Covid-19 Virus

Hear hear. I can be equally as unproductive at home or in the office. Time to bin the commute for all but those who need to be physically there.

 

Yes I really do hope things will change in that regard. My train line from where I live into Waterloo is torturous (so much so that I put my house up for sale because I can’t bear it any longer ) it’s SWR and the ****ers are always on strike, as if it’s not bad enough already when they aren’t.

Even just the ability to work from home two days a week would improve quality of life incredibly.

 

Soi-disant socialist hopes anti-racism protestors (including my daughter) catch Covid and die.

 

I think the working world was heading in this direction but CV19 has fast forwarded the trend at least 5 years.

 

And it would improve the quality of life for those people who will still have to travel in.

 

Listening to our Permanent Secretary last week I think the DfE is seriously considering the "default" to be working from home for those that want to in the future. There is little doubt that some team meetings are just not as productive or as inclusive when via video-link when it comes to an "idea sharing and thinking" type session as a physical meeting should be. But a video-link is just as productive when it comes to an "information delivery" type of meeting. It's a balance that will take a while to get right if there really is a move to homeworking.

But I could see the commuter traffic saving could be really significant, maybe 25% to 50% in cities?

 

You are right, though in many ways behaviour is pretty similar. I’ve had short snappy online meetings (esp. when I’m chairing and I need to get back on here to tell you that you are wrong about something) and ones that were just as torturously long as when they took place face to face, because that’s how some people do it.

I doubt you would get a 50% reduction in traffic anywhere, but any double digit decrease would make life better for all. I was always work in the office on Friday in London, because the commute is much less busy and almost tolerable.

 

Two parents told my partner yesterday that they had been ‘shielding’ their kids from coronavirus for the last few months.

She said something along the lines of ‘Good, well we have plenty of measures and messages in place for them to keep up social distancing etc.’

She can’t have been expecting the reply ‘No, we’ve been shielding them from everything to do with the virus. We don’t want them to know about it’

Now I speak as someone who doesn’t have kids yet but **** me that’s a pretty remarkable approach to parenting. I want to know why the kids think they’ve been off school for ten weeks!

 

It’s always weird when parents take this view as kids are so resilient and unaffected by this kind of worry. It’s so transparently about the parents’ own fears.

It’s like when parents complained to the BBC because their children could be upset by the disabled CBeebies presenter who is missing one forearm. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GAWN MAD! screamed the parents.

Kids are like ‘why does the lady only have one arm?’ Two seconds later, ‘Ok, what’s for tea?’

 

How old are the kids?

 

I’ve been commuting (not into London) up and down the A1 for about the last 10 years and there’s no doubt that in the last couple the traffic on Fridays has been significantly lighter. I put it down to a combination of working from home and organisations allowing employees to condense their hours on other days so they can have a longer weekend to help their work/life balance.

As TUT said earlier, this has definitely been coming anyway and the pandemic will have accelerated it. My organisation is already looking at reducing office space to cut costs and I expect hot-desking to become much more widespread when it’s recognised that workers don’t need to come in five days a week.

 

27 and 36.

 

Year 6, so 10-11. I was expecting her to say they were EYFS or Year 1 but no they were kids in her Y6 group.

 

It’s been a joy, on the occasions I have needed to drive recently, to drive without a delay. We obviously can’t live like that going forward, but it’s in everyone’s interest to rethink how we do things.

Maybe we lose a little bit of liberty, but gain a lot in return.

 

What idiots. I’d say it would be fairly difficult to completely shield kids of that age from what’s going on, so they are likely making it a lot worse.

 

I get why you’d leave out the bit about slowly dying surrounded by people in hazmat suits, that’s a hard thought for anyone of any age to deal with.

How and why you would completely shut the story out is beyond me though. I don’t actually believe that their kids don’t know about it, it’s obviously very wishful thinking on the parents part. They were obviously still in school when this started so it must have taken a quite incredible amount of lying and denying from the parents.

They had something similar after the Manchester Arena bombing, with some parents unhappy about an assembly the head teacher gave. It’s a very unhealthy way of dealing with things.

 

Christ. I can't believe at that age they don't know.

We have a 5yo and a nearly 4yo and they know there's 'bad germs' about and it's important they wash their hands when they come back from walks etc. They ask why they can't do things and in fairness we've just said everything is (was) closed but would be back soon, without getting into too much detail. The eldest isn't the most inquisitive child so seems to have accepted it without many further questions, even though it's meant one day at school in 10 weeks. Meanwhile the youngest, who is a much deeper thinker, announced to me out of the blue at her bedtime late last week that, "I think something has gone wrong in the world." (You're telling me love!) I asked her why and she mentioned things being closed and the germs...but in conclusion she wasn't really sure, so moved onto asking what we were doing the next day. Which pretty much proves @Moose's point.

 

‘I think something has gone wrong in the world’. Out of the mouths of babes eh?

I don’t for a second believe a ten year old could have no concept of what’s happening, I’ll be fascinated to see if the parents blame the teachers for scaring their baby in the coming days.

 

I don’t know about Leicester city but the rest of the boroughs in the county are back. Some of the smaller village primaries near us have clubbed together to save one opening for the sake of five or six kids.

Post lockdown levels of cheek and backchat are apparently off the scale. Today she begrudgingly gave the boys a football to play with, three strikes and your out in terms of being sensible. Third strike was the football clearing a fence and landing in the pond area at the back of the playground. ‘Come on don’t be stupid, frogs can’t get coronavirus miss!’

 

Three strikes and you’re out.

Pleb.

 

Aha! The penny's dropped! Queueing up to get in IKEA and other stores when they reopen is the 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead come true! In it the undead converge on a shopping centre because it's a habit their mushed-up brains vaguely recollect.

 

So my wife has been tested and has the antibodies so hopefully I do too, though of course being Jo Public I don't have access to the antibody test yet/ever.
The interesting finding coming out of the testing of NHS staff was that many who were utterly convinced they had had CV19, hadn't in fact had it, ......and there were many examples of those who did have the antibodies who didn't believe they had had CV19, so were presumably asymptomatic.

Also I understand the oxford vaccine testing is going really well with very good rates of vounteers testing positive for antibobies after 2 weeks.

 

Not directly related to your post but I’ve seen a lot of talk and various studies recently into some people having some or full immunity to Covid already from the common cold as it’s also a coronavirus. Obviously time will tell and it may or may not be the case, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was true. It would explain people not having antibodies who assume they’ve had it, especially people working on the frontline in the NHS.

 

ONS testing pilot shows a big drop in community cases of Covid-19 this week:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...onaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/5june2020

Down from around 133k cases between 3-16 May to 53k between 17-30 May.

It doesn't include hospitals or care homes, both of which seem to now be driving the whole thing.

Hopefully this puts to bed some of the paranoia seen in other places about the potential impact of the VE Day celebrations, with numerous people (Piers Morgan among them) saying they would surely cause a second peak.

 

Interesting but not peer reviewed:

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/maths/news/2020/peak-lockdown.html

 

Hopefully the trend continues and we can also put the hysteria over people going to the beach to bed.

 

I see the debate has now moved on to the compulsory use of face coverings on public transport. The science behind it suggests limited benefits, and some increased risks, so I can only imagine the main goal is psychological to improve public confidence to get out of the house again.

 

Love that film

 

The numbers in South America are going to end up staggering

 

Bolsonaro even worse than Trump? Hard to believe, but maybe.

 

Peru started lock down before we did, and that was when they only had a handful of cases. The problem over there was that free health care is under funded and with high levels of poverty it is over stretched. The government doesn't have money in the coffers to throw at a furlough scheme like we do, but it wouldn't have helped the poorest as those tend to live their lives by the day, with lock down they had no income.
Lockdown was relaxed in April as the economy was on the verge of collapse. Unlike Brazil, Peru does have a president who is liked and competent but the funds are lacking.

 

All the recent studies I've seen say otherwise, except one...which was retracted by the authors due to some serious statistical errors.

https://www.livescience.com/face-masks-eye-protection-covid-19-prevention.html
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext

Worth noting that the CDC over here recommend face mask usage, on top of the WHO backing one of the recent studies touting the impact of facemasks.

 

No doubt the Peruvians will be grateful for the Cuban medical brigade that arrived yesterday to help.

Almost 50 years to the day since the first Cuban medical brigade arrived in Lima in response to the 1970 earthquake.

 

Yeah, it’s a bit frustrating when I post something accurate and the WHO updates it’s guidance a few hours later

Nonetheless, the WHO is recommending three-layer homemade masks for general use rather than the simple face coverings our government is saying will suffice. So far as I can read this morning it appears general face coverings are still thought to be of limited benefit.

Even if we’re talking masks, the benefit is surely reduced big time unless everyone follows the correct drills in wearing them. The WHO advice has multiple stages and anyone who knows people knows the vast majority will never reach that standard: https://www.who.int/images/default-...fographic--web---part-1.png?sfvrsn=679fb6f1_1.

Mrs UEA has seen the full range in her supermarket over the past 2 months - people with mouth holes in their masks, people with ill-fitting respirators, masks down so they don’t cover the nose, a bloke who threw his away when it was pointed out his cigarette smoke could still permeate it, people who take their mask off when they enter the shop and then put it on again as they leave...the list goes on. Plus she’s adamant the mask wearers are by far the worst group for breaking social distancing rules and getting too close to staff and other customers.