Covid-19 Virus

Poor old 'field near Leicester'. Overlooked again.

 

Please not me. Not how the games are right now.

 

Tier 3 for me.

Perfect. I hate people.

 

Oh I always thought it was "Angus Curly-Wurly" whom I assumed was an E Street version of a clansman,originally from somewhere near Perth and Kinross.

I'm not sure I could get a handle on it if it were so.

 

So this has been my day. I have an optician business in the centre of Norwich. Whatever my views maybe we are fully COVID safe compliant, strictly to the law,rules and general advise. It has cost me a fortune in PPE and lost appointments as we have to allow time to disinfect the building in between appointments. I have not and will not moan or complain as compared with a lot of folk we have got away lightly.
Last week I had 2 COVID Marshalls lurking outside twice in one day. Today I got a phone call from Norwich city council telling me that the marshalls had observed us breaking the rules. After a lengthy and polite on my part conversation where I explained what we were doing and had the marshalls bothered to knock on our door we could have shown them what we are doing I was told that I had to send them a copy of our risk assessment. Our risk assessment was done on the .GOV template and guidelines. I immediately emailed it across and have now been told it isn’t good enough and I should redo it as per the .GOV template.
I’m currently drinking gin with the word ‘jobs worth’ echoing in my mind

 

What was the alleged breach?

 

No shields in the dispensing area. Had the marshalls looked closer they would have seen that the area is ‘boxed ‘ out with marked tape to ensure 2m distancing+our professional bodies have given us guide lines to do it that way

 

Oldfield hasn't played for Lester for years m8. No wonder he's been overlooked.

 

Sorry to hear that RA. There's nothing worse than jobsworths being given too much power. Reminds me of Ofsted.

 

What are the flu numbers like though? We've had unprecedented lockdowns all through the run up to Christmas and heavily encouraged the flu vaccine so is the flu not less of an issue this year?

 

Good question. I expect the answer is: it’s too early to say, since the flu season isn’t yet in full swing. More interesting would be to know how many more people have had flu jabs this year than normal.

 

It would be interesting to know how these jobsworth roles developed. When the first lockdown happened compliance was the responsibility of each citizen and the police. Now it’s an industry.

Like you say, you have professional bodies and if you were hosting energetic orgies while testing eyesight (ok unlikely, it is Norwich) a fitness to practise complaint could be made or the police could be informed. Anything from the Council needs to simply be helpful.

 

Came across this interesting article in Byline Times on Victoria (Australia) beating the virus and the pernicious influence of the media.

Australia is on the verge of eliminating the Coronavirus now that the epicentre of its second wave – Melbourne – has recorded its twenty-eighth consecutive day of no new cases. It is a milestone epidemiologists say signals the elimination of COVID-19 in the community, leaving the city of five million residents now without a single active case.

The land of Down Under has become the world’s benchmark for managing the pandemic: following the science, placing faith in bona fide public health experts and rejecting the kind of unthinking, know-nothing, right-wing populism pushed by Rupert Murdoch-employed pundits in the media and members of the country’s right-wing Government, the Liberal Party.

Through the months of July, August and September – when Melbournians were living under an enforced lockdown and denied visits by family members and access to retail, gyms, cafes, pubs and restaurants – the right-wing punditry class worked overtime to undermine the state of Victoria’s COVID-19 strategy and the city’s social cohesion by essentially rooting for the virus in the hope of scoring cheap political points against the overwhelmingly popular left-wing Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews.

Posting 28 consecutive days of zero COVID-19 cases is undoubtedly a stellar achievement, given that it comes more or less at the same time as the United States recorded 200,000 new daily cases; the UK 20,000; Italy 35,000; and France 40,000; and as early success stories such as South Korea and Japan battle respective second waves of infection and death.

After crushing its first wave, which peaked at 430 new cases on 28 March, Australia recorded single-digit cases throughout much of May and June, before the crest of a second wave formed in the first days of July, with new cases spiking upwards from 45 on 28 June to 254 on 3 July, before hitting a peak of 721 on 30 July.

The outbreak caused by hotel quarantine violations from returning overseas travellers and problems in Victoria’s contact tracing regime, left Premier Andrews rightfully shouldering much of the responsibility and blame.

Had Andrews not implemented a hard lockdown, however – as he did on 7 July when new daily cases hit 169 – and enforced mandatory mask -wearing – as he did on 19 July when new cases hit 361 – then the state would have hit 20,000 new daily cases by the first week of August, according to modelling by Monash University. This would have resulted in an infection rate that translates to roughly 400 deaths a day.

Instead, a total of only 900 Australians have died from COVI-19, with the rate of infection falling to 400 a day in early August and to 150 by the end of that month, before returning to low single-digits by the start of October.

Newspapers all over the world celebrated Andrew’s remarkable success, with most praising him and the country for being the world’s first and only to successfully crush a second wave of COVID-19 infection. But the part they left unsaid was the pressure, vitriol and personal attacks the Premier had to endure from a right-wing media ecosystem that was determined to undermine his science-based COVID-19 strategy and the health of his fellow Victorians.


‘COVID Gulag’
From the moment, he imposed a lockdown on Melbourne, the Murdoch-dominated media landscape ceased referring to the Premier as Dan Andrews. He was now “Dictator Dan”, waging a war against “freedom” and “liberty”, while ushering in a form of “Coronavirus Totalitarianism”.

“Dictator Dan… is literally trying to build a Covid gulag here,” read an excerpt from an article published on the Murdoch-owned Sky News, while other commentators on the right accused Andrews’ supporters of being of “weaker minds” and “locked in the grip of Stockholm Syndrome”.

For months, the hashtags “#DanMustGo”, “#GiveDanTheBoot” and “#DictatorDan” trended across social media platforms, with Murdoch columnists at The Australian echoing calls for the Premier to resign, despite his high approval numbers and tireless work in the middle of a pandemic – an effort that saw him exhaustively answer reporters’ questions at daily press conferences, held each and every day for more than 120 consecutive days.

Even as the rate of daily infections fell through September and October, right-wing media outlets continued to lambast the Premier’s strategy, arguing that “lockdowns don’t work”, that “face masks don’t work”, that the “14-day average will never fall below 5” and that “elimination is impossible”.

When Murdoch pundits and right-wing politicians weren’t calling for Andrew’s resignation or smearing him with authoritarian tropes, they spread deliberate misinformation, including false claims that the lockdown had resulted in an increased suicide rate and that Black Lives Matter protests caused the outbreak. Despite both claims being demonstratively false, both remain uncorrected in articles published in The Australian and the Herald Sun.

Much of the online mobilisation against Andrews came from a Conservative Party-linked right-wing populist think tank known as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

“In line with their international counterparts, Australia’s far-right advocacy groups have condemned Victoria’s lockdown measures in the most sweeping and dramatic terms,” observes Zachias Szumer in Jacobin magazine. “Untroubled by the epidemiological or economic arguments for lockdown, and with no interest in articulating grounded criticisms of the Victorian Government’s strategy, their message from the get-go was: ‘open up, now!’.”

At no point did the right’s critique of Andrews include an alternative path for handling the second wave than the one taken, albeit for the occasional urge for Victoria to adopt Sweden’s model, which has produced a horrific second wave and a death rate and a rate of infection nearly 10 times greater than its neighbouring countries.

Last week – Sweden, a country with a population of 10 million – recorded 6,000 infections and a record number of hospitalisations. Australia – with a population of 25 million – recorded none.

Dr Denis Muller, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, told The Feed that the Murdoch media’s characterisation of Andrews not only threatened to sabotage the country’s pandemic response but was also “dangerous for democracy”.

“It’s obvious that he’s a Labour Premier and News Corp has been campaigning against the Labour Party in Australia at the state and federal levels for decades,” he said. “I think they have seen an opportunity to damage a Labour Premier. And they’re doing all that they can to do it.”

With Australia now the toast of the world for its pandemic response and subsequent success, the country can be thankful that the leader of its second-largest state ignored the right-wing disinformation bubble and stuck hard to facts and science.

 

A letter to the Sun's agony aunt....

Dear Deirdre,

I’m starting to suspect that there might be a problem with my relationship. Please tell me I’m not going crazy.

At the start of this year I started going out with a new man, Boris. He was charming and seemed very clever – he’d been to Oxford and could read Latin. He’d “been around the block” a bit, if you know what I mean, and he was a bit overweight. But he was good fun and very decisive. He liked to “get things done”, which was a big appeal.

Anyway, in March he started to change. He went down the pub one evening with his friend, Neil, who’s a bit of a weirdo to be honest, and Neil told him all about this “Chinese bat flu” that was going to wipe out the human race. Neil showed him all this stuff on his phone that he’d got off Wikipedia and he did some calculations on the back of a beer mat showing that the population of the UK would basically be wiped out in six month’s time unless we completely changed our way of life.

When Boris told me about Neil’s predictions I thought he was having a laugh. Sadly not. The next morning he went to the corner shop and bought all the loo roll and Pot Noodles then he insisted that we stay at home completely, no going to work or socialising, and only going out to buy absolute essentials.

He’s a clever guy, so although I had my doubts I assumed he knew what he was talking about, and creepy Neil was good at maths and had once been on Countdown. Anyway, Boris said it only needed to be for three weeks – to “flatten the sombrero” or something (don’t ask me!) so I thought I’d play along, maybe it was a mid-life crisis or something.

Anyway, three weeks came and went, and still Boris wouldn’t let me go out and see anyone or go back to work. I didn’t complain though. It’s hard to explain – he’d spooked me so much I kind of stopped thinking critically about what he was saying. And it wasn’t too bad at first. I was a bit worried about the financial impact of not working, but Boris said he had lots of money in the bank. And it was quite nice to have a bit of time off. We watched Tiger King on Netflix and I bought a lot of stuff off Amazon to take my mind off things.

After several months things got ever so slightly more normal. Boris said that we could go out again and go to the shops and talk to people, but we still had to “stay safe” at all times and stay two metres apart from other people. I could even go back to work for a bit. I kind of played along with it, thinking he was about to lose enthusiasm for the whole bat flu situation. Then, in the middle of summer, out of nowhere he suddenly announced that we had to wear masks whenever we went to the shops! This was when things started to get really weird. He even wanted to wear a mask when we made love, but I drew the line there.

Then he got angry with me one day and said I hadn’t been taking the rules seriously enough. I should say at this point that Neil and these other creepy blokes from the quiz team down the pub, Chris and Pat, were obsessed with this thing called the “R number”. This had something to do with how much bat flu there was going around. Every day they would call Boris up and tell him that the “R number” wasn’t coming down enough and there was too much bat flu, and Boris would go white and say how sorry he was. Then he would take it out on me and give me these long lectures. One day Chris and Pat sent him this really scary chart, showing how we were all going to die again unless we acted straight away. I remember Boris asking if this was a prediction, and for some reason this made them furious, and they kept screaming over and over “it’s a projection!”, which really confused him.

Boris sat me down and said the “R number” was still too high, and it was all my fault for not following “the rules”. I must have been forgetting about the two metres, or not wearing the mask, or not singing Happy Birthday while I washed my hands or something. He said that he had no choice but to introduce a “Three Tier” system. Tier 1 meant things were bad, Tier 2 meant that they were very bad, and Tier 3 meant that they were catastrophic. We were only allowed to do certain things depending on what Tier we were in. This was the only way we could “save Christmas”. I asked if there could ever be anything lower than Tier 1 and he just shook his head and said that was obviously impossible. He called up Chris and Pat and they said that we could start off in Tier 2. This meant I had to wear a mask even when I was driving in my car and no-one else was around.

We went on like this for a while, until one day Chris and Pat called Boris and gave him a stern talking to. Another “projection” – the R number was going to get high again! Boris then started shouting at me, and accused me of having taken my mask off in Lidl. It was back to “lockdown”. This meant no meeting anyone at all, no going to work, nothing. This went on for a month. I started getting very anxious and worried about everything. Plus I had a really nasty shock one day when I happened to see Boris’s credit card statement. He was tens of thousands of pounds in debt! I started crying and shaking and having some very dark thoughts.

I think Boris realised how upset I was and he sat me down and said he knew that it was tough but it was all for my own good. He didn’t like locking me up like this but I had given him no choice. Then his tone changed and he said that there was some good news – the “lockdown” would end in December! I was overjoyed, until he revealed that the “lockdown” would be replaced by the return of the “Tiers”. Only this time it was even more serious. I could forget about Tier 1. It was just Tier 2 or 3 from now on. To be honest, I couldn’t even understand what the difference between these Tiers was. It was something to do with eating a “substantial meal” and “the rule of 6” – total gibberish, really. Boris did say that we could have five days off “the rules” at Christmas so that I could see my mum, but we would have to sit two metres apart with the windows open and not use the same serving spoons.

I asked him if the more serious “Tier system” meant that the bat flu had got worse. And here’s the weird thing – he said that there was actually less bat flu than before. This made no sense, and I tried to get him to explain, but he started muttering “hands face space” over and over again and talking about the toot of the distant bugle. I used to find that stuff quite charming but to be honest it’s got really annoying and I’m not convinced that he’s in his right mind.

I just don’t know when all of this is going to end. It’s unbearable – the bizarre rules that change every second of the day, the uncertainty, the endless control over my every action, the lack of freedom, the fear and anxiety. I think the mask is starting to make me ill. I just can’t see any hope for the future.

And here’s the thing. I’ve got a friend who works in a hospital. She says that the bat flu was actually real, and it was quite nasty, but it wasn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary. They coped with it without much difficulty and it seems to be going away now. They are having a pretty normal winter in her hospital – certainly no busier than usual. So why the Tiers and the masks and the rwo metres and the massive credit card bill? It doesn’t make any sense to me any more.

I’m at the end of my tether. What should I do?

Yous sincerely,

Anonymous

 

Why? If you think about about everything thats going on right now (Covid, global economy tanked, most of Europe brassic, vaccine, trade deals etc) its obvious Boris wants news sequence to be choreographed.

 

Claims such as these, and in fact that whole article, are so disingenuous - the key thing which it glosses over is the fact that it's currently summer in Australia and winter in all those other places - covid pretty much vanished from Europe during summer as well, only to return again once winter swung around. The fact that Oz is pretty isolated as well is also ignored; it's nothing to do with it being the supposed "toast of the world for its pandemic response and subsequent success" meaning that "the country can be thankful that the leader of its second-largest state ignored the right-wing disinformation bubble and stuck hard to facts and science".

 

I don’t think it has nothing to do with it. And isolation is a factor, but only one factor.

Australia and NZ were exposed to the virus much later than European countries. That meant they had more time to adjust, plan, and provide information, and therefore have achieved better outcomes on the whole.

Otherwise their rates would have been sky high in our summer, and they weren’t (though higher than now).

The really interesting question is why rates have generally been low in Africa.

 

It also reached them first in their summer - and in lower numbers than many other countries due to their isolated nature; so they also had less to start with than most other places.

Africa has a very young population and lots of sun.

 

Did it? March is autumn in NZ and Oz. If it arrived in January, maybe.

Well, yes the youth of the African population seems relevant. But why is that so decisive to spread? I’m not sure we know.

 

March tends to be pretty warm in Oz still, and NZ had closed its doors by then, it was much easier for them to have fewer people arriving than more populous and connected countries.

Maybe there has been a fair bit of spread in Africa, but because so few people are old enough to get severe symptoms from it and there isn't the same scale of testing as in more developed economies, it just hasn't been noticed? The virus also clearly doesn't spread as much in hot weather anyway.

 

Yes, which is part of my point - they had time to plan. And isolation of course made that easier.

India, Brazil and Mexico have had high death rates. It can’t just be temperature.

 

Peru had one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns in South America, yet has comfortably the worst death rate. It can't just be lockdowns.

 

No. So frankly we still have no ******* idea.

 

Age and obesity are pretty much the only things which have been conclusively proven by science so far.

Air pollution seems to be another potential factor with regards to spread

 

Yes, true. Quite a lot of air pollution in certain African cities, though.

 

I think that the Ebola breakout in 2014 gave Africa a bit of a head start in learning to cope with a disease and to minimise the spread.

 

Mmm, I’m not sure about that. Do most African countries possess the necessary public health, or political infrastructure? That was certainly an issue with Ebola. Have things changed that much since? I’m sceptical.

 

There is a strong suggestion it did, but not just Ebola. The response to both AIDS and tropical diseases will have played a part. Most African countries have very well developed outreach systems for dealing with disease outbreaks. People are also very used to restriction caused by disease and absorb the rules quickly.

The reported death toll across the whole of Africa iirc is about the same as the UK, though this could be underreported. Another big factor is that the population is young and life is often hard. There is little scope for sitting around eating junk food getting unhealthy.

 

Age is the overwhelming factor with Covid:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/207273/covid-19-deaths-infection-fatality-ratio-about/

The IFR is just 0.23% in low income countries compared to 1% in high income countries.

So it just won’t be as serious in places like Africa.

 

That is a pretty startling difference though. And higher income countries have vastly better health systems so that should partially even things out.

Fatality rates are quite low in Japan and South Korea, both of which have a median population age higher than the global average.

It's all very complex...

 

Who are our three players isolating because of Covid, does anyone actually know?

I've heard it's Sema; Cleverly & Capoue, is this correct? If so whats happening with Hughes?