "difficult" questions, he said "ridiculous" questions, that is completely different. How can a Health Minister "guarantee" anything at the moment in terms of performance over the next month that will involve hundreds of separate organisations and is something the nation has never attempted before? These questions are intended ONLY to set a potential trap for the politician and they are often totally ridiculous.

At the end of April, if we are only achieving 90k tests a day, then the TV pundits, Labour and you will be jumping up and down for joy in the excitement of having caught out the government on their "promises" and "vows". They are using those words this morning but the reality is that, in the interviews I've seen, the Minister said the 100k was a target, a goal - not a promise or a vow. Missing a goal or target can still be a success if considerable progress has been made, and if that happens Ministers answer to "Have you achieved 100k?" should be "...not yet"

 

Is it correct that the U.K. government turned down an offer of testing equipment from Germany at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis? Why did they turn down the offer if this information is correct? I know that the U.K. wanted to use tests which were proven to work, but someone suggested to me that the reason may be because the U.K government did not want to rely on help from the European Union (following Brexit).

This article"Coronavirus testing: how some countries got ahead of the rest" (in the Guardian yesterday) is interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...g-how-uk-coronavirus-test-strategy-unravelled

 

Naga never trends for a good reason. She just seems to do it for some people and I can't figure out why.

The Government, caught asleep at its post early on is now making rash promises. But it's typical of you and typical of the Tories recent form that the first thing you do is blame the scrutiny.

But of course, if this was a Corbyn Government you would simply have been saying won't everyone get behind the Government! They are doing their best!

 

A small ray of hope is that Austrian scientists have developed a drug APN01 which may be able to treat Covid-19 by blocking the infection of the cells. Research on this drug (to combat respiratory and lung disease) originates from the Sars outbreak in 2002. Regulatory approval has been given and trials are being carried out in Austria, Germany and Denmark. This drug could become generally available after three months if the trials are successful.

 

Is there any evidence for this in court appearances? Presumably all sorts of other crimes have declined so would DV incidents simply be a bigger proportion of the whole, but a similar number to before?

 

For what it’s worth I think it’s wrong and bit of a red herring to look at events like Cheltenham and say they shouldn’t have gone ahead. You can’t look at them in isolation, they have to be taken in the context of social distancing as a whole. All the experts have said and the modelling has shown large events don’t make much difference. It’s easy to look at a picture of loads of people together, but the reality is somebody that is infected will not come into contact with 99.9% of them and will then not necessarily infect them either. The net impact of Cheltenham on its own will have been negligible if indeed it had any impact at all. When Cheltenham went ahead other social distancing measures were not really in place, so anybody with an infection there would’ve spread it somewhere else in the same way if Cheltenham had not gone ahead and they had not gone there. It’s not like we were all on complete lockdown with the exception of Cheltenham.

The relevant question really is should we have been doing what we’re doing now earlier and before Cheltenham, Cheltenham on its own is an irrelevance if we were not exercising the current social distancing measures across the whole country at the same time.

 

You quoted my post, were you intending to comment on it?

 

I think the only guide we will have will be a retrospective look at somewhere like Sweden.

 

I did. I made a comment on the Government’s conduct as defended by you and your bad faith.

Did you intend to say something about mine?

 

The thing with Sweden is that the we can probably say with certainty the virus will still spread there. Just not as much as it would if life was completely normal, or not as little as it will here with extreme social distancing measures in place. The question with them will simply be will it spread slowly enough that their healthcare service can deal with it.

If you simply banned large gatherings and let everything else carry on as normal then that wouldn’t do anything at all. If people can still regularly and freely interact with others then the virus will spread one way or the other. If your goal is to stop it spreading as much as possible it has to be all or nothing. If Cheltenham was on now and the government let people go as an exception but all other restrictions remained, then of course it would slightly aid in the spreading of the virus. But it wouldn’t have made a difference at the point it went ahead.

 

I didn't defend the government, I pointed out that the questions were ridiculous. You merely came up with your usual stock deflections.

 

So come on, and also for @The Voice of Reason if a Corbyn Government had given a goal of 250k tests, then reduced it to 100k when achieving about a tenth of that, you’d have said questions about it were stupid and everyone should get behind Comrade Corbachev?

C’mon, answer, we all need a good laugh.

 

Interesting read this.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-breathing-talking-enough-spread-airborne

All this talk about sneezing/coughing into your elbow & tissues is one thing. Most reasonable humans have been doing that anyway when they sneeze or cough as a matter of basic decency. Are we really supposed to think all the people infected have been coughed/sneezed at with 'big droplets'. I doubt it.

Truth is this 1.5m rule is most likely nothing more than cursory measure, perhaps affords a bit more of a psychological protection if nothing else.

This is the reason we need to get back to normality in a 'phased approach' ASAP IMO, Continue to isolate the old & the vulnerable for 6 months, the damage has already been done. Let the healthy catch it, you are never going to out run it.

 

No. Too many snags and unknowns.

It could work for health and care workers, but we haven’t yet the capacity to cover all of them, let alone the whole population. It seems unlikely it could be in place for the general return to work.