# General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat



## phillm (Mar 9, 2020)

Mumsnet has a whole subforum - some great advice in there.



Spoiler: ed: some of the advice is a bit rubbish












						Coronavirus (COVID-19) Forum | Mumsnet - Mumsnet
					

Worried about coronavirus? Want to discuss news / prevention tips / impact on families & children? Join Mumsnet's COVID-19 information forum.




					www.mumsnet.com


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## lizzieloo (Mar 9, 2020)

phillm said:


> Mumsnet has a whole subforum - some great advice in there.


There is also some shit advice there, probably best to stick to good advice of the official/scientific kind on this thread.


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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)

COVID-19 #CoronaVirus Infographic Datapack — Information is Beautiful
					

Updated daily, now with global vaccination stats




					informationisbeautiful.net


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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)




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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)

Cloo said:


> I think it's very helpful to make clear it's quite different from a normal cold and that really fever (38c+) and a dry cough and the things to look out for - not blocked nose, sore throat etc.


That is very useful to know. I will start saying that during any discussion about it because people don't seem to be very clear on it. Nobody around me anyway.


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## sihhi (Mar 10, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> View attachment 201167



This is _highly _misleading more recent estimates have average transmissions at 4.7-6 see attached Los Alamos Report,

One person on a bus infected _seven_ others, one of whom got on the bus half an hour after the original infected person got off.









						Coronavirus can travel twice as far as official ‘safe distance’, study says
					

Health authorities advise people to stay 1-2 metres apart, but researchers found that a bus passenger infected fellow travellers sitting 4.5 metres away.




					www.scmp.com
				




The whole chart looks suspect, the basic reproduction number of measles is in all textbooks 12-18, not 9.


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## editor (Mar 10, 2020)

sihhi said:


> One person on a bus infected _seven_ others, one of whom got on the bus half an hour after the original infected person got off.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


From that article: 


> _ The study at the centre of this article on the transmission of the coronavirus was retracted on Tuesday by the journal _Practical Preventive Medicine_ without giving a reason. The South China Morning Post has reached out to the paper's authors and will update the article._


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## sihhi (Mar 10, 2020)

editor said:


> From that article:



I read of it on Weibo here 微博搜索 
yesterday waited for a translated version.

wait and see, the journal is a core _hexin _one and so is properly blind-reviewed


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## mod (Mar 10, 2020)




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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)

sihhi said:


> This is _highly _misleading more recent estimates have average transmissions at 4.7-6 see attached Los Alamos Report,
> 
> One person on a bus infected _seven_ others, one of whom got on the bus half an hour after the original infected person got off.
> 
> ...


They say their source is the Centre for Disease Control, WHO. I guess either them or the WHO CDC could be wrong/lying though.


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## Supine (Mar 10, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> View attachment 201167



Wtf is going on with that y axis. Looks like it starts logarithmic and then turns linear.


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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)

Supine said:


> Wtf is going on with that y axis. Looks like it starts logarithmic and then turns linear.


Good point! Oh well. It looked all right at first glance.


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## Mrs Miggins (Mar 10, 2020)

I guess that so much of what they are plotting is below the 10% mark so it would be impossible to see if they didn't do it like that but yeah - it does kind of make it look less than rigorous.

I still prefer it to WE'RE ALL GOING TO CATCH IT AND DIE though.


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## steveo87 (Mar 10, 2020)

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know why Italy appears to have been hit so hard?


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## weltweit (Mar 10, 2020)

steveo87 said:


> Just out of curiosity, does anyone know why Italy appears to have been hit so hard?


My feeling is that they had infected people in their population circulating freely for perhaps a month or two before anyone started testing and treating. This idea is slightly supported in that they announced deaths from the virus almost before they announced cases.


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## elbows (Mar 10, 2020)

steveo87 said:


> Just out of curiosity, does anyone know why Italy appears to have been hit so hard?



Many countries (and posters here including me) appear to be working on the basis that Italy is just further ahead than their countries, and that within a few weeks many other countries will be in the same boat.

I should say that outbreaks of seasonal endemic diseases can have very interesting timing variations between countries, and I'll be posting some stuff on that theme in regards flu in europe this season at some point later this evening or in the coming days. However some of the timing variations with those endemic things is probably down to the history of what went before in the populations of those countries, and that wont apply to this coronavirus since populations had no existing immunity against it so its a clean sheet on that front.


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## elbows (Mar 10, 2020)

weltweit said:


> My feeling is that they had infected people in their population circulating freely for perhaps a month or two before anyone started testing and treating. This idea is slightly supported in that they announced deaths from the virus almost before they announced cases.



Deaths at the same time as discovering cases is indeed one of those bad signs, along with countries staring to export cases that are then tested/detected in other countries, before they have recorded many cases of their own.

However, once we move away from the country level 'has this country noticed their first outbreak yet' framing of this phenomenon, we can tell a similar story on another level. The 'discover a new cluster/particular chain of transmission' somewhere within that country level.

I will explain this in the form of a question. When it comes to the domestic cluster level, is the UK any better than Italy? By this I mean, were all the recorded UK deaths as a result of either imported travel-related cases, or from community clusters that were already detected well before the death of someone in that cluster? The answer is no. The first death in the UK was a patient without the travel history, who had been in and out of hospital. And there was not much time between the test and their death. The logical conclusion is that this was a community or hospital acquired case, and it was the serious illness/death that first alerted authorities to the existence of this particular cluster. I keep saying cluster but obvious I dont know what sort of scale of transmission has been going on in relation to that particular case.

Or to put it all a different way, just because your existing surveillance methods had detected various other unrelated cases for ages beforehand, doesnt mean these 'death reveals a new cluster' alarms are any less significant.


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## weltweit (Mar 10, 2020)

elbows said:


> Deaths at the same time as discovering cases is indeed one of those bad signs, along with countries staring to export cases that are then tested/detected in other countries, before they have recorded many cases of their own.


e.g. Singapore was the source of our so called first super spreader, yet they apparently only report 166 cases. It seems strange to me. Up only 6 from yesterday.



elbows said:


> However, once we move away from the country level 'has this country noticed their first outbreak yet' framing of this phenomenon, we can tell a similar story on another level. The 'discover a new cluster/particular chain of transmission' somewhere within that country level.



Indeed, on the macro scale the individual cases don't tell us so much. The trend is more interesting. I forget the terminology but delaying mass infections does mean more possibilities for medicines and eventually a vaccine, however long that will take, perhaps years.  



elbows said:


> I will explain this in the form of a question. When it comes to the domestic cluster level, is the UK any better than Italy? By this I mean, were all the recorded UK deaths as a result of either imported travel-related cases, or from community clusters that were already detected well before the death of someone in that cluster? The answer is no. The first death in the UK was a patient without the travel history, who had been in and out of hospital. And there was not much time between the test and their death. The logical conclusion is that this was a community or hospital acquired case, and it was the serious illness/death that first alerted authorities to the existence of this particular cluster. I keep saying cluster but obvious I dont know what sort of scale of transmission has been going on in relation to that particular case.



Was the first death like that? I am not sure I ever read anything about that. 



elbows said:


> Or to put it all a different way, just because your existing surveillance methods had detected various other unrelated cases for ages beforehand, doesnt mean these 'death reveals a new cluster' alarms are any less significant.


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## elbows (Mar 10, 2020)

weltweit said:


> Was the first death like that? I am not sure I ever read anything about that.



The reason I have to go on about this sort of thing so much is because its often missing from the media articles. Unless a writer happens to latch onto that angle, it is often left without the full implications being spelt out properly at all. This case did feature enough reported detail and hinted at the implications without dwelling on them.

On Thursday March 5th the BBC reported:



> A woman with underlying health conditions has become the first person in the UK to die after testing positive for coronavirus.
> 
> The Royal Berkshire NHS Trust said the patient, understood to be in her 70s, had been "in and out of hospital for non-coronavirus reasons".
> 
> She was admitted and tested positive for coronavirus on Wednesday.





> The woman, who was being treated at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, is believed to have caught the virus in the UK, said the country's chief medical adviser Prof Chris Whitty.
> 
> She is not thought to have been abroad recently, BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle added.
> 
> Officials are now trying to trace the people she was in contact with.











						Coronavirus: Woman in 70s becomes first virus fatality in UK
					

The patient, who had underlying health conditions, dies as the number of UK cases rises to 116.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Unfortunately the problem I have is that this is often where the story ends for us. There is not very much reporting these days about the nature of specific UK clusters. I will be lucky to ever discover whether contract tracing for the deceased woman revealed any other cases, or a real good picture of the transmission chain and how it started.


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## jakethesnake (Mar 10, 2020)

This podcast is pretty interesting and worth watching imo. The guest, Michael Osterholm, predicted this outbreak a couple of years ago, he puts it in context and also discusses what can be done.


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## Kevbad the Bad (Mar 10, 2020)

Does anyone know, if you get the virus and recover, how long do you remain infectious to other people?


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## killer b (Mar 10, 2020)

jakethesnake said:


> This podcast is pretty interesting and worth watching imo. The guest, Michael Osterholm, predicted this outbreak a couple of years ago, he puts it in context and also discusses what can be done.



this is good, but jesus christ it goes on.


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## MrSki (Mar 11, 2020)

Polite request   Could this thread be kept to sensible information & advice & other non qualifying posts (like this one) be deleted? editor  There are plenty of other threads for questions or comments.


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## elbows (Mar 11, 2020)

MrSki said:


> Polite request   Could this thread be kept to sensible information & advice & other non qualifying posts (like this one) be deleted? editor  There are plenty of other threads for questions or comments.



Please move them rather than delete them. There can be a thread just for the stuff moved from this one, which should include the conversation I ended up having here earlier after someone asked a question, stuff I was going on about that really doesnt belong here.


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## Mation (Mar 11, 2020)

Are you managing to not touch your face? If so, how?

I was at a conference yesterday and caught myself cupping my face in my hands, elbows on table loads of times throughout the day. And noticed everyone else doing that or similar, too. (But also that hardly anyone shook hands, and lots of people were pushing doors open using their forearm, not their hand.)

From the 'Nudge Unit'



			
				https://www.bi.team/blogs/how-to-stop-touching-our-faces-in-the-wake-of-the-coronavirus/ said:
			
		

> Since there is little to no evidence available on specific tactics, more work is needed to work out the most effective options and how they vary between groups (since we know face touching varies across cultures). However, there is strong evidence that the best way of ensuring that these tactics happen is by using *“if-then” plans.* These take the form of statements like “if I am looking at my phone, I will put my other hand in my pocket” or “if I sit down in a meeting, I will do ‘locked arms’”. Over time, these actions become habitual. The result is that people do not have to think about creating barriers to face touching: it just happens automatically.
> 
> An alternative possibility is that unprompted face touching occurs as a compulsive or habitual action, like nail biting. In those cases, the best option again is to *create an alternative behavior* that displaces the need away from face touching. Some options could be drumming fingers on legs or playing with a substitute object.
> 
> These may seem to be absurdly small and unimportant things to be discussed. In fact, they are crucial. Creating substitute behaviors and new barrier-forming habits are the most effective way of curbing face touching. We need to work out the most promising approaches and the best way of communicating them – fast.


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## Cid (Mar 11, 2020)

Mation said:


> Are you managing to not touch your face? If so, how?
> 
> I was at a conference yesterday and caught myself cupping my face in my hands, elbows on table loads of times throughout the day. And noticed everyone else doing that or similar, too. (But also that hardly anyone shook hands, and lots of people were pushing doors open using their forearm, not their hand.)
> 
> From the 'Nudge Unit'



The virus is readily transmitted through breathing coughing etc; I.e the important bit of you being at a conference and cupping your face isn’t the hands, it’s the conference.

e2a: not to say people shouldn’t be aware of hand washing etc, but it’s not an effective way to avoid infection on its own. I think both this and other measures, like masks, are probably more damaging than many think. There’s a degree to which these become kind of talismans against infection - it feels safer to go out if you remember to wash your hands, avoid touching your face etc. But by far the highest risk factor is simply going to be being in the same room as someone who just coughed.


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## killer b (Mar 11, 2020)

editor said:


> This thread has completely veered off topic. it was supposed to be where people could link to sensible, well researched content and be suitably informed. A chat on Mumset definitely does not fit that description,  and I'm not sure a one and a half hour long US radio chat show does either, even if there is an expert speaking.
> I'm going to spin all the other stuff off into a general chat thread and would ask that people ONLY post up excellent resources from credible sources here.
> 
> Done: General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat


in which case, I'm not sure how credible this infographic is - shortness of breath is listed as a primary symptom rather than a sometimes one on all the proper resources I've read, and anyone can whack 'source: world health organisation!' on the bottom of their dodgy infographic...



mod said:


> View attachment 201226


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## extra dry (Mar 11, 2020)

I aonder how long it will go on fot a year the rest of the decade. Will it kill off all the politics and such who seem to be in large groups of large people. No very long before hospitals fill up


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## SpookyFrank (Mar 11, 2020)

phillm said:


> Mumsnet has a whole subforum - some great advice in there.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Mumsnet's advice is just 'vote tory' though isn't it?


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## elbows (Mar 11, 2020)

Thanks for splitting this stuff off from the pinned useful sources of info thread.


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## gosub (Mar 11, 2020)

Now the WHO has declared it a pandemic can we change the background colour of this bit of the forum?


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## phillm (Mar 11, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Mumsnet's advice is just 'vote tory' though isn't it?


If you have become a trawling obsessive there is some organic stoneground  wheat amongst the chaff... plus a stone-aged forum software that died out about 10 years ago everywhere else.


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## killer b (Mar 11, 2020)

mumsnet always used to be solid middle-class liberal back in the day - one of it's founders is Alan Rusbridgers wife iirc - a friend of mine briefly had a Comment is Free column off the back of being a prolific poster over there... Things must have changed considerably if they're now a hive of tories.


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## Cribynkle (Mar 11, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Mumsnet's advice is just 'vote tory' though isn't it?


They had a post yesterday suggesting a thread on here as a useful resource...


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## two sheds (Mar 12, 2020)

boardwars


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## Buddy Bradley (Mar 12, 2020)

Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that's the real global emergency
					

We may look back on coronavirus as the moment when the threads that hold the global economy together came unstuck




					www.independent.co.uk


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## gentlegreen (Mar 12, 2020)

French Catholic Shrine’s “Healing” Waters Shut Down Due To Coronavirus
					

Oops.




					friendlyatheist.patheos.com


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## editor (Mar 12, 2020)

Interesting graph here. Without the same levels of testing worldwide it's impossible to work out which countries are the worst affected


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## editor (Mar 12, 2020)

FFS: Under US sanctions, Google removes Iran’s coronavirus app


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## 1%er (Mar 12, 2020)

This pandemic could also be very bad news for many workingclass people as news reports in the financial press suggest a number of big companies are going under. 

Cineworld Group plc who own almost 100 cinemas in the UK have issued a statement saying "The worst case scenario for the coronavirus outbreak, with moviegoers in the UK and US staying at home for three months, this would lead to “material uncertainty” and “may cast significant doubt about the group's ability to continue as a going concern”. Their shares were down 50% on the day which can only make things worse for their employees.

Finablr who own Travelex and Xpress Money as well as other companies has also said that the lack of people traveling and foreign exchange services have been hit hard by travel restrictions imposed to limit the spread of coronavirus could push them under, with the loss of many jobs. Their shares have dropped by 77% on the day and has put massive pressure on their finances. They also employ lots of people.

Intu (formerly Capital Shopping Centres Group plc)  the company that owns a number of very big shopping centers in the UK look like it is going under, they lost over £2billion last year and have debts of £4.5billion that they can not refinance. While their problems are not down to COVID-19 people staying away because of the virus could well push them over the edge according to news reports. That would mean all the shops in some of the biggest shopping centers in the UK could close on their sites (a list of their sites can be found here, it includes intu Derby, Eldon Square in Newcastle, Lakeside, Merry Hill, Trafford Centre, Manchester Arndale Centre and many others)

This is just 3 companies of many that believe this virus could mean many job losses.


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## editor (Mar 12, 2020)

Was it just me or did others find it really chilling watching a British prime minister say that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."

It almost brought to mind footage from the "Threads" era.


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## QueenOfGoths (Mar 13, 2020)

Back into work after a day off yesterday and some of the shelves not just loo roll and hand wash, have been decimated (photos below, so those shelved are usually chocker). 

The poor online shoppers are facing Christmas levels of orders but without the level of staff who normally help out then.


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## Badgers (Mar 13, 2020)

editor said:


> Was it just me or did others find it really chilling watching a British prime minister say that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."
> 
> It almost brought to mind footage from the "Threads" era.


Every word that self serving cunt say's is chilling. 

This is probably one of the more honest thing the cunt has ever said, chilling or not.


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## SpookyFrank (Mar 13, 2020)

QueenOfGoths said:


> Back into work after a day off yesterday and some of the shelves not just loo roll and hand wash, have been decimated (photos below, so those shelved are usually chocker).
> 
> The poor online shoppers are facing Christmas levels of orders but without the level of staff who normally help out then.
> 
> View attachment 201517View attachment 201512View attachment 201513View attachment 201514View attachment 201515View attachment 201516View attachment 201517



Whereabouts is this? Round here there are empty shelves for a random selection of items (instant noodles, tinned kidney beans, crisps) but generally it looks like business as usual.


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## SpookyFrank (Mar 13, 2020)

editor said:


> Was it just me or did others find it really chilling watching a British prime minister say that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."
> 
> It almost brought to mind footage from the "Threads" era.



Johnson could lose his own mother and think of nothing besides the opportunity to bury some bad news. It's what he just did with his engagement and the prospect of his first acknowledged child.

FWIW I have no idea is his mother is still alive. Probably he doesn't either.


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## LDC (Mar 13, 2020)

editor said:


> Was it just me or did others find it really chilling watching a British prime minister say that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."
> 
> It almost brought to mind footage from the "Threads" era.



Yeah very grim. There's been a few shivers down my spine moments over this in the the last few weeks.


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## QueenOfGoths (Mar 13, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Whereabouts is this? Round here there are empty shelves for a random selection of items (instant noodles, tinned kidney beans, crisps) but generally it looks like business as usual.


Maidenhead


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## QueenOfGoths (Mar 13, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Whereabouts is this? Round here there are empty shelves for a random selection of items (instant noodles, tinned kidney beans, crisps) but generally it looks like business as usual.


We are short of those plus soup, pasta, flour, yeast, dried beans /lentils, UHT milk, eggs, tinned veg and chocolate!


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## treelover (Mar 14, 2020)

editor said:


> The Albert pub in Brixton has put up hand sanitisers around the bar, which is a great idea, so I'm going to try and persuade other venues to do the same. I'm also going to persuade a piece asking clubs to temporarily get rid of the toilet attendants and replace their trays of trinkets and perfumes with piles and piles of soap because their presence tends to dissuade people from washing their hands or making them do it too quickly.
> 
> Maybe others could pass this advice on to bars in their area?
> 
> Just finished the article:  Brixton bars and clubs and coronavirus – two important ways to help keep them safe for customers



Some of the pubs and bars around here, and cafes aren't exactly clean, especially the Toilets, they bare going to have to up their game

Why hasn't the Govt announced more stringent measures for business hygiene, toilets cleaned regularly, etc?


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## treelover (Mar 14, 2020)

bimble said:


> This might not really fit the thread title but here's the governments instructions for how to self isolate.
> It asks things of people that sounds pretty much impossible if you live with other people especially children and do not have a vast mansion.
> 
> 
> ...



Ah, but the top politicians, civil servants, do have large houses, etc, they also don't seem to realise many young people now live in shared houses, sometimes 7 or 8 in one house.

Bubble beginning to have real consequences with C19.


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## danny la rouge (Mar 14, 2020)

treelover said:


> they *bare* going to have to up their game


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## brogdale (Mar 14, 2020)

danny la rouge said:


>


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## brogdale (Mar 14, 2020)

Apols if this has already been put up, but an (Emeritus) Professor of Behavioural factors in Anti-Microbial Resistance has tweeted this thread on the assumptions that he thinks the UK state's strategy for herd immunity are based upon:



Interesting, if scary.


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## Mr Moose (Mar 15, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Apols if this has already been put up, but an (Emeritus) Professor of Behavioural factors in Anti-Microbial Resistance has tweeted this thread on the assumptions that he thinks the UK state's strategy for herd immunity are based upon:
> 
> 
> 
> Interesting, if scary.




It is. The approaches are poles apart too. One response is to treat it almost like Ebola, to isolate and kill the outbreak off. The other is to build herd immunity, so pretty much purposefully allow it to spread.


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## killer b (Mar 15, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Interesting LRB piece by clinician Rupert Beale:


Theres an extended interview with him on the podcasts which is great too (recorded a few days later)









						Podcast: Rupert Beale and Thomas Jones · Wash Your Hands, Again · LRB 13 March 2020
					






					www.lrb.co.uk


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## Reno (Mar 15, 2020)

Here in Berlin everything non-essential has shut down. No clubs, bars, gyms, theatres and cinemas. Last week was still normal and now it feels like the apocalypse has arrived. It’s odd, looking at life in London on Facebook, where so far it’s business as usual. I see my friends posting from clubs, gigs, the theatre, etc. I‘m worried about the NHS not coping once severe infections hit critical mass.

I hope this means that we’ll get over this quicker in Germany and that normal life can resume in a couple of months. I was already going stir-crazy just because of winter and now spring has been cancelled. I’m more scared of getting lonely, bored and depressed rather than of getting the virus. I’ve at least got the cat. My workplace, the Berlin LGBT+ Center, has reduced its services and cancelled all social events. I hope it will stay open, just so I’ll get out of the house. 

One thing about Germany which so far is remarkable is the low death rate. Its been explained to be down due to early testing, but can that be all ? We have roughly 4600 diagnosed infections but only 9 deaths. France has a slightly lower number of infections but over 90 deaths. Could it be that there are different strands ?


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## brogdale (Mar 15, 2020)

Today's Guardian piece by Dr William Hanage a  Harvard professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease is quite something and troubling.

Summed up quite succinctly by this quote:


> The most fundamental function of a government is to keep its people safe. It is from this that it derives its authority, the confidence of the people and its legitimacy. Nobody should be under the illusion that this is something that can be dodged through somehow manipulating a virus that we are only beginning to understand. This will not pass you by; this is not a tornado, it is a hurricane.


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## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Bloody hell: 









						Austria bans gatherings of more than five people over coronavirus
					

People allowed out of homes only for work, food shopping and helping others




					www.independent.co.uk


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## Reno (Mar 15, 2020)

Germany has just closed its borders to neighbouring countries.









						Coronavirus: Germany to partially close some borders – DW – 03/15/2020
					

German authorities have decided to reimpose controls on the nation's borders with France, Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Commuters would still be allowed to travel. Follow DW for the latest.




					www.dw.com


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## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 15, 2020)

I did a grocery run early this morning.  The shelves were bare of toilet paper, soup, pasta, pasta sauce, canned fruit and veggies, rice, and beans.  There was plenty of everything else.

There were plenty of fresh foods.  They had (very helpfully) moved all of the cheap alcohol to the front of the store and there was ample supplies.

I overheard a clerk say that their supply truck  "is a couple of hours late" and they'd expect to have full shelves later in the day.

<edited to add>
Once again the kid who packed the sacks put my bananas on the bottom of the bag.


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## 2hats (Mar 15, 2020)

phillm said:


> Mumsnet has a whole subforum - some great advice in there.


Doubtless this has been covered elsewhere (sorry, only just catching up; there is lots to do) but the word 'mumsnet' and phrase 'great advice' should be kept at maximum spatial separation at all times.


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## phillm (Mar 15, 2020)

2hats said:


> Doubtless this has been covered elsewhere (sorry, only just catching up; there is lots to do) but the word 'mumsnet' and phrase 'great advice' should be kept at maximum spatial separation at all times.


Yes I've been well spanked for that.


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## farmerbarleymow (Mar 15, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> Once again the kid who packed the sacks put my bananas on the bottom of the bag.


Have you upset them or something?


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## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 15, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Have you upset them or something?



I dunno.  I'm using reusable bags.


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## hash tag (Mar 15, 2020)

If you don't happen to run out, leaf


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## two sheds (Mar 15, 2020)

Nettles are much more widely available though.


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## farmerbarleymow (Mar 15, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> I dunno.  I'm using reusable bags.


Maybe they hate bananas.


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## brogdale (Mar 15, 2020)

More of this sort of thing.


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## Cid (Mar 15, 2020)

If this is to be the sticky general chatter thread, can we replace it/merge with the original thread (Coronovirus: cases triple)?


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## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Cid said:


> If this is to be the sticky general chatter thread, can we replace it/merge with the original thread (Coronovirus: cases triple)?


I think this thread should be kept for general chat rather than the more sciencey/news other one, although maybe the title of that one should be changed to something more general (maybe: The worldwide spread of Coronavirus - news and updates")?


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## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Meanwhile, here's a pretty - but grim - graphic


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## treelover (Mar 15, 2020)

editor said:


> Meanwhile, here's a pretty - but grim - graphic
> 
> View attachment 201831



very good infographic, even though a business site, didn't even know there had been a PLAGUE IN 1855.


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## DexterTCN (Mar 15, 2020)

Here is some maths.  Maths is good.


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## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Rail companies fucked too









						Train companies seek bailout as coronavirus hits passenger numbers
					

Train operators are in talks with government to slash services as passenger numbers fall.



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 15, 2020)

Thought I'd share this article (hidden behind paywall) from Research Professional News

Seems to me to show serious failure on behalf of the government to protect the British population from this virus. Apparently the government has closed vaccine centers for a quick, short-term buck. If this is true then it means that austerity is directly responsible for the failure of the government to deal with this crisis.

Maybe we need a thread about how austerity is effecting this pandemic? Especially as school closures are going to mean pupils from poor families going without food, as it's the schools that are feeding them..

*UK lacks capacity to make own coronavirus vaccine, experts say
Historic UK under-investment in this area of R&D might mean jabs are in short supply*



Virology experts have warned that should a vaccine against the global coronavirus outbreak be developed, historic under-investment in this area of R&D in the UK might mean jabs are in short supply when they eventually materialise.

“Some countries still have state serum institutes whose mission is to ‘protect against infectious disease’ and making vaccines is one of their roles,” Ian Jones, professor of virology at the University of Reading, told Research Professional News.

“But in the UK these have long gone and although there have been recent initiatives to correct the obvious deficit they are not yet up and running, nor is their remit really manufacture—more trial batches of experimental vaccines.”

As of 10 March, some 382 people in the UK had tested positive for the virus—including health minister Nadine Dorries—and eight had died. More than 26,000 people had been tested.

“In a truly worldwide crisis, the sovereign states who host [vaccine manufacturing] sites would understandably want their own needs met before they would agree to allow export elsewhere,” Jones said.

“Not to have any such manufacturing options within its own borders puts a country at the back of the queue when the vaccine is requested, despite the technology to make it being very transferable.”

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has asked for $2 billion (£1.5bn) to develop and make vaccines against the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, making hundreds of millions of doses available through a globally fair allocation system within 12-18 months.

The requirements for a vaccine for most coronaviruses are well known, said Jones, so the issue is not vaccine discovery.

“In fact, [a vaccine] is already available,” he said, noting that a recombinant SARS-CoV-2 protein was being advertised on commercial websites within four weeks of the virus’s genetic sequence being released.

“In essence this is vaccine material although it is not manufactured as such, it is sold for research use only, but its availability so quickly shows that to produce a vaccine using material of this type is also not an issue.”

The hold-up is the need to conduct lengthy trials to test efficacy and safety.

“What is galling about the current situation is that years of research, mostly publicly funded, has told us what to do and provided the tools and technologies to do it,” Jones said. “Yet some combination of the established and the sacrosanct prevents it being shaken by the throat and done.”

One hope in the medium term is the UK’s first dedicated Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, in Harwell, near Oxford, which is expected to be up and running by 2022. But even this centre will not be able to handle large epidemics without millions in further funding, experts have said. The centre has received £66m through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Medicines Manufacturing challenge.

Matthew Duchars, chief executive of the VMIC, told Research Professional News that the centre could support vaccine production for first responders and to help contain local outbreaks with up to a million doses.

“The facility has not been designed to respond to a more widespread outbreak such as a pandemic situation, where many more doses, i.e. millions, would be required,” he said. “In order for VMIC to be able to respond to a potential pandemic situation, such as the current coronavirus outbreak, the facility would need to be scaled up.”

“This would require larger scale equipment, more staff and the building to be expanded,” Duchars said, estimating that a further £40m would be required for the upgrade “to provide surety for domestic supply”.

“Currently we are having to look abroad to find sufficient capacity and in situations where entire countries are being locked down (e.g. Italy), that is proving difficult! Additionally, it is no good having the facility if it is not kept operational. Hence the need to maintain it in a qualified state by keeping it ‘warm lit’.”

Duchars’s team is now considering asking for more money for such an upgrade.

Robin Shattock, an infection researcher at Imperial College London, told The Times on 7 March that a further £2-4m a year would be needed to keep the VMIC ready to ramp up production on demand.

The government seems open to funding vaccine research and manufacture, whatever it costs, given the Chancellor’s comments on 11 March when presenting the budget.

Rishi Sunak promised that “whatever extra resources our NHS needs to cope with coronavirus—it will get…whether its research for a vaccine, recruiting thousands of returning staff…whether its millions of pounds or billions of pounds…whatever it needs, whatever it costs, we stand behind our NHS”.









						UK lacks capacity to make own coronavirus vaccine, experts say - Research Professional News
					

Historic UK under-investment in this area of R&D might mean jabs are in short supply




					www.researchprofessionalnews.com


----------



## treelover (Mar 15, 2020)

My local real ale micro pub tell me their takings were down massively this week, as was the cafe across the road, staff are very very worried, zhc contracts, etc.


----------



## phillm (Mar 15, 2020)

CofE has issued guidance - sorry to report that *Intinction* isn't on but apparently it was a papish practice anyway. All very wonderful in a Monty Python sort of way...









						Coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance | The Church of England
					

Guidance and advice on COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus, for churches and parishes.




					www.churchofengland.org
				












						Intinction - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				




and there are laws.....

_Please note that the distribution of individual cups for use by communicants is not a lawful practice in the Church of England. _(broad Church my arse)

_Suspend the use of holy water stoups._

And this is a kicker

_Refrain from passing collection plates around.

Wash vestments (surplices, cassocks) on the hottest cycle you can without damaging them. __Chasubles __etc. which could become contaminated, may not be able to be washed. Instead, they should be securely stored away from people, ideally in a well ventilated and brightly sunlit area, for at least 48 hours before re-use, _


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 15, 2020)

editor said:


> Meanwhile, here's a pretty - but grim - graphic


factor in populations and the contrast is even more stark - and they could at least have had seasonal flu as a reference point ...

It says a lot about how unacceptable such deaths are deemed now - though mainly when it directly affects the upper classes ... plus of course in the past there was rarely anything they could do about it ..


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 15, 2020)

phillm said:


> CofE has issued guidance - sorry to report that *Intinction* isn't on but apparently it was a papish practice anyway.


Double dipping


----------



## phillm (Mar 15, 2020)

Has Dr Who ever travelled back to a plague time? Turns out he has. At 15.00 you can see innovative futuristic plexiglass face visors.


----------



## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Apols if already posted 









						Private Eye Magazine | Official Site - the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop
					

The official site for Private Eye magazine, the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs publication edited by Ian Hislop. Subscribe here for only £38 a year.



					www.private-eye.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Mar 15, 2020)

Well played Germany


----------



## two sheds (Mar 15, 2020)

Could have gone under the 'Profiteering scumbags ...' thread if he'd been successful. I'm sure he'd have turned a nice profit on it.


----------



## editor (Mar 15, 2020)

Depressing stuff 



> Coronavirus is the nightmare scenario that calls the viability of this business structure into question. It’s the bottom falling out of the idea that everyone will always want to be in the room. A major tributary for touring artists is drying up quick with no end in sight. With it goes work for sound and lighting teams, people working merch tables, bartenders, and so on. There is real danger for the spring and summer festival circuit right now, which is already spread thin in terms of the amount of bookable talent and the increase in weekend festivals looking for them to play. Record Store Day has been pushed back to June, meaning resolute retail outlets counting on the annual bump in income in April have to soldier on even further into the year without the cache of rarities and exclusives that draws superfans out in numbers in the spring











						Coronavirus Should Be a Turning Point for the Music Industry
					

It’s the nightmare scenario that calls the viability of the whole business structure into question.




					www.vulture.com


----------



## Badgers (Mar 15, 2020)

> US extends travel ban to include the UK and Ireland:
> 
> US president also said he has been tested for COVID-19.


From Travel Weekly


----------



## 2hats (Mar 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Well played Germany



Amazingly, CEO of biopharmaceutical company understands how vaccines work better than Trump does.


----------



## Mation (Mar 15, 2020)

brogdale said:


> More of this sort of thing.
> 
> View attachment 201825


Be good to see a second hour, later in the day, too. Chances of my parents being up and about that early are zero.


----------



## sihhi (Mar 15, 2020)

editor said:


> Was it just me or did others find it really chilling watching a British prime minister say that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."
> 
> It almost brought to mind footage from the "Threads" era.



He will reference this in future as the bodies get dumped in the ground, saying he was straight with everyone.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 15, 2020)

Again another media source claiming to have 'seen reports or tip off' so hardly scientific facts. Still a concerning read and does not sound unnecessarily alarmist. 





__





						UK coronavirus crisis 'to last until spring 2021 and could see 7.9m hospitalised' | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Exclusive: Public Health England document seen by Guardian says four in five ‘expected’ to contract virus




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## TopCat (Mar 15, 2020)

killer b said:


> mumsnet always used to be solid middle-class liberal back in the day - one of it's founders is Alan Rusbridgers wife iirc - a friend of mine briefly had a Comment is Free column off the back of being a prolific poster over there... Things must have changed considerably if they're now a hive of tories.


Their moto is "Themselves first, always".


----------



## Sue (Mar 15, 2020)

Just got an email from my local theatre (it's a charity). They've suspended all performances and are looking for donations to stay afloat. The first of many such organisations I fear.


----------



## friendofdorothy (Mar 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Again another media source claiming to have 'seen reports or tip off' so hardly scientific facts. Still a concerning read and does not sound unnecessarily alarmist.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I'm fed up of reading 'possible' 'maybe' forcasts. They are guesswork at best. Journalists should curb all speculation. Its all alarmist. 

Fed up of big PLAGUE YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE type headlines, even when they are followed with _don't panic_ text.


----------



## friendofdorothy (Mar 15, 2020)

on the plus side its wiped all Brexit chat off the headlines.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 15, 2020)

friendofdorothy said:


> on the plus side its wiped all Brexit chat off the headlines.


Small blessings but yes


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 15, 2020)

5 ways to successfully self isolate

Scroll down for video.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 15, 2020)

Mr Moose said:


> It is. The approaches are poles apart too. One response is to treat it almost like Ebola, to isolate and kill the outbreak off. The other is to build herd immunity, so pretty much purposefully allow it to spread.




It's far too late to contain it and stop it.


----------



## bellaozzydog (Mar 16, 2020)

I’m working abroad really well isolated so no real corona worries.
No one can guarantee any of my movements that’s at a National Gvt level so fuxking nothing I can control
so I’m just gonna log off the corona virus forum and social mediaTry and stay sane and healthy and when i get a chance to get back to the U.K. take it 

3/4 of the family are stranded outside the country so we are all “in the same boat” at least we will all have good tans for the summer 

stay frosty


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 16, 2020)

brogdale said:


> this is not a tornado, it is a hurricane


What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. A tornado and a hurricane are the same thing, just one is over water and the other is over land. Really fills you with confidence in scientists' proclamations when they come out with idiotic faux-profundity like that.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 16, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. A tornado and a hurricane are the same thing, just one is over water and the other is over land. Really fills you with confidence in scientists' proclamations when they come out with idiotic faux-profundity like that.


He was using the analogy as a means to illustrate the scale difference between the government's ineffective short-termist, knee-jerk responses and the long-term/huge impacts the virus will have.
Tornadoes & Hurricanes are different weather phenomena with differing genesis, form, scale, life-cycle and impacts, but this is probably more readily appreciated by Americans.


----------



## prunus (Mar 16, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. A tornado and a hurricane are the same thing, just one is over water and the other is over land. Really fills you with confidence in scientists' proclamations when they come out with idiotic faux-profundity like that.



Um, no, hurricanes are the same as typhoons, and cyclones, but tornadoes are a different kettle of fish entirely.  Not that it’s particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but I wouldn’t want people to be dismissing his words on the basis of a misunderstanding of the phenomena in his metaphor.

The pertinent comparison being (I believe) that tornados are intense, localised and short-lived, whereas hurricanes are immense, cover huge areas and go on for much longer.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 16, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> What an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. A tornado and a hurricane are the same thing, just one is over water and the other is over land. Really fills you with confidence in scientists' proclamations when they come out with idiotic faux-profundity like that.



I dunno if you're being wrong on purpose for comic effect or what but at tornado is not the same thing as a hurricane at all. Also you can get tornados over water. There was one in Wales the other week.


----------



## Dogsauce (Mar 16, 2020)

Seemed to be less kids coming into school today, think some are being kept away. Reckon this might snowball and predict we’ll be shut by the end of the week, though I’ll probably still go into work there when I’m not looking after my own kids, plenty of stuff I can do.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 16, 2020)

definitely less traffic than normal today and much reduced numbers at primary school gate. I would be surprised if schools are still open by the end of the week.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 16, 2020)

I dont generally suffer from anxiety - but i have been losing sleep over this. The implications are massive on so many levels and most of them are very troubling. In two days Ive gone from stressing about leeds united being robbed of promotion to fearing a massive community/life wrecking recession combined with collapse of the NHS and public services.   And not having any work for .... who knows? The BBC diet of "keep calm and carry on" followed by uplifting stories of how people are coping and smiling is not helping either.


----------



## BassJunkie (Mar 16, 2020)

Reno said:


> Germany has just closed its borders to neighbouring countries.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


But, but, I was told, repeatedly, by the people now in Government, that we would have leave the EU to _Take Back Control Of Our Borders_. Now it turns out to have been wrong. Is it possible the government are nothing but perfidious cunts?


----------



## campanula (Mar 16, 2020)

Looks like we are in deep scary shit. \this morning, no pharmacist, clinic closed, facing complete methadone withdrawal after more than 3 decades. |Feeling very, very frightened as it is clear people like me are no sort of ptiority at all. Dunno how I am going to get through this, as I cannot even tell my kids about our addiction issues. Surely, there are goiing to be other people who need community pharmacies but I am afraid CGL and other privatised healthcare places are going to be seen for the shoddy rubbish they really are. Terrified.


----------



## bimble (Mar 16, 2020)

campanula do you know why pharmacist is closed this morning?
Totally get why you are panicking but its got to be a priority, getting people the medicines they are dependant on, those places surely would not be closed for virus reasons whilst people are still swanning about going to restaurants etc. even in the European countries that are in full lock down, pharmacies are still open.


----------



## pinkychukkles (Mar 16, 2020)

editor said:


> Depressing stuff
> 
> 
> 
> ...


From within that article, it refers back to an article written by Steve Albini from 1993 about how bands got / get screwed over by 'the music industry' which was interesting too:








						The Problem with Music | Steve Albini
					

Steve Albini’s iconic music industry takedown explains how record labels use A&R flaks and impenetrable contracts to screw artists while raking in millions



					thebaffler.com


----------



## pinkychukkles (Mar 16, 2020)

campanula hope some something can get sorted for you. 🤞🙏


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

I'm sure it's already been posted but it is interesting


----------



## two sheds (Mar 16, 2020)

editor said:


> I'm sure it's already been posted but it is interesting




Illustrative but I think the scale is very misleading.









						Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
					

Can't see my mother not going over the road to church today.Hopefully no-one else (except maybe God) will be there so she will be okay.   Am in church now. Numbers about half the normal but mainly parents and their kids have stayed away. The older folk are here (including a 103-year old).




					www.urban75.net
				




Plus Buddy Bradley's response a few posts later.

Plus I think this is relevant too:








						Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
					

Can't see my mother not going over the road to church today.Hopefully no-one else (except maybe God) will be there so she will be okay.   Am in church now. Numbers about half the normal but mainly parents and their kids have stayed away. The older folk are here (including a 103-year old).




					www.urban75.net


----------



## iona (Mar 16, 2020)

Fucking hell campanula, hope that gets sorted for you.

I've got a meeting with CGL this afternoon coz they're taking over contract here from next month, will ask what plans if any they've made for people to continue getting their scripts...


----------



## Wilf (Mar 16, 2020)

editor said:


> I'm sure it's already been posted but it is interesting



There have been more technical responses to this notion before, but my general take is that government doesn't have enough control to operate a sophisticated 'turning the tap on and off' strategy.  At the moment very little is being done to create social distancing, there's panic buying and the rest. But most of all we haven't got a clue about the extent of community transmission because we are not testing for it. Even more so, we are no longer even testing those people who seem to have the virus but don't get as far as a hospital. Similarly, telling the over 70s to self isolate is a blunt instrument, regardless of the impact it will actually have on the over 70s.


----------



## campanula (Mar 16, 2020)

bimble said:


> Totally get why you are panicking but its got to be a priority, getting people the medicines they are dependant on, those places surely would not be closed for virus reasons whilst people are still swanning about going to restaurants etc. even in the European countries that are in full lock down, pharmacies are still open.


 The pharmacist called in sick on Sunday night. There is about half of out script waiting until a pharmacist can be sent over (for an hour between 2-3pm. We are only allowed 3 days worth at a time and everything is 'just on time' ordering meds every week, no stocks... so even if we wait till then, get half what we need, this is going to be an issue. Whilst I was at the pharmacy, at least half a dozen people arrived, most needing urgent prescriptions. I think we are going to see the effects of 40 years of austerity/privatisation. There is no-one picking up the phone at the treatment clinic either. I feel we have been abandonned and am very, very scared.


----------



## Serge Forward (Mar 16, 2020)

Has this been on here yet?I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire | William Hanage


----------



## Serge Forward (Mar 16, 2020)

Or this from Nesrine Malik:
The Great British deference is dangerous in this time of crisis | Nesrine Malik


----------



## Leafster (Mar 16, 2020)

I had to go to the surgery this morning for a routine blood test. I decided to walk as it's only 1 1/2 miles. There was hardly anybody about on foot. In all, I can't have seen more than half a dozen people. I can't ever remember seeing so few cars parked on the road outside the surgery. They'd disabled the touch screen log in and there was "hazard" tape on the floor by the receptionist which I'd been told not to cross in a text beforehand. I had to confirm, yet again, that I was showing no symptoms. The waiting room was empty! The phlebotomist came out and asked me, yet again, if I was showing any symptoms before she allowed me to follow her to the consulting room. She was wearing a mask and gloves. She took the sample and she said it was highly unlikely that I would be able to keep my face to face appointment with the doctor on Friday. Instead, she suggested I might be able to have a phone consultation instead. I appreciate they have to take every precaution but it hadn't hit me just what precautions they might be taking until this morning.


----------



## Raheem (Mar 16, 2020)

I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?


----------



## Supine (Mar 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?



It's happening more and more. Phone consultation and only face to face if the issue warrants it.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?



yeah - my local gp is saying the same thing.


----------



## Big Bertha (Mar 16, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> yeah - my local gp is saying the same thing.


How about non essential dentist appointments?


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 16, 2020)

just want to say - Urban 75 is doing a brilliant job  providing informed information and bullshit busting. Thanks all


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 16, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> yeah - my local gp is saying the same thing.


Mine too.  Big banner on their website, and reception staff quiz you when trying to make an appointment. a number of texts so far about it.   

I had some bloods done recently and the nurse said they were planning to more or less cancel face to face appointments.  Presume you could still get one if it was urgent though.


----------



## Numbers (Mar 16, 2020)

Telephone only in my GP.


----------



## treelover (Mar 16, 2020)

repeat prescription line minimal staff already

your postion in the que is 

15!


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 16, 2020)

is there any informed speculation on weather food supplies are going to be affected If half of the world is in lockdown?


----------



## Raheem (Mar 16, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> is there any informed speculation on weather food supplies are going to be affected If half of the world is in lockdown?


Informed by my understanding of the meaning of the phrase 'half the world is in lockdown', I would speculate that the chances of food supplies being unaffected is low.


----------



## not a trot (Mar 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?



Had a copd revue booked for next Monday, surgery have cancelled.


----------



## elbows (Mar 16, 2020)

The first one yes, I remember linking to either it or a tweet about it.

The 2nd one I dont think but, but I'm glad you mention it since a small bunch of people on the forum have called for just such a deference to authorities and some experts (but not others), much to my disgust.

edi - this post has been moved from elsewhere and no longer has the context to make sense.

the context was:



Serge Forward said:


> Has this been on here yet?I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire | William Hanage



and



Serge Forward said:


> Or this from Nesrine Malik:
> The Great British deference is dangerous in this time of crisis | Nesrine Malik


----------



## campanula (Mar 16, 2020)

Finally got 3 days of script but warned there are 'supply problems' for Thursday. Wondering how quickly I can safely taper without leaving myself vulnerable to corona. My lovely, lovely pharmacist asst. has taken it upon herself to keep is updated...unlike CGL who are still inaccessible. Saw a couple of others on 'supervised' daily pick-up and a number of panicking people who have been unable to get their scripts too. This is terribly worrying since we are barely out of the starting gate. Have confessed to eldest (also the one most able to keep mouth zipped) and am attempting to acquire some extra opioids to get us through what seems to be inevitable and fat-teaching changes.

Also have a shit of a sore throat!


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

So, the U.K. will eventually go on lockdown?


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 16, 2020)

Went for my second chemotherapy session this morning.
I don’t know if anyone on here knows Weston Park hospital in Sheffield, the side entrances were sealed and all patients and visitors had to go through the main entrance. Once in the foyer everyone was questioned as to whether they had felt unwell over the last few days and everyone had to say what they were there for.  All hands had to be sanitised while being observed. Then they let us through.
I was told after my session that my next face to face pre treatment consultation would be done via phone.
I was also told to arrive earlier on the day of my next treatment to have my bloods checked on the day instead of the previous Thursday.
It was also the most empty I have seen it in over thirteen years of visits.


----------



## existentialist (Mar 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?


The surgery group I work for closed both their surgeries to patients, other than pre-screened people with a clinical need to attend (eg INR injections, etc). I think the decisions are still being made on an individual surgery-by-surgery basis, but I suspect there'll be an official declaration at some point.

College is still open, but nobody's under any illusions about how long that situation will prevail for. I am not particularly astonished that there is no central contingency planning for how to deliver teaching during a shutdown...personally, I'm out of the game as far as their "official" Skype for Business offering goes (it won't run on Linux, and it runs like shit on a virtualised Windows instance), so we'll be rolling our own and delivering seminars via Zoom. I shall "steal" my other teaching organisation's account for that...


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

Update: Pubs and clubs aren't being forcibly closed yet.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> I've just had a text saying not to go to the GP surgery under any circumstances! Anyone know if this is a general thing that is happening, or do I have a local issue?



Ive been delivering to GP’s recently and noticed signs on the doors saying if you have flu type symptoms, don’t come in but go home and call 111.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 16, 2020)

editor said:


> Update: Pubs and clubs aren't being forcibly closed yet.


Got to be such a hard decision to make if you're a landlord - you know you're facilitating virus spread by staying open, but you're also likely to go out of business if you close. Rock and a hard place.


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

Fuckface multi millionaire Richard Branson wants his staff to take two month's unpaid leave.  The fucking shit.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

Jeff Bezos recently pledged $10 billion to combatting climate change.

Wonder how much he’s going to pledge to assist his army of workers and contractors during this pandemic?  I suspect the sum will be zero.


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

Here's a twat


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

Americans 









						Americans panic buying guns is the most American response to coronavirus
					

Gun sales are surging across the US as the pandemic grows.




					metro.co.uk


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

Coronavirus might just be the making of us: 9 things to be cheerful about — The Mirror
					

There's reason to worry, and to prepare. But there's always a silver lining if you look hard enough, says Fleet Street Fox




					apple.news
				






> All right, delivery drivers are working like never before, but on the upside you will at least be home to receive your parcel, for once.



Great stuff.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 16, 2020)

I've become ill today. Felt pretty well yesterday, bit of sniffles, same as for weeks. Sore throat this morning, almost dry throat. Runny nose developed this afternoon. Mrs SI and both kids are ill so I suppose it was going to happen, but I'm wondering how ill is ill. Could do with staying off but if I do everyone has to, right? I don't think I've got the bug. No cough, no high temp. Still worried though


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 16, 2020)

I work in central London. Posted this up on Brixton virus thread:


Was in City and West End working today. It had a lot less people in it. Lots of companies are getting people to work at home.

With a few staff in offices. Postroom staff mainly. As well as security guards.

Looks like big companies are keeping small staff at main offices with where possible home working. With stuff being sent by courier to and from main office and private addresses.

This is going to have big knock on effect on those who depend on city and west end workers. Cafes and street food business.

Lot less traffic as well.


----------



## editor (Mar 16, 2020)

More about how it's fucking up the music industry 










						How Coronavirus Is Destroying the Livelihood of Music's Behind-the-Scenes Workforce
					

As the COVID-19 outbreak threatens live music everywhere, crew members, venue workers, and many other employees are struggling to pay their bills




					www.rollingstone.com


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 16, 2020)

Forgot to mention in my above post.
The staff went around the main waiting room in the day case unit removing all the Macmillan pamphlets and locking them in a side room. They then collected all the magazines and periodicals in disposal bags.
IMO I thought this measure in hospital waiting rooms is about forty years too late.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

editor said:


> More about how it's fucking up the music industry
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Interesting article tho sad to hear it relies so much on ‘gig workers’ who will be hit the hardest.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 16, 2020)

Apparently 3 drivers from my old employer have self quarantined now.


----------



## Humberto (Mar 16, 2020)

There needs to be less 'every man for himself' and more looking out for each other. I've seen examples of both. Some people will be fucked if we don't all look to the latter. Stopping anyone going hungry is pretty much the priority. Anyway, I like it round here. A lot of hustle, gang.


----------



## treelover (Mar 17, 2020)

S☼I said:


> I've become ill today. Felt pretty well yesterday, bit of sniffles, same as for weeks. Sore throat this morning, almost dry throat. Runny nose developed this afternoon. Mrs SI and both kids are ill so I suppose it was going to happen, but I'm wondering how ill is ill. Could do with staying off but if I do everyone has to, right? I don't think I've got the bug. No cough, no high temp. Still worried though



one of the things this is exposing, is just how high the level of low grade fevers, bugs chills, etc, is in the UK as people reveal they have them wondering if it is C19, i suespect this is partly due to the way people are forced to go to work or have the macho attitude they can. I have M.E i get those sort of symptoms weekly, tonight i have a sore throat, migraine, have nearly passed out, dizzy, near delerious, the young barman in the pub yesterday had a right hacking cough, was quite unstable, feverish, but i don't think him or me have C19, though i will at some point.


----------



## treelover (Mar 17, 2020)

Humberto said:


> There needs to be less 'every man for himself' and more looking out for each other. I've seen examples of both. Some people will be fucked if we don't all look to the latter. Stopping anyone going hungry is pretty much the priority. Anyway, I like it round here. A lot of hustle, gang.



seeing the best, massive growth in support groups, and the worse, profiteering,  over stockpiling, agression in shops, 

expect the latter to get worse, organised crime wont accept massive losses, etc


----------



## Mation (Mar 17, 2020)

Hmm. I need to remember tomorrow to go and order some more of my meds. Can't really work without them and work is unlikely to be suspended any time soon.


----------



## danny la rouge (Mar 17, 2020)

My brother works for council parks and rec and has been told he and his workmates may be needed for digging graves.


----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

danny la rouge said:


> My brother works for council parks and rec and has been told he and his workmates may be needed for digging graves.


My goodness


----------



## 8ball (Mar 17, 2020)

I had been wondering how the whole funerals thing would work.
You always get a lot of old people coming together, and a few kids and stuff.

Will we see specific funerals advice coming out?  
Will it be "special arrangements" to deal with sheer volume etc.?


----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

danny la rouge , how are you feeling today? You said you had a bit of sniffles a couple of days ago.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 17, 2020)

danny la rouge said:


> My brother works for council parks and rec and has been told he and his workmates may be needed for digging graves.


Has he had backhoe training?


----------



## campanula (Mar 17, 2020)

Christ, yesterday was terrible. Couldn't tell whether I was ill or just missing my meds, daughter ringing hourly (sweetheart has had to stop her from talking to me since I had a massive panic attack - couldn't breathe or stop shaking (again not sure whether just meds. When I finally got them (my script) I couldn't stop being sick so had to use all the injectables (soz folks, I should prolly be doing all this on drug forum).
On the upside, I live in a terrific community (a small council/mixed estate) - my local convenience store has been keeping a supply of stuff not on the shelves and will do deliveries. Have put my name down as a person offering help and we are trying to co-ordinate some sort of central emergency line. D-i-L not going to work (because my youngest has resorted to deception to keep her off work (in a nursery while she is completely immune deficient although has gamma-globulin treatment). Her meds are being delivered on Thursday - 3 months worth!)
I think for a lot if is, some sort of action is the best response - getting help to people, even just visiting and talking through the windows.  May try to do a daily round to check on my elderly neighbours.


----------



## existentialist (Mar 17, 2020)

8ball said:


> I had been wondering how the whole funerals thing would work.
> You always get a lot of old people coming together, and a few kids and stuff.
> 
> Will we see specific funerals advice coming out?
> Will it be "special arrangements" to deal with sheer volume etc.?


There's talk of funerals in crematoria being videocast...


----------



## 8ball (Mar 17, 2020)

existentialist said:


> There's talk of funerals in crematoria being videocast...



My brain did a weird snigger-double-take thing there - couldn't figure out whether you were joking.


----------



## Leafster (Mar 17, 2020)

campanula , pleased to hear you've got your meds sorted out for a while. It's amazing to see the community spirit kicking in. I live on a single-track lane on the edge of a small town and so many of the younger residents have offered to help look after the elderly in our road over the last couple of days.


----------



## danny la rouge (Mar 17, 2020)

little_legs said:


> danny la rouge , how are you feeling today? You said you had a bit of sniffles a couple of days ago.


I’m OK. I’m self-isolated. Initially 7 days. Now extended to 14.  I have cough, headache, sniffles, slight asthma worsening but nothing alarming.  But it’s all pretty mild.


----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

danny la rouge said:


> I’m OK. I’m self-isolated. Initially 7 days. Now extended to 14.  I have cough, headache, sniffles, slight asthma worsening but nothing alarming.  But it’s all pretty mild.


Hopefully the sniffles and aches go away soon. If you need anything, we are here for you.


----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

campanula said:


> Christ, yesterday was terrible. Couldn't tell whether I was ill or just missing my meds, daughter ringing hourly (sweetheart has had to stop her from talking to me since I had a massive panic attack - couldn't breathe or stop shaking (again not sure whether just meds. When I finally got them (my script) I couldn't stop being sick so had to use all the injectables (soz folks, I should prolly be doing all this on drug forum).
> On the upside, I live in a terrific community (a small council/mixed estate) - my local convenience store has been keeping a supply of stuff not on the shelves and will do deliveries. Have put my name down as a person offering help and we are trying to co-ordinate some sort of central emergency line. D-i-L not going to work (because my youngest has resorted to deception to keep her off work (in a nursery while she is completely immune deficient although has gamma-globulin treatment). Her meds are being delivered on Thursday - 3 months worth!)
> I think for a lot if is, some sort of action is the best response - getting help to people, even just visiting and talking through the windows.  May try to do a daily round to check on my elderly neighbours.


Look at this little warrior.


----------



## NoXion (Mar 17, 2020)

Where's the thread in which healthy gits like me can complain about people leaving slight but noticeable traces of that hand sanitiser shite all over the place? There's nothing worse than grabbing a handle or whatever only to find it's coated in a thin smear of the old shite. Makes me fucking gag.


----------



## petee (Mar 17, 2020)

i'm bawlin'









						Split by COVID-19, Man Celebrates 67 Years With Wife Outside Her Nursing Home
					

A Vernon, Connecticut, man celebrated his 67th wedding anniversary outside of his wife’s nursing home in Stafford Springs on Saturday. The couple isn’t allowed to visit each other because of COVID-19. Due to coronavirus concerns, Bob couldn’t go inside the nursing home and be with his wife...




					www.nbcnewyork.com
				




_Due to coronavirus concerns, Bob couldn't go inside the nursing home and be with his wife Nancy, but he didn't let that stop him from celebrating.

Bob brought a sign to the nursing home that said "I've loved you 67 years and still do. Happy Anniversary." _


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 17, 2020)

Just had a bit of a wander around my local town centre. Quite a few people in the pubs and cafes.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 17, 2020)

No surprise here then 









						Amazon: Staff told to work overtime as virus spikes demand
					

Unions say the retailer is putting "profit before safety" as it tells some warehouse staff to work overtime.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 17, 2020)

11:00 receive a text from vet to say one of the dogs vaccinations are due and to ring and make appointment.
11:15 I ring vet to make appointment, I am told by receptionist that due to covid-19 no routine appointments are available until post 20th April.
I say, I’ve just had a text to make appointment, I fear for my dog as your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing.
Receptionist said bear with me.
I say marvellous, the bear didn’t struggle to make an appointment.
Wasted humour, but in on 26th March.
Result.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 17, 2020)

What is happening in Russia?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 17, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What is happening in Russia?



Putin hailed a hero -https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/17/coronavirus-in-russia-the-latest-news-march-17-a69117


----------



## editor (Mar 17, 2020)

British Museum and V&A now closed.


----------



## editor (Mar 17, 2020)

Might help 








						The Social Distancing Festival
					

A site that celebrates the work of artists who have had shows or presentations cancelled due to the need for social distancing caused by Coronavirus (COVID-19)




					www.socialdistancingfestival.com


----------



## spitfire (Mar 17, 2020)

editor said:


> British Museum and V&A now closed.



All IWM sites closed now as well. "Until further notice".


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 17, 2020)

editor said:


> British Museum and V&A now closed.


As is the Science Museum group.


----------



## editor (Mar 17, 2020)

Unsurprisingly  Monday was the biggest day for video chats in history


----------



## editor (Mar 17, 2020)




----------



## two sheds (Mar 17, 2020)

editor said:


>




Love the 1066 and all that quote


----------



## kenny g (Mar 17, 2020)

danny la rouge said:


> My brother works for council parks and rec and has been told he and his workmates may be needed for digging graves.



One of my team is an ex-gravedigger and has said he would be more than happy to go back to help fill in for a while. Claims that apart from the pay it was the best job he had (not sure what it says about what we do!).


----------



## MickiQ (Mar 17, 2020)

Received this email from Dominos today, I have this vision of the guy placing the pizza on the doorstep, ringing the bell and legging it down the drive before I open the door


----------



## DexterTCN (Mar 17, 2020)




----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What is happening in Russia?



As of today:

Number of people tested: 116,061
Number of registered infected: 114
Number of recovered: 5

The state news broadcaster openly says it's a Chinese virus brought to Russia by foreigners FFS. Thousands of Russians stranded abroad are being evacuated.

The government is openly saying stop drinking and quit acting like assholes. Wash yourselves, don't dare going to work if you have flu like symptoms. The young are being urged to regularly check on their relatives and neighbors and make arrangements for them food and medication wise. All this is being done in an amazing shaming way that's only acceptable in Russia. I can't imagine the language being used in Russia being used in BoJo's briefings.

They have not postponed the vote on the constitutional changes scheduled for April 22.


----------



## little_legs (Mar 17, 2020)

Even the Masons now:


> In view of the latest UK government advice on the coronavirus pandemic, the Masons have suspended all lodge and chapter meetings within England and Wales for a period of four months, with immediate effect


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 17, 2020)

If shops where you are have ran out of pasta - go to Ann Summers as they have plenty of penis pasta.









						Ann Summers has an offer on penis-shaped pasta during coronavirus shortages
					

It might be the only penis some of us will be getting during these self-isolation days.




					metro.co.uk


----------



## editor (Mar 18, 2020)

I've had quite a few posts blocked by those insufferably shitehawks facebook 









						Facebook wrongly blocked some links, including coronavirus info
					

Facebook suffered from a massive bug in its News Feed spam filter, causing URLs to legitimate websites including Medium, Buzzfeed, and USA Today to be blocked from being shared as posts or comments. The issue blocked shares of some but not all coronavirus-related content, while some unrelated...




					techcrunch.com


----------



## petee (Mar 18, 2020)

some of that dialogue you can hear right now.


----------



## Cid (Mar 18, 2020)

editor said:


> I've had quite a few posts blocked by those insufferably shitehawks facebook
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Tbh I'd rather their spam filters were catching too much than too little.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 18, 2020)

Girlfriend has been sent home this morning - told you self isolate.

Apparently she walked into office to her desk with a coffee, took a sip then coughed twice to which one of her colleagues looked mortified and looks like grassed her up to her boss.

She’s now off work for 2 weeks on full pay.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 18, 2020)

The weird thing is I had a post blocked on my own Facebook feed that I doubt more than a handful of people would ever see of a moderately humorous local newspaper article. How was I SPAMming myself?


----------



## Numbers (Mar 18, 2020)

One thing I can't fathom with this is having listened to Sir Patrick Vallance y/day talking about if we get away with 20000 deaths in the UK, although horrible would be a good outcome.  There's less than 8000 worldwide deaths at the moment.

I don't mean this to be in any way untoward as we have some very vulnerable people in our family, but I just can't see those figures being reached.  

I hope I'm right.


----------



## little_legs (Mar 18, 2020)

Numbers said:


> One thing I can't fathom with this is having listened to Sir Patrick Vallance y/day talking about if we get away with 20000 deaths in the UK, although horrible would be a good outcome.  There's less than 8000 worldwide deaths at the moment.
> 
> I don't mean this to be in any way untoward as we have some very vulnerable people in our family, but I just can't see those figures being reached.
> 
> I hope I'm right.



That number is based on how Italy's death rate has been growing day by day, and we're in a worse position than they are. He probably also took into accout that both China and Iran have not been disclosing accurate death rates.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Mar 18, 2020)

jusrt started sweating and feeling a bit groggy. on my way home now.sure its nothing but ...


----------



## Fedayn (Mar 18, 2020)

Vomit....


----------



## not-bono-ever (Mar 18, 2020)

peckham iceland scrapping at the closed doors - staff forced to open up to defuse it and stop door from being breached


----------



## The Pale King (Mar 18, 2020)

not-bono-ever said:


> peckham iceland scrapping at the closed doors - staff forced to open up to defuse it and stop door from being breached
> 
> View attachment 202167



There was a queue outside the New Cross one, word was they were opening at midday. Seemed orderly though


----------



## treelover (Mar 18, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> Vomit....




but how much is it?


----------



## treelover (Mar 18, 2020)

not-bono-ever said:


> peckham iceland scrapping at the closed doors - staff forced to open up to defuse it and stop door from being breached
> 
> View attachment 202167



Shopworkers are doing sterling work, GMB and USDAW need to make this clear to wider public.

btw, looks like that young girl has a rifle!


----------



## elbows (Mar 18, 2020)

Testing and virus suppression are not the only areas where the UK lags behind!



Not that I ever place faith in that sort of press release.


----------



## treelover (Mar 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> but how much is it?



ah, going to be free to those who need it, good on them for a change

Is Branson offering anything to anyone yet?


----------



## Cid (Mar 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> Shopworkers are doing sterling work, GMB and USDAW need to make this clear to wider public.
> 
> btw, looks like that young girl has a rifle!



That woman has a boom mic.

(not a boom stick)


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> Is Branson offering anything to anyone yet?



No, but his airline has shoved the begging bowl at the government.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> Is Branson offering anything to anyone yet?


He has offered (told) all his staff the opportunity to take unpaid leave 


Teaboy said:


> No, but his airline has shoved the begging bowl at the government.


Also this 
The cunt


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

In the city of London today. Quite empty.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

Pret is now takeaway only in city of London


----------



## Badgers (Mar 18, 2020)

Not good news from HMP Manchester  









						Strangeways prisoner tests positive for coronavirus
					

It is the first confirmed case of the virus at HMP Manchester




					www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 18, 2020)

elbows said:


> Testing and virus suppression are not the only areas where the UK lags behind!




I tried to persuade my wife she should let me try to get her pregnant earlier, so if the shops run out at least we’ll have fresh milk on tap...  didn’t go down well


----------



## bimble (Mar 18, 2020)

I think that if possible anyone who was planning to spend tonight somewhere else from where they’d like to be locked down in should probably just go to their bunker instead. Rumours are going round that something may come into force tomorrow.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 18, 2020)

bimble said:


> I think that if possible anyone who was planning to spend tonight somewhere else from where they’d like to be locked down in should probably just go to their bunker instead. Rumours are going round that something may come into force tomorrow.



I'm away from home at the moment. Can't really get stranded here. They'll not shut down all travel everywhere in one go surely?

'Rumours going round' is not very helpful tbh. Any reason to think there's a credible source behind this?


----------



## Dandred (Mar 18, 2020)

How does the UK have 104 deaths and South Korea only 84? 

Here in South Korea the govement have been giving adice and infomation from the start of this, are the Tories so inept?


----------



## Badgers (Mar 18, 2020)

Spoke to sister who works in a school. 



> School is still open for all vulnerable, sen and children of health care workers. So that's about 200 (40%) of our kids and 30% of our staff are off sick/isolated.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 18, 2020)

Dandred said:


> How does the UK have 104 deaths and South Korea only 84?
> 
> Here in South Korea the govement have been giving adice and infomation from the start of this, are the Tories so inept?



Looking at the difference of population size that looks about equal.  Don't know relative average age and health of population but that will be a factor.  Unfortunately in the UK we don't really have a particularly healthy population on the whole.


----------



## bimble (Mar 18, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> I'm away from home at the moment. Can't really get stranded here. They'll not shut down all travel everywhere in one go surely?
> 
> 'Rumours going round' is not very helpful tbh. Any reason to think there's a credible source behind this?


I’m sorry. Maybe shouldn’t have passed on unverified stuff like that. I’m sure everyone will be able to get home . Was just thinking about crowd avoidance.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 18, 2020)

bimble said:


> I’m sorry. Maybe shouldn’t have passed on unverified stuff like that. I’m sure everyone will be able to get home . Was just thinking about crowd avoidance.



Unverified or vague, but maybe not both at once eh?


----------



## bimble (Mar 18, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Unverified or vague, but maybe not both at once eh?


Yep my bad.


----------



## A380 (Mar 18, 2020)

No, the army aren’t going to impose a lockdown. With the two standby battalions there aren’t enough anyway.









						No, that's not the British Army preparing for lockdown
					

A number of posts on Facebook and Twitter have went viral (pun intended), all of them share the same misleading image.




					ukdefencejournal.org.uk


----------



## A380 (Mar 18, 2020)

The European model isn’t  to stop everyone goring our. It’s to limit going out to buying food or medicine, going to work if needs be and traveling . The French do love a good form to fill in. I bet none of them ever get looked at.


----------



## grit (Mar 18, 2020)

Dandred said:


> How does the UK have 104 deaths and South Korea only 84?
> 
> Here in South Korea the govement have been giving adice and infomation from the start of this, are the Tories so inept?


 
SK had mass testing in place very very quickly.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 18, 2020)

bimble said:


> I think that if possible anyone who was planning to spend tonight somewhere else from where they’d like to be locked down in should probably just go to their bunker instead. Rumours are going round that something may come into force tomorrow.


Rumours like this one, you mean?


----------



## bimble (Mar 18, 2020)

S☼I said:


> Rumours like this one, you mean?


Yep. Have said sorry already. I was glad to be told because of this feeling that we aren’t getting proper info from where we should be but shouldn’t have spread it around.


----------



## Cid (Mar 18, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Looking at the difference of population size that looks about equal.  Don't know relative average age and health of population but that will be a factor.  Unfortunately in the UK we don't really have a particularly healthy population on the whole.



The difference is that SK had a major outbreak a bit earlier, and yet their death rates are slowing... Just 3 recorded today. Or, to use new cases, the UK has +676 cases today (?, possibly yesterday), SK +93 (this even in the context of SK having a far more extensive testing regime). It's very clear if you find the graphs on worldometers.

Take March 8th as an example; SK had more than 7,313 recorded cases, the UK 278. SK has increased by 1100, UK by more than 2000. Obviously those absolute figures don't look too different, but as percentages that's massive. And remember the UK is effectively only picking up serious cases (and maybe contacts with them?) at the moment, whereas SK has tested more than 270,000 people (UK 828 tests/million, SK 5,776 tests/million).


----------



## editor (Mar 18, 2020)

Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS

























						In photos: Sainsbury’s Brixton Superstore picked clean by panic buyers, 18th March 2020
					

This is the depressing sight of Sainsbury’s Brixton Superstore, with rows and rows of shelves left completely empty after panic buying shoppers grabbed everything in sight.



					www.brixtonbuzz.com


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 18, 2020)

Just found out Amazon are now paying drivers an extra £2 per hour/£18 per day during this pandemic 

But - they’re going to review this at the end of April


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 18, 2020)

editor said:


> Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Much like our local Sains - the only canned food I did manage to get was some smoked oysters that students wouldn’t buy. Not much point in opening to the elderly first thing tomorrow morning if shelves ain’t stocked overnight.


----------



## kenny g (Mar 18, 2020)

editor said:


> Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Saw some creature buy 25 eggs in Waitrose. scum.

she kept trying to bullshit her way out of it as well.


----------



## kenny g (Mar 18, 2020)

US imposes additional sanctions on Iran. FFS.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

editor said:


> Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I must say I find some of the panic buying going on in London a bit scary. It epitomises the everyone for themself mentality. Understandable but a bit scary if this gets worse.

I was in Brixton in my off license having a chat this evening. Sainsbury came up.

Said that in the City of London , now no one is there except a few people, I can get stuff from the Tesco / Sainsbury / Boots  in the City.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 18, 2020)

Gramsci said:


> I must say I find some of the panic buying going on in London a bit scary. It epitomises the everyone for themself mentality. Understandable but a bit scary if this gets worse.
> 
> I was in Brixton in my off license having a chat this evening. Sainsbury came up.
> 
> Said that in the City of London , now no one is there except a few people, I can get stuff from the Tesco / Sainsbury / Boots  in the City.



Is London a ghost town now?


----------



## Numbers (Mar 18, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Is London a ghost town now?


Where I live in Newham is same as ever, apart from McD’s sit down area being closed off.


----------



## Cid (Mar 18, 2020)

I think Gramsci meant The City specifically. Not much residential, and most of the offices there are going to be financial services and the like, probably many now working from home.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

I was chatting to my friend who runs the off license in Brixton about this government help. 

He is still open but his takings have gone down 40% on weekend when Brixton, entertainment centre ,  is busy.

The government scheme to support small business has not been clarified yet. Also it will be administered by local Councils.

He is concerned by the time the bureaucracy gets round to organising it he will find it hard to survive. 

Looks to me the measures the government is putting forward are to timid.

Basically the government needs to underwrite all peoples wages and all small business. 

At moment a lot of smalll business and precarious workers are potentially going to go under. 

So the whole market based ethic is going to have to be put on hold if people are expected to stop work for several months.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Is London a ghost town now?



City of London is a ghost town. 

City is in the centre of London.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 18, 2020)

Gramsci said:


> I was chatting to my friend who runs the off license in Brixton about this government help.
> 
> He is still open but his takings have gone down 40% on weekend when Brixton, entertainment centre ,  is busy.
> 
> ...



Are you still working mate?


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

Cid said:


> I think Gramsci meant The City specifically. Not much residential, and most of the offices there are going to be financial services and the like, probably many now working from home.



This is what is happening.

Im surprised how quickly the big business in the City have organised this. The big legal firms and auditing firms. They are paying people to stay at home.

Whole loads of equipment has been moved out to peoples homes. A massive logistical effort in short space of time.

My delivery firm has been busy this week doing that.

This has all been done without any direction from Boris/ government.

I notice two things in London. Local people starting to automously organsising local support groups and big capitalist business organising home working on a large scale whilst still paying the employees.

So the State response in comparison has been pitiful imo.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Are you still working mate?



Just. Been busy all day. But im getting seriously worried now about next weeks.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 18, 2020)

This was my route today - normally a route of this size would take my up to around 6.30pm to complete with a 40min drive home - today I completed route at 5.10pm and home by 5.45pm due to the coronavirus majority of people were home and the roads were clear.  Felt surreal at times.


----------



## Azrael (Mar 18, 2020)

Cid said:


> The difference is that SK had a major outbreak a bit earlier, and yet their death rates are slowing... Just 3 recorded today. Or, to use new cases, the UK has +676 cases today (?, possibly yesterday), SK +93 (this even in the context of SK having a far more extensive testing regime). It's very clear if you find the graphs on worldometers.
> 
> Take March 8th as an example; SK had more than 7,313 recorded cases, the UK 278. SK has increased by 1100, UK by more than 2000. Obviously those absolute figures don't look too different, but as percentages that's massive. And remember the UK is effectively only picking up serious cases (and maybe contacts with them?) at the moment, whereas SK has tested more than 270,000 people (UK 828 tests/million, SK 5,776 tests/million).


Hope we fast get some clarity about how S.K.'s kept her fatalities so low. There's demographic factors -- more infections among younger people and women -- but they don't appear to explain it all. Are they starting supportive treatment earlier? Is there something in their antiviral cocktail? (Maybe administering it earlier to slow viral replication.) Is it a milder strain? Or something else?


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 18, 2020)

On a lighter note. Just been to my local shop in Loughborough junction (London). They have managed to get some toilet rolls. 😂


----------



## Badgers (Mar 18, 2020)

Gramsci said:


> On a lighter note. Just been to my local shop in Loughborough junction (London). They have managed to get some toilet rolls. 😂View attachment 202223


I got that as a present recently. It is awful bog roll but satisfying regardless.


----------



## elbows (Mar 18, 2020)

Azrael said:


> Hope we fast get some clarity about how S.K.'s kept her fatalities so low. There's demographic factors -- more infections among younger people and women -- but they don't appear to explain it all. Are they starting supportive treatment earlier? Is there something in their antiviral cocktail? (Maybe administering it earlier to slow viral replication.) Is it a milder strain? Or something else?



Yeah no current way for me to know if any of those are factors.

A few other possibilities:

Due to their very different testing & contract tracing regime, their total number of cases may be much, much closer to the actual real number of cases than ours.

If you can avoid spread of the disease in hospitals and other institutional settings it can make a notable different to the number of deaths, and these could really affect the statistics even more obviously early in the outbreak, if for example a lot of the first cases you find are a result of an outbreak that affects people in a care home, a big hospital-related cluster etc.

In this case that latter point so far applies more obviously to South Korea than the UK, making the low number of South Korea deaths even more remarkable. I've found it very hard to keep up with news regarding clusters in different countries recently, which is bad because institutional outbreaks can be a big factor that changes the burden. But at the point where I lost touch with the full South Korea story around 25th Feb, 7 out of the 10 deaths they had recorded at the time were from an outbreak in the mental health ward of a hospital.

And when it comes to the UK on this point, I havent seen much talk of institutional outbreaks at all yet - some hints here and there, but I get the idea I would have to read a lot of local press and read between lines to pick up on these. That might change, eg we have started to hear about individual prisoner/prison officer cases, there is always the fear that one of those will turn into something far more. As for hospitals, I dont feel like we are being provide with much of a picture really. Same with care homes. I dont know what to expect in regards of future reporting on such things.


----------



## Cid (Mar 18, 2020)

Azrael said:


> Hope we fast get some clarity about how S.K.'s kept her fatalities so low. There's demographic factors -- more infections among younger people and women -- but they don't appear to explain it all. Are they starting supportive treatment earlier? Is there something in their antiviral cocktail? (Maybe administering it earlier to slow viral replication.) Is it a milder strain? Or something else?



Tbh I think a major component of it is just testing. Many published figures are crude mortality rates, so just deaths/number of people tested positive. That figure is essentially meaningless without a lot of interpretation.


----------



## elbows (Mar 18, 2020)

So following on from my previous thoughts, in order to understand the burden other countries have faced, we need to understand not just something about the timing of their epidemics, their testing regimes, timing of lockdowns, societal and behavioural differences, demographics, state surveillance etc, but we also need to understand their institutions. For example I know absolutely nothing about care homes in South Korea. And I dont know what their protocols are for testing healthcare workers. These things can be big difference makers.


----------



## Dandred (Mar 19, 2020)

South Korean supermarkets.


----------



## fishfinger (Mar 19, 2020)

Dandred said:


> South Korean supermarkets.
> View attachment 202252View attachment 202252View attachment 202253View attachment 202254View attachment 202252View attachment 202253View attachment 202255View attachment 202252View attachment 202253View attachment 202254


So it's the South Koreans who've been stockpiling all our toilet paper!


----------



## Supine (Mar 19, 2020)

bimble said:


> I think that if possible anyone who was planning to spend tonight somewhere else from where they’d like to be locked down in should probably just go to their bunker instead. Rumours are going round that something may come into force tomorrow.



I'm 230 Miles away from home


----------



## bimble (Mar 19, 2020)

Supine said:


> I'm 230 Miles away from home


Sorry for adding to the panic! I really am . I think it’s just London first. And that there will be announcement today.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 19, 2020)

In Brittany they're getting annoyed at wealthy Parisians retreating to their second homes.
But even the locals aren't allowed on the beach...









						Finistère. Coronavirus : des promeneurs verbalisés sur les plages
					

Mardi 17 mars, à la suite des annonces du président de la République pour lutter contre le Covid-19, les gendarmes ont observé « une très grande fréquentation des plages finistériennes ». Or, ces balades sur la plage ou activités nautiques n’entrent pas dans le champ des exceptions au...




					www.ouest-france.fr


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 19, 2020)

It seems you are allowed to walk the dog or go for a bike ride in France, but you have to sign a document.









						Covid-19 : Déplacements internationaux
					






					mobile.interieur.gouv.fr


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 19, 2020)

Or perhaps not ..









						[Coronavirus] La Ministre des Sports le précise, le cyclisme interdit en extérieur
					

Suite, ou plutôt précision suite à mon article d'hier qui indiquait que le confinement impliquait de ne plus sortir faire du vélo. Promis, les prochains articles seront orientés




					www.matosvelo.fr


----------



## bimble (Mar 19, 2020)

i enjoyed this little snippet about Italy gentlegreen . The dogs are tired but helping.


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 19, 2020)

Not a great idea if dogs can pass the infection between people bimble.  Not sure if that is the case.


----------



## bimble (Mar 19, 2020)

I thought that one of the bits of good news recently was that dogs cant get it?


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

bimble said:


> I thought that one of the bits of good news recently was that dogs cant get it?


I think they can transmit it from their fur. Only if touching an infected person. Or something an infected person has touched. Or another dog that has been in contact. 

Probably fine


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Looks desperate.









						How London's supermarkets have become the frontline of the coronavirus — Evening Standard
					

“If you want loo roll, come and queue at 4.30am for our opening at 5am.” This was the advice of the store manager at a Tesco Extra superstore in north London yesterday morning as anxious customers came to load up on essential items — and left empty-handed.




					apple.news
				




My gf bought some essentials for her brother who is self quarantining as he is high risk with asthma- drove an hour to his house yesterday with pasta, loo rolls, milk etc - left them in his shed for him to collect after she left.


----------



## killer b (Mar 19, 2020)

Gramsci said:


> I must say I find some of the panic buying going on in London a bit scary. It epitomises the everyone for themself mentality.


It's difficult to know what else people are supposed to do - there's an expectation that at any moment we need to be prepared to stay indoors for 14 days: lots of people - if they're anything like me - have small kitchens and not a lot of storage space, and have typically only food for a few days in at any one time. Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 19, 2020)

I want to see pictures of shelves of food people haven't panic bought in shops where the pasta, crap-wrap etc has been locusted


----------



## magneze (Mar 19, 2020)

There's lots of mushrooms. Which is great, I really like mushrooms. 🍄


----------



## killer b (Mar 19, 2020)

There's no risotto rice in my local supermarket, which is annoying. plenty of paella rice though - is there much difference?


----------



## kebabking (Mar 19, 2020)

My neighbour reports that at Sainsbury's the panic buyers have left all the fresh salmon and cleared all the meat. Bramley apples aren't popular either, but Bananas are.

I had scrambled egg and smoked salmon on toast for breakfast. And excellent it was too...


----------



## bimble (Mar 19, 2020)

S☼I said:


> I want to see pictures of shelves of food people haven't panic bought in shops where the pasta, crap-wrap etc has been locusted


My sister this morning sent me lots f photos of totally empty shelves and then this, said it was the only thing left in the tinned section.


----------



## platinumsage (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> It's difficult to know what else people are supposed to do - there's an expectation that at any moment we need to be prepared to stay indoors for 14 days: lots of people - if they're anything like me - have small kitchens and not a lot of storage space, and have typically only food for a few days in at any one time. Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?



Add to that simply buying food for meals that would otherwise have been had at restaurants or at work. Also all the toilet roll used in closed workplaces that will now have to be purchased from supermarkets.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> It's difficult to know what else people are supposed to do - there's an expectation that at any moment we need to be prepared to stay indoors for 14 days: lots of people - if they're anything like me - have small kitchens and not a lot of storage space, and have typically only food for a few days in at any one time. Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?



When the supermarkets run dry, McDonalds and Greggs will save us.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 19, 2020)

This morning, the massive car park delivery drivers wait at till they get the group text to head to Amazon depot is absolutely rammed - understandable I guess as this car park is surrounded by a Lidl, Greggs, The food warehouse (Iceland), Home Bargins and a McDonalds.


----------



## planetgeli (Mar 19, 2020)

Panic over. Postman just shoved my weed through the letterbox. SD, signed for. Except he didn’t bother waiting for my signature.


----------



## killer b (Mar 19, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Add to that simply buying food for meals that would otherwise have been had at restaurants or at work. Also all the toilet roll used in closed workplaces that will now have to be purchased from supermarkets.


Yeah, absolutely - it's a total reorganisation of the way we shop, eat and live and everyone is having to do it at the same time under extreme pressure. I think we should give each other a break.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 19, 2020)

Supermarkets round my way (SW London) are baron mess for most items.  Perishables such as fruit and veg are reasonably easy to come by and then the local convenience stores are a gold mine for non-perishables.  Basically any shop without a car park.  Its an opportunity to get creative in the kitchen for sure.


----------



## treelover (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> It's difficult to know what else people are supposed to do - there's an expectation that at any moment we need to be prepared to stay indoors for 14 days: lots of people - if they're anything like me - have small kitchens and not a lot of storage space, and have typically only food for a few days in at any one time. Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?



yes, but many are pushing in on the new one hour for elderly and vulnerable shopping period in shops.


----------



## killer b (Mar 19, 2020)

treelover said:


> yes, but many are pushing in on the new one hour for elderly and vulnerable shopping period in shops.


Is it actually 'many' though, or is it one or two pricks being amplified by pitchfork social media?


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?


Not selfishly buying a year's supply of pasta and toilet paper, leaving none for others would be a start.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 19, 2020)

Weirdly I was spotted the other day by the guy I did the Bordeaux exchange with 45 years ago - I'd been quietly "stalking" him on Facebook.
He's on the road to the country from Paris and we're going to Skype later ... it'll be interesting to get the French perspective.

I'd better get familiar with his music ... 







__





						Pierre Dorenlot on Amazon Music
					

Check out Pierre Dorenlot on Amazon Music. Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.



					www.amazon.com


----------



## killer b (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> Not selfishly buying a year's supply of pasta and toilet paper, leaving none for others would be a start.


is that what's happening? How much pasta is a year's supply?


----------



## Cid (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> There's no risotto rice in my local supermarket, which is annoying. plenty of paella rice though - is there much difference?



Not much, no.


----------



## treelover (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> Is it actually 'many' though, or is it one or two pricks being amplified by pitchfork social media?



Sky news just showed it in london, big crowds there, plenty under 40


----------



## Cid (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> is that what's happening? How much pasta is a year's supply?



Yeah, I mean you don’t have to do much to disrupt a supply line that is usually based on the tightest margins you can get away with.


----------



## Cid (Mar 19, 2020)

treelover said:


> Sky news just showed it in london, big crowds there, plenty under 40



Oh, well, if Sky news are showing it...


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> is that what's happening? How much pasta is a year's supply?


There's plenty of reports of people going away with ridiculous amounts of essentials, way more than they could ever consume in a month or even two.









						Brit shopper mugged for his toilet roll amid stockpiling panic over coronavirus
					

Dinendra, 56, said he was left 'shaking' after someone came up behind him and snatched one of the loo rolls he had just purchased from Savers in North London




					www.mirror.co.uk
				




This is quite interesting 









						Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying
					

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, people are flocking to supermarkets worldwide – but are they simply preparing, or irrationally panicking?




					www.bbc.com


----------



## Numbers (Mar 19, 2020)

Local CoOp and Morrison’s fast running out of most things, was in Morrison’s earlier and it was mad.  

Even local shops full.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

Bins emptied on schedule


----------



## lizzieloo (Mar 19, 2020)

MrCurry said:


> Not a great idea if dogs can pass the infection between people bimble.  Not sure if that is the case.



The other day Mr loo and myself both were supposed to be going to a meeting a 2 hour drive away, my in-laws love having our dog so that was the plan. I was going to bath her first because I was worried about them (late 70s).

The meeting was called off. 

The dog (late 110s gets out of having a bath)


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 19, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Local CoOp and Morrison’s fast running out of most things, was in Morrison’s earlier and it was mad.
> 
> Even local shops full.



Popped to our local Sainsbury’s again to see if I could get what I couldn’t yesterday - even fuckin worse!! Though I did manage to bag 3 onions. Some auld fella in a right old state


----------



## Numbers (Mar 19, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Popped to our local Sainsbury’s again to see if I could get what I couldn’t yesterday - even fuckin worse!! Though I did manage to bag 3 onions. Some auld fella in a right old state


As a complete aside.  I already finished one of the macaroni cheese tins, couldn’t resist.   None left there today so down to the 1.


----------



## Serge Forward (Mar 19, 2020)

Comment from the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) on the Coronavirus pandemic, 19 March 2020. Coronavirus and the ill health of capitalism


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 19, 2020)

My husband took these photos today.
Supermarkets/ Public transport in Krakow


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

FabricLiveBaby! said:


> My husband took these photos today.
> Supermarkets/ Public transport in Krakow


I want to be at that meat counter


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson is late then

The Queen has helped by running away and making a paragraph statement saying something about hard times for us all.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

Italy deaths overtake China 
Bank of England cuts rates to paper over cracks 

Suddenly 16 minutes late here is our disgraced Prime Minister Johnson.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

I am disgusted at this


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 19, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I am disgusted at this


What? I can't be arsed to watch it but I'm curious lol


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 19, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I am disgusted at this



Is he drunk?  His normal go to when going gets difficult is to hide in a bottle.


----------



## bellaozzydog (Mar 19, 2020)

Boris says fuck all and is asked biff questions by his friends Laura, Beth and Peston 

who is asking the proper fucking questions


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

For fuck's sake. Fuck the airlines. 



> Budget airline EasyJet has asked pilots and cabin crew to agree to sweeping changes in their terms and conditions, as part of its response to coronavirus.
> 
> Among the proposed changes are a freeze on planned pay rises and a requirement to take three months of unpaid leave.
> 
> ...











						Coronavirus: EasyJet staff may no longer be given food on shifts
					

The airline wants pilots and cabin crew to accept sweeping changes to their terms and conditions.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## magneze (Mar 19, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I am disgusted at this


Perhaps the government think they've done enough.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Is he drunk?  His normal go to when going gets difficult is to hide in a bottle.


He seems to be slurring a bit. Keeps switching between grinning/leering and trying to look concerned.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

magneze said:


> Perhaps the government think they've done enough.


Social cleansing in action


----------



## Numbers (Mar 19, 2020)

‘Shoppers... please be reasonable’

Ffs, bit late for that.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

S☼I said:


> What? I can't be arsed to watch it but I'm curious lol


Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson has said nothing. Just 'urged' people to do better and praised everyone for their efforts. 

Nothing else


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 19, 2020)

i liked him wittering about pregnancy tests and tailing off


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

He w w w wants to errrr Get On With It 

Sounds like another farce statement


----------



## Badgers (Mar 19, 2020)

Come on snipers


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 19, 2020)

Badgers said:


> He seems to be slurring a bit. Keeps switching between grinning/leering and trying to look concerned.



Not surprised.  Would also explain why he was late.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 19, 2020)

he is deffo pissed


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 19, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> he is deffo pissed


Churchillian


----------



## danny la rouge (Mar 19, 2020)

Badgers said:


> The Queen has helped by running away and making a paragraph statement saying something about hard times for us all.


I interpreted it as her offering to collect my shopping and prescriptions. That’s right, no?


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 19, 2020)

I'm hearing that the school I clean will remain open for keyworkers children and that includes during the holiday. So we'll still be going in as o/t at time and a half. This plague could turn out to be an earner rodney.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> Brixton. Stripped clean by panic buying vultures, FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...




It’s hardly a superstore! Footfall in that Sainsbury is very high, lots of commuters in the surrounding area with fewer corner shops than other places. Probably everyone who lives on Leander Road will pass that Sainsbury’s as they go home. There’s no other shop beyond Iceland they can shop in on that route.

I’m not saying it’s okay (it isn’t, it’s shit) but it’s an inaccurate telling of the story in that link.


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It’s hardly a superstore! Footfall in that Sainsbury is very high, lots of commuters in the surrounding area with fewer corner shops than other places. Probably everyone who lives on Leander Road will pass that Sainsbury’s as they go home. There’s no other shop beyond Iceland they can shop in on that route.
> 
> I’m not saying it’s okay (it isn’t, it’s shit) but it’s an inaccurate telling of the story in that link.


Sainsbury's describes the store as a superstore and I'm not sure how it's an 'inaccurate' telling of the story either - the place has a car park so facilitates bulk buying.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 19, 2020)

killer b said:


> It's difficult to know what else people are supposed to do - there's an expectation that at any moment we need to be prepared to stay indoors for 14 days: lots of people - if they're anything like me - have small kitchens and not a lot of storage space, and have typically only food for a few days in at any one time. Millions of people having to increase their stocks of food from 2-3 to 14 days is inevitably going to cause problems with supply chains - but what else would you have them do?




Also loads of people are buying for people who are self isolating or can’t get out for one reason or another.

Hoarding and over-buying is happening for sure, but I’ve not seen much of it. I’ve  seen many more people out in shops, and some with stacks of stuff (like 12paxks if instant noodles for eg)  but I’ve not seen anyone with car loads of stuff. The other day in Tesco it was super busy but everyone had baskets not trolleys. That might be because I live in a busy inner city area where most people use public transport or walk.

Brixton Market was bonkers today, super busy and a horrible feeling of edgy panic. The phone shop,and WHSmith were empty, Nour was heaving. I couldn’t hack it and left without buying my cashew nuts. Another woman fled alongside me. We felt like escapees.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> Sainsbury's describes the store as a superstore and I'm not sure how it's an 'inaccurate' telling of the story either - the place has a car park so facilitates bulk buying.




Really? Then I don’t know what a superstore is. 

I’ve shopped there twice this week and neither time did I see people bulk buying. I’m not saying it’s not happening because I know it definitely is happening. But I don’t think most people are doing it, I think most people are doing Christmas level stock ups, with more people doing it than would be around for Christmas (no one is travelling elsewhere but the rich) and the shops were not geared up for heavy stock-up shopping when it started.


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Really? Then I don’t know what a superstore is.


From their own site:



And you may not have seen it yourself but shelves don't get stripped bare without people taking vastly more than they need.


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

And as posted in the Brixton forum, Iceland has been pretty much stripped to the bone. 
























						In photos: Brixton panic buying – Iceland stripped clean, low stocks in Marks & Spencer, 19th March 2020
					

These were the scenes in Brixton half an hour ago, with the busy Iceland supermarket pretty much picked completely clean, and Marks & Spencer showing many empty shelves:



					www.brixtonbuzz.com


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

Here's a depressing read 









						We’re not going back to normal
					

Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.




					www.technologyreview.com


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 19, 2020)

Blimey editor I wasn’t saying it doesn’t happen. I actually said it does happen. My own corner shop has been stripped. I’ve been bitching about it on Facebook for days. I was just sharing my own perspective of my own observation of my own experience. I’m saying that not everyone who’s in the shops is behaving like a locust. I’m not, I assume you’re not, the people I saw with only one basket aren’t.

You’re right, it’s happening and it’s shit. I’m not arguing with you. I’ve also taken photos like those and stood there in the aisles shaking my head in bewilderment, I’ve also had strange stressy conversations with shelf stackers and till operatives.

I’m saying it’s complex. It’s not _only_ bulk buying that’s making this situation.


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Blimey editor I wasn’t saying it doesn’t happen. I actually said it does happen. My own corner shop has been stripped. I’ve been bitching about it on Facebook for days. I was just sharing my own perspective of my own observation of my own experience. I’m saying that not everyone who’s in the shops is behaving like a locust. I’m not, I assume you’re not, the people I saw with only one basket aren’t.
> 
> You’re right, it’s happening and it’s shit. I’m not arguing with you. I’ve also taken photos like those and stood there in the aisles shaking my head in bewilderment, I’ve also had strange stressy conversations with shelf stackers and till operatives.
> 
> I’m saying it’s complex. It’s not _only_ bulk buying that’s making this situation.


I'm so fucking good that when I saw just two packets of pasta left, I only took one!

*shines halo

Meanwhile...


----------



## elbows (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> And you may not have seen it yourself but shelves don't get stripped bare without people taking vastly more than they need.



Yes they can be stripped bare without people taking more than they think they need. Because peoples perceptions of what they need changes at a time like this, and that in itself is enough to upset the balance between supply and demand.

Of course this is not a good thing either, perceptions can vary from reality. Shortages tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, people perceive that they need to stock up precisely because empty shelves create a perception of insecurity of supply, and so an ugly loop is created, even if there are no shortages earlier in the supply chain.


----------



## editor (Mar 19, 2020)

elbows said:


> Shortages tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, people perceive that they need to stock up precisely because empty shelves create a perception of insecurity of supply, and go an ugly loop is created, even if there are no shortages earlier in the supply chain.


Well, yes, we're well into that phase now. The bogroll frenzy still baffles me.


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 19, 2020)

A close friend of mine lost her dad to a long illness over the weekend.
The funeral director has told them that any wake or get together following the funeral will have to take place in the family home due to the usual pubs being off limits due to Covid-19.
I haven’t heard this anywhere else, but saw the news earlier that the CofE is limiting weddings to five guests.
I expect a lot of family celebrations and memorial services are going to be put on hold for a while.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 19, 2020)

So Jet2 have now cancelled all flights in April which means our holiday can’t go ahead but apparently Jet2 have stopped giving refunds else they will collapse as a company.

Travel agent we booked thru has been trying to get us to change dates but we can’t due to the circumstances - travel agent said they’d get back to us, but we’ve asked for a refund.

We paid for the holiday on credit card, so hoping we get our money back.


----------



## treelover (Mar 19, 2020)

awful that, especially with you working your socks off at the moment.


----------



## Sue (Mar 19, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Is London a ghost town now?


Not where I live (Hackney). Popped out earlier and as busy as usual (which is v busy). Only difference was a noticeable number of people were wearing masks.


----------



## kenny g (Mar 19, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> So Jet2 have now cancelled all flights in April which means our holiday can’t go ahead but apparently Jet2 have stopped giving refunds else they will collapse as a company.
> 
> Travel agent we booked thru has been trying to get us to change dates but we can’t due to the circumstances - travel agent said they’d get back to us, but we’ve asked for a refund.
> 
> We paid for the holiday on credit card, so hoping we get our money back.


section 75 of the consumer credit act. Talk to the CC company. I am facing similar hell shortly. Good luck and it is gutting.


----------



## Smangus (Mar 19, 2020)

I always book holidays  by CC as an extra insurance, you should get you money back from the CC company.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 19, 2020)

I've started Skyping the French guy I did an exchange with 45 years ago and he's escaped Paris and is at a shared family home in the South and he's convinced he can honestly fill out the online "attestation" and walk the half mile to the beach without incurring a 135 EU fine ...

... mind you this particular place isn't actually the Riviera - so perhaps he can get away with it there ...

EDIT :-

Blimey I hope he doesn't read this :-



			https://www.facebook.com/groups/306417682846527/
		


The locals are not keen on Parisian refugees and the law is being laid-down.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 19, 2020)

I dont think many air lines or holiday tour operators are going to be still standing when all this is over. And i think getting refunds on holidays we booked will be the least of our worries.


----------



## DexterTCN (Mar 19, 2020)

Things are moving so fast it's entirely possible that this has already been posted multiple times....this is what it does and why it's so dangerous (that we know, so far)


----------



## xes (Mar 19, 2020)

editor said:


> Well, yes, we're well into that phase now. The bogroll frenzy still baffles me.
> 
> View attachment 202383


I think it can be used as a benchmark for future reference that the shit is about to hit the fan. The bogroll factor.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 19, 2020)

My neighbour told me to go to the doctors because I'm coughing (and have been for over a week now...  I get a cough every spring because of allergies and general shit no tonsil protection).

I tired to tell her i HAVEN'T LEFT THE HOUSE FOR 5 DAYS.
Not good enough.

Woman's an idiot I swear.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 19, 2020)

Viruses always affect my lungs first. about a year go I cracked a rib because I was coughing so much.  Every year I take two wekes off because I consisgtently end up with a lung infection and lose my voice.

Fuck you next door lady. _if_ there's any chance I got a disease I'm not going to any vulnerable doctors office. I'm staying the fuck at home.

K thaqnx.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 19, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Blimey editor I wasn’t saying it doesn’t happen. I actually said it does happen. My own corner shop has been stripped. I’ve been bitching about it on Facebook for days. I was just sharing my own perspective of my own observation of my own experience. I’m saying that not everyone who’s in the shops is behaving like a locust. I’m not, I assume you’re not, the people I saw with only one basket aren’t.
> 
> You’re right, it’s happening and it’s shit. I’m not arguing with you. I’ve also taken photos like those and stood there in the aisles shaking my head in bewilderment, I’ve also had strange stressy conversations with shelf stackers and till operatives.
> 
> I’m saying it’s complex. It’s not _only_ bulk buying that’s making this situation.



I also live in Brixton.

I don't understand what your issue is with the @Editors article.

People on Brixton forum have been complaining about shelves be stripped bare.

One of my workmates dropped into his local supermarket to buy a few things today. ( North London) Told me the poor cashiers were trying to tell people to they coiuld only have two packs of rice/ pasta. He said he felt sorry for the cashiers as they were getting a lot of angry people arguing with them. He thought it might kick off

He also told me his relative outside London was findiing it difficult to get powdered milk for her baby. Apparently someonw has been going around buying all local supplies and selling them on EBay at inflated prices.

He thought the government should step in and outlaw profiterring.

At moment I cannot get toilet rolls anywhere.

As Im one of those workers who has been moving people stuff out of the City in past week Ive "requisitioned" some from the now empty office blocks I visit

The situation is not that complex.

People are panicking.

The problem is that the weakest get pushed to back of queue..

In Brixton Iceland and a few other stores are now only letting retired people in the morning. As this vulnerable group is liable to get pushed out of the way at other times.


----------



## Gramsci (Mar 19, 2020)

Up in the City of London today. The couriers in London have been working hard this week helping to move people out to homeworking. Just finished another ten and a half hours. 

Amazingly looks like closing down the City has been successful. Its all done to the hard work of the couriers / delivery people in London. They have been working flat out.

My partner teaches in North London and says the tube is empty in mornings now.

So its worked. 

What concerns me is that soon the couriers / delivery people will be out of a job soon. There has been little in news of the logistical feat and hard work of ordinary people that has gone into moving people out to home working.

Mayor Khan says we should all work at home. 

Me and my workmates can't. So dont know how we are going to survive.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

Gramsci said:


> I also live in Brixton.
> 
> I don't understand what your issue is with the @Editors article.
> 
> ...




I don't have a problem with the article


----------



## RD2003 (Mar 20, 2020)

editor said:


> Here's a depressing read
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Cheer up. It might mean that the collapse of capitalism has actually begun at last, just as most of us wanted.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 20, 2020)

Hopefully they will come up with a quicker and cheaper method than PCR of spotting virus particles - perhaps routine screening of populations, spotting virus mutations .. vaccines, exploit-preventing drugs ...
It's like the early days of computer viruses...

Perhaps animal eating may start to lose its appeal at an even faster rate than it currently is...

It's making me a bit curious about virus evolution ...

Viruses ironically will also save us in these days of antibiotic resistance... I have a work client working on the mechanisms used by virii to attack bacteria ... the Russians used to be keen on using actual bacteriophages ...

In my case I have to stop rubbing my eyes and picking my nose*- and lose the mild phobia of intense handwashing that used to set my teeth on edge every time I watched MASH...

* I pick my nose a lot less than I did and replaced it not with netipot woo, but simply routinely snorting handfuls of cold water when I visited the washroom ... that is also problematic and perhaps helps to explain my increasing frequency of lurgification...


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 20, 2020)

RD2003 said:


> Cheer up. It might mean that the collapse of capitalism has actually begun at last, just as most of us wanted.



I don't know about wanted, more like 'accepted was inevitable'. If capitalism did fall apart before it fucked the planet up completely, that might be advantageous. The collapse itself was never going to be a fun time though. More likely a humanitarian catastrophe beyond anything seen since the depopulation of the Americas.


----------



## xes (Mar 20, 2020)

Gave 2 dust masks to the ladies in the bakery this morning. They gave me free food! Bartering has started


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 20, 2020)

Found out today that a husband's work colleague went into work THE DAY AFTER running a fever.

It's always the stupid fucking English in Krakow that fuck things up for everyone. Now I gotta not leave the house for two weeks after doing everything right. What an absolute cunt.

Then there's this bellend. Who my best friend here had the pleasure of living with last year. Proper nasty pick up artist type dude, shagging different women every day, sometimes 2 a day.  Putting his used condoms in the kitchen bin so his conquests wouldn't get wind.

Anyway, he left Krakow after getting a reputation and moved to fucking Italy, and then as Italy went on lock down he decided that actually, he was very fucking special. To fucking special to be locked down and FLEW to Krakow to continue his pussy exploitation and then got locked down here.

Honestly. What is is about the culture that makes too many people so reckless and irresponsible? It's fucking embarrassing being associated with these types.

I'm so pissed off with them.









						Harborough man trapped in Poland after country sealed its borders due to coronavirus
					

“I must be the unluckiest bloke in Europe," says Brad Williams who travelled from Italy - only to get stuck in Krakow.




					www.harboroughmail.co.uk


----------



## danny la rouge (Mar 20, 2020)

Shower of utter cunts.  If you are looking for something to do, Britannia Hotels deserve your ire.









						Coronavirus: Hotel made staff homeless in 'admin error'
					

More than a dozen staff at a Highland hotel were sacked and asked to leave staff accommodation.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 20, 2020)

I wonder if constant bacterial infections are defence against viral ones.
No trace of the moderate bronchitis I had 2 weeks ago, just need to spit a couple of times a day ..but I'm moderately snotty again - not streaming or anything .. thinking about it I always have a fairly healthy mucus production in the winter - most days when cycling home when I stop at the lights half way I have to clear my nose - but watery ..

/TMI


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 20, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> I wonder if constant bacterial infections are defence against viral ones.
> No trace of the moderate bronchitis I had 2 weeks ago, just need to spit a couple of times a day ..but I'm moderately snotty again - not streaming or anything .. thinking about it I always have a fairly healthy mucus production in the winter - most days when cycling home when I stop at the lights half way I have to clear my nose - but watery ..
> 
> /TMI


I've no idea but for some reason I've been quite scared of the idea of getting C19 while I've got this chesty cold. The three other humans in the house will be home for the foreseeable future from today and I'm (probably irrationally) terrified one of them is bringing the bug home with them.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 20, 2020)

FabricLiveBaby! said:


> Found out today that a husband's work colleague went into work THE DAY AFTER running a fever.
> 
> It's always the stupid fucking English in Krakow that fuck things up for everyone. Now I gotta not leave the house for two weeks after doing everything right. What an absolute cunt.
> 
> ...


I think there is a strong streak of "I won't do as I'm told" in British culture. Even if what you're being told to do is the right thing to do.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 20, 2020)

S☼I said:


> I've no idea but for some reason I've been quite scared of the idea of getting C19 while I've got this chesty cold. The three other humans in the house will be home for the foreseeable future from today and I'm (probably irrationally) terrified one of them is bringing the bug home with them.


Me too - it was the first time in decades probably that I had a whistly cough - not full-on flu, but bad enough - and I actually had the jab last November ..
I'm still in my late 50s for another month or so, and I'm only _*technically *_diabetic ... so no being sent home from work ...

If they discovered this thing was around last spring, I would have said maybe - but that was just 6 days of the craziest fever I ever had - of the "wouldn't crawl downstairs to pick up a £50 note variety ..."


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> I think there is a strong streak of "I won't do as I'm told" in British culture. Even if what you're being told to do is the right thing to do.


Yes. Saw Liz-across-the-road this morning, who had already been out shopping. She's late seventies with a heart condition. "I've lived through Asian flu, Hong Kong Flu, bird flu, swine flu and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And besides you can only die once!"


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 20, 2020)

I'm waiting for my 93 year old and rather infirm ex-neighbour to make her way to the shops, but she's now in the sheltered housing in the next street so they probably have the residents locked-in.... (she always has to get a taxi home -)


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> I think there is a strong streak of "I won't do as I'm told" in British culture. Even if what you're being told to do is the right thing to do.



Agreed.  Its also the reason I wonder whether restrictions that have happened in places like China, Singapore and South Korea could ever be effectively implemented here?

For China's draconian surveillance state to enforce lockdown measures it was pretty straight forward.  In S. Korea they seem to have a general culture of abiding by what government advises.  Whereas in the UK I know a couple who are both well into the high risk group who are refusing to abide by any advice / instructions primarily because they come from Johnson who they hate with unbridled passion.


----------



## 8ball (Mar 20, 2020)

S☼I said:


> "I've lived through Asian flu, Hong Kong Flu, bird flu, swine flu and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And besides you can only die once!"



Yep, you can only die once.  And if you're selfish enough you can take a few people with you.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 20, 2020)

I think what shouldn't be underestimated that for a lot of older people the prospect of staying in, possibly alone, for months is more terrifying than the chance they'll get a disease they don't understand and aren't afraid of.


----------



## 8ball (Mar 20, 2020)

S☼I said:


> I think what shouldn't be underestimated that for a lot of older people the prospect of staying in, possibly alone, for months is more terrifying than the chance they'll get a disease they don't understand and aren't afraid of.



They should at least understand that not all older people (or younger people in higher risk groups, or people in lower risk groups who would sooner avoid even a small chance of serious illness/permanent lung damage/death) feel the same way as they do.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 20, 2020)

Tbf she stopped six feet from me when I told her I was self-isolating.


----------



## kalidarkone (Mar 20, 2020)

I think there is still a sense of disbelief.  It's like a disaster film unfolding. I don't quite believe it myself but am erring on the side of caution.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 20, 2020)

S☼I said:


> I think what shouldn't be underestimated that for a lot of older people the prospect of staying in, possibly alone, for months is more terrifying than the chance they'll get a disease they don't understand and aren't afraid of.


yes - difficult to get my head around being 90-ish - even as I turn 60 with retirement planning bringing the march of time into stark focus .. some people are going to have a very different mindset.
I'm already feeling a bit stir-crazy myself and I'm walking to work on Monday - probably risking the bus for most of the journey ...
It's going to be weird after a week away from the office when things have been changing so quickly -  - presumably we'll have to try to avoid being near the remaining colleagues as much as possible...


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

kalidarkone said:


> I think there is still a sense of disbelief.  It's like a disaster film unfolding. I don't quite believe it myself but am erring on the side of caution.



I keep veering into a place where it feels like we’ve gone collectively mad, it’s all nonsense and hysteria and complete overreaction. When it passes off I realised with a jolt that that’s a kind of defence mechanism for trying to handle the end of the world.

Not being melodramatic here, but nothing will ever be the same again after this. The old ways and the old world is ended and whatever emerges after this will be new and different and strange. Even the old stuff that survives and comes with us will be different because it will be affected by what has happened. It’s almost impossible to fathom. It’s happened so fast. It’s abstract even while we’re living it. So the brain shuts down and says “nope”.

And yeah, it’s quite peculiar that yoga teachers and so forth who presumably desired for the old order to be radically different are somehow refusing to accept or understand that things are falling apart now. Are they so attached to the old order because there they can be comfortably “different” without actually putting any effort into change?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 20, 2020)

C-19 finally hits North East Lincolnshire.


----------



## kalidarkone (Mar 20, 2020)

I prefer 'The end of the world as we know it'


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 20, 2020)

kalidarkone said:


> I think there is still a sense of disbelief.  It's like a disaster film unfolding. I don't quite believe it myself but am erring on the side of caution.


I had that feeling a couple of weeks ago when we were all sat around at lunch joking about it and saying "oh it will all be fine". 
It felt just like the scenes at the beginning of a disaster movie....and now look where we are!


----------



## Badgers (Mar 20, 2020)

Good tweet:



Might be worth having a thread listing companies who have acted selfishly or treated staff/customers with contempt?
Covid19ShitList
#covid19boycottlist


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> I had that feeling a couple of weeks ago when we were all sat around at lunch joking about it and saying "oh it will all be fine".
> It felt just like the scenes at the beginning of a disaster movie....and now look where we are!



There are loads of things out there saying this is the worst crisis since WW2.  Given that there is hardly anyone alive today who was an adult in WW2 its hardly surprising that we're all unable to recognise a proper full on crisis when it is looming.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

kalidarkone said:


> I prefer 'The end of the world as we know it'




Yes that song has been looping in my head for days now.


I'm also remembering when Ursula le Guin was asked what she imagined the end of the world would be like she said "Oh, but the world ends over and over again! The world I grew up in has ended, the world in which I raised my children has ended. The world we know ends and a new one emerges. It's only that it happens at the same pace that we grow that we don't notice it".

It's just happened really really fast this time, all at once everywhere.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 20, 2020)

For example this is a statement from a Wetherspoon's (minimum wage, zero hours contract) staff member:


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

I just got a text from my niece, who lives nearby, offering to pop over with shopping and asking if I need anything.

Bless her heart. It did make me laugh though because it's the very first time I've been treated as a potentially vulnerable elder. I'm in my mid-fifties and she's in her thirties. so it makes sense. But I still think of her as a wee'un so I was about to send her offers of help and support myself!


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

Badgers said:


> For example this is a statement from a Wetherspoon's (minimum wage, zero hours contract) staff member:
> 
> View attachment 202428




Aren't "allowed"?
So if they take precautions they'll be disciplined?


ETA
Statement from Weathespoons. So they are aware of the issue.

Dear customer


We wanted to update you on the precautionary measures which Wetherspoon is taking to minimise the spread of COVID-19 to both customers and our employees.


We will remain open, with additional precautions, until the government tells us otherwise.

To enable social distancing:

once you have ordered your drinks, please find a table and avoid standing at the bar.
our tables will be well spaced – and we ask that customers respect others by choosing alternate tables in the pub.
you can use our app to order food and drinks, to be delivered to your table.
Other precautions include, but are not limited to,:

all payments, where possible, being made by card.
providing regular updates to all employees.
reinforcing personal hygiene controls.
emphasising, to both customers and employees, frequent and proper hand-washing.
educating our employees on prevention.
cleaning and sanitising contact points more frequently.
our dish/glasswashers fully sanitising all cutlery, plates, cups and glassware, after every use.
We are continuing to take account of official guidance from the UK Government and Public Health England.


Kind regards
John Hutson | Chief Executive

UPDATED: Wednesday 18 March 2020 at 2pm


----------



## Badgers (Mar 20, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Aren't "allowed"?
> So if they take precautions they'll be disciplined?


It would not surprise me.
Even if they were allowed could they find/afford the necessary?

Some might suggest that putting some windows in could be for the greater good


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

This bloke is such an arse isn't he.










						Coronavirus: Wetherspoon's boss says 'over the top' to shut pubs
					

Number 10 refuses to criticise the entrepreneur, who claims there is "hardly been any transmission" of infection in pubs.




					news.sky.com


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

I'm getting really annoyed with one of my mates , refusing to believe there is anything to be unduly worried about. I'm on the verge of telling her to grow up an stop being an idiot, she is so convinced she is right  and asking me  who i know has got it and proof , blah blah ,saying she thought better of me as I am concerned.


----------



## Looby (Mar 20, 2020)

I’m sorry, I haven’t read the thread but it seems like the appropriate place for this. Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable about  sharing stuff when this forum is public?
Maybe it’s just me and I’ll stick to shagging and diseases but it feels slightly more exposing than I’m comfortable with.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 20, 2020)

Looby said:


> I’m sorry, I haven’t read the thread but it seems like the appropriate place for this. Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable about  sharing stuff when this forum is public?
> Maybe it’s just me and I’ll stick to shagging and diseases but it feels slightly more exposing than I’m comfortable with.



There is a corona sofa thread in k&s which has restricted (to a degree) access.

There is some very good information and advice on this sub forum which I would prefer to be available to all regardless of whether they are a contributor or not.  That's my thoughts anyway.

Edit: Its actually in parenting but I doubt they'd mind you chipping in.  You could always start a new one in general k&s.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> I'm getting really annoyed with one of my mates , refusing to believe there is anything to be unduly worried about. I'm on the verge of telling her to grow up an stop being an idiot, she is so convinced she is right  and asking me  who i know has got it and proof , blah blah ,saying she thought better of me as I am concerned.


she is now saying its no black plague, ive just pointed out it took 3 years for the plague to wipe out a 3rd of europe whilst this has only been a couple of months. our friendship is on the brink lol


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> I'm getting really annoyed with one of my mates , refusing to believe there is anything to be unduly worried about. I'm on the verge of telling her to grow up an stop being an idiot, she is so convinced she is right  and asking me  who i know has got it and proof , blah blah ,saying she thought better of me as I am concerned.




I think the time to be polite and patient with this shit is way gone. I've been the one impressing on people the seriousness of this for about two weeks. Been laughed at scoffed and mocked ignored both politely and rudely. Some people are choosing not to look, preferring not to know. In most ordinary circumstances that can be tolerated, but not now when wilful ignorance puts the lives of others at risk.


A young friend of mine was doing a gig last Friday. I really wanted to go, to see her play and to support her on tour. At the last minute I decided not to go and felt regretful and fretful all evening. Yesterday she posted on Facebook saying that she had come down hard with something dreadful and it had been diagnosed by NHS111 as C-19. She apologised for being complacent and foolish in previous weeks. She said she'd been dismissive, believing that being young and strong she either wouldn't get it or wouldn't get it badly, taking no precautions of any kind. She said she'd been as ill as ever in her life, unconscious and delirious for some of the time, and breathing was still painful and difficult. She also made a plea to all her friends fans cohorts peers to stop being complacent and start paying attention.  I'm very glad she's okay, I'm very glad she's made that post, and I'm also very glad I didn't go to the gig, I would most certainly have been in close contact with her that evening.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 20, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> I'm getting really annoyed with one of my mates , refusing to believe there is anything to be unduly worried about. I'm on the verge of telling her to grow up an stop being an idiot, she is so convinced she is right  and asking me  who i know has got it and proof , blah blah ,saying she thought better of me as I am concerned.


It's weird isn't it? Ignoring all the advice just so you can see yourself as some sort of Truth Warrior. 
What's the benefit? To whom?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

I live very close to a primary school. I really love the sound of the children playing. I'm sitting here soaking it up because I know I won't hear it for a long time to come


----------



## Looby (Mar 20, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> There is a corona sofa thread in k&s which has restricted (to a degree) access.
> 
> There is some very good information and advice on this sub forum which I would prefer to be available to all regardless of whether they are a contributor or not.  That's my thoughts anyway.
> 
> Edit: Its actually in parenting but I doubt they'd mind you chipping in.  You could always start a new one in general k&s.


I already am on the corona sofa but there are other threads that I’d like to contribute to like the WFH thread but hold back.
Fair enough that people want to keep them open, just wondered if other people feel similar.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> It's weird isn't it? Ignoring all the advice just so you can see yourself as some sort of Truth Warrior.
> What's the benefit? To whom?


Thing is she has a mum in a care home, she hasnt even mentioned it, then going on about Death is death and it is what it is, oh so brave

I dont want to mention how she didnt feel that way about death when one of her mates killed himself  few years back, as that would be cruel,


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 20, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Might be worth having a thread listing companies who have acted selfishly or treated staff/customers with contempt?
> Covid19ShitList
> #covid19boycottlist



Absolutely. Also comanies engaged in profiteeting.


----------



## Numbers (Mar 20, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I live very close to a primary school. I really love the sound of the children playing. I'm sitting here soaking it up because I know I won't hear it for a long time to come


As a complete aside.  We went to Cannes for our wedding anniversary last October and whilst our room was lovely it overlooked a random boring street and we were initially a tad annoyed.  Next morning tho’ the sound of the kids playing in the school playground opposite was incredible.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 20, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> Thing is she has a mum in a care home, she hasnt even mentioned it, then going on about Death is death and it is what it is, oh so brave
> 
> I dont want to mention how she didnt feel that way about death when one of her mates killed himself  few years back, as that would be cruel,



Maybe it’s the experience of having been bereaved by suicide quite recently that’s contributing to this current fatalism?

It took me years and years to get back to something approaching normal around death danger and disaster after my best friend killed himself.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Maybe it’s the experience of having been bereaved by suicide quite recently that’s contributing to this current fatalism?
> 
> It took me years and years to get back to something approaching normal around death danger and disaster after my best friend killed himself.


sorry to hear that youve been through this  .

 I haven't said it , but I have told her to back off for a bit before we fall out.

Any unexpected side effect of all this


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 20, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Absolutely. Also comanies engaged in profiteeting.


Londis near where a friend lives: £4 for a 4 pack of loo roll and £7 for hand sanitiser


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Londis near where a friend lives: £4 for a 4 pack of loo roll and £7 for hand sanitiser


our clown of a pm was asked about this yesterday.

his reponse was to ask people to be nicer , grrr


----------



## Badgers (Mar 20, 2020)

Just had my weekly shower and fortnightly shave then broke the toilet roll holder off the wall  oh well, it may not be needed soon


----------



## elbows (Mar 20, 2020)

One thing about younger members of society is that they might make the wrong assumptions about older people having lived through similar situations before. Certainly I saw someone in their 20's on a local news report earlier this week who was under the impression it was just people her age and younger who hadnt lived through anything like this before. Made me realise that yeah, how would they know that these times are exceptional for pretty much everyone? Well knowing history in detail would be one way to find that out, but plenty dont, especially if history was taught in a boring and narrow way to them. I dont think my knowledge of history and geography improved till years after I'd left school!


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> It's weird isn't it? Ignoring all the advice just so you can see yourself as some sort of Truth Warrior.
> What's the benefit? To whom?



I guess the benefit is to herself.  Believing that makes life a lot easier and less boring in the short term and also avoids having to stare into the abyss which the future currently is.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

editor said:


> Sainsbury's describes the store as a superstore and I'm not sure how it's an 'inaccurate' telling of the story either - the place has a car park so facilitates bulk buying.



my neighbour just been in the msssive archer road sainsburys in sheffield and he says it is like a plague of locusts have descended, hardly nothing left.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> I dont think many air lines or holiday tour operators are going to be still standing when all this is over. And i think getting refunds on holidays we booked will be the least of our worries.



my friend who i mention a bit, a former inf diseases nurse says a huge amount of people will die, my GP basically just wished me luck ,. saying it was the big one, just not sinking in with many.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

I


S☼I said:


> I think what shouldn't be underestimated that for a lot of older people the prospect of staying in, possibly alone, for months is more terrifying than the chance they'll get a disease they don't understand and aren't afraid of.



i have been in all week, going stir crazy, going out to sit outside coffee shop, one of few still open


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 20, 2020)

Meanwhile there’s a vocal minority who are not only carrying on as normal, ignoring all govt advice to reduce socialising because “I’m not in one of the risk groups”, but also whinging about the “hysterical overreaction” which apparently risks costing them money.  This guy triggered me today:



Typical “I’m alright Jack” attitude and his only worry seems to be that his IT consultancy workload might decrease a bit. Twat.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I keep veering into a place where it feels like we’ve gone collectively mad, it’s all nonsense and hysteria and complete overreaction. When it passes off I realised with a jolt that that’s a kind of defence mechanism for trying to handle the end of the world.
> 
> Not being melodramatic here, but nothing will ever be the same again after this. The old ways and the old world is ended and whatever emerges after this will be new and different and strange. Even the old stuff that survives and comes with us will be different because it will be affected by what has happened. It’s almost impossible to fathom. It’s happened so fast. It’s abstract even while we’re living it. So the brain shuts down and says “nope”.
> 
> And yeah, it’s quite peculiar that yoga teachers and so forth who presumably desired for the old order to be radically different are somehow refusing to accept or understand that things are falling apart now. Are they so attached to the old order because there they can be comfortably “different” without actually putting any effort into change?



I was hoping people would discuss this on the Spanish Flu thread, did much change after, not too sure, in many ways it was forgotten.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Good tweet:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




fucking great!


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Mar 20, 2020)

Just had a young woman at the door - new family who moved into the street a month or so ago - probably 17 years old.

She's just been round all the doors introducing herself - at a distance - and handing out one of those cards with her contact details, offering to get shopping etc for people who are self-isolating. Apparently all the sixth-years at the local school got together before it shut today and decided they would do this, splitting up the village into manageable chunks between them.

I mean, what can you say. My heart is bursting.


----------



## treelover (Mar 20, 2020)

MrCurry said:


> Meanwhile there’s a vocal minority who are not only carrying on as normal, ignoring all govt advice to reduce socialising because “I’m not in one of the risk groups”, but also whinging about the “hysterical overreaction” which apparently risks costing them money.  This guy triggered me today:
> 
> 
> 
> Typical “I’m alright Jack” attitude and his only worry seems to be that his IT consultancy workload might decrease a bit. Twat.





I imagine Spiked are part of this perspective..


----------



## Sue (Mar 20, 2020)

elbows said:


> One thing about younger members of society is that they might make the wrong assumptions about older people having lived through similar situations before. Certainly I saw someone in their 20's on a local news report earlier this week who was under the impression it was just people her age and younger who hadnt lived through anything like this before. Made me realise that yeah, how would they know that these times are exceptional for pretty much everyone? Well knowing history in detail would be one way to find that out, but plenty dont, especially if history was taught in a boring and narrow way to them. I dont think my knowledge of history and geography improved till years after I'd left school!


I was talking to a late-20s colleague yesterday about living through historic events. I mentioned the millennium and he mentioned HIV/AIDS in 80s/90s. It kind of caught me by surprise as I'd never really thought of it like that before (and was also very surprised he had.)


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 20, 2020)

Well, the London panic buying has spread to the northeast and supermarkets are fucking bare


----------



## bimble (Mar 20, 2020)

I'm having strange thoughts. Right now it does not feel to me likely that we'll ever really 'go back to normal' as in resume just where we left off, not this year or next or anytime soon at all. I don't mean we'll be stuck indoors but people who study such things knew it was basically just a matter of time until we had a global pandemic of some sort. Nobody is able to say when there'll be an effective vaccine or treatment and even when there is, for this particular bug, another will come along in due course. 
What if this means that certain things are changed forever - so that in decades from now the physical environment the way we live and travel and build cities and public spaces will bear the marks of its impact and attempts to brace against the next one. I don't know maybe am losing it.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

BUe have enabled the majority of employees to work from home but conntinue to operate this facility with essenal site staff. Please knock and wait for assistance. We are following Government guidelines for social distancing, so please don’t be offended if we maintain a 6 distance and respect any requests made, which will be in the best interest of the Health and Safety of our employees, visitors and contractors. We will ask all site attendees to read and complete necessary forms in regards to recent travel and potenal exposure to higher risk individuals or environments. We also request that we measure your temperature when you attend and leave the building using a contactless IR thermometer. If you are unwilling or if your temperature is elevated ie: 37.4 Deg C or greater, we may ask you not to aend site and if you are an employee, to work from home. This is a precauon and does not constitute a diagnosis – only that your temperature may be higher than what is considered normal. We appreciate your understanding in our efforts to protect yourselves and ourselves during this me. Thank you. SINESS AS USUAL Please be advised that w


bimble said:


> I'm having strange thoughts. Right now it does not feel to me likely that we'll ever really 'go back to normal' as in resume just where we left off, not this year or next or anytime soon at all. I don't mean we'll be stuck indoors but people who study such things knew it was basically just a matter of time until we had a global pandemic of some sort. Nobody is able to say when there'll be an effective vaccine or treatment and even when there is, for this particular bug, another will come along in due course.
> What if this means that certain things are changed forever - so that in decades from now the physical environment the way we live and travel and build cities and public spaces will bear the marks of its impact and attempts to brace against the next one. I don't know maybe am losing it.


I dont think you are, things are definitely going to be different from now


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 20, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> I dont think you are, things are definitely going to be different from now


I honestly don't think anything is going to change when all this is over. There will be good people who will help the vulnerable through this but they have always been there.

The majority have already shown themselves to be selfish cunts buying up everything in sight. That is not going to change at any point soon.

Yeah the government are stepping in saying they are going to help people out but as soon as this is over, it will be business as usual. I think you are fucking mad if you think otherwise.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> I honestly don't think anything is going to change when all this is over. There will be good people who will help the vulnerable through this but they have always been there.
> 
> The majority have already shown themselves to be selfish cunts buying up everything in sight. That is not going to change at any point soon.
> 
> Yeah the government are stepping in saying they are going to help people out but as soon as this is over, it will be business as usual. I think you are fucking mad if you think otherswise.


im more concerned abut the new laws being rushed through allowing the police to nick people with suspected symptoms, and them not being rolled back when its all over

( i am a little bit fucking mad too, and not in an ironic way )


----------



## miss direct (Mar 20, 2020)

I'm extremely anxious about what is to come both here in Turkey and in the UK. Here, cases and deaths have been rising at over 100% per DAY. And yet there are still crowds outside and ignorant people saying it's God's will and it won't affect them because they use lemon cologne. I stayed at home today. PLEASE STAY AT HOME if you can and only go out for walks in uncrowded places or for essential things.


----------



## elbows (Mar 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Yeah the government are stepping in saying they are going to help people out but as soon as this is over, it will be business as usual. I think you are fucking mad if you think otherwise.



Well I am happy to confidently predict that things will never be the same again. But there are a number of different directions they could go, and it wouldnt be very wise of me to try to guess which one will actually happen.

Even if they keep the economy on life support in a way that theoretically offers a resumption of most of the old way of doing things, some cats have been let out of the bag in terms of economics and what is actually possible and what people can demand and what our priorities should be.

With some previous big events and issues I think one of the areas that people were searching with hope for some kind of positive change was, to cut a long story short, some kind of equivalent to Roosevelts new deal. Some people thought of such a thing in the wake of the financial crisis. Some people have long imagined a green new deal to tackle climate change and energy issues. Signs of such things in those contexts came there none. With this pandemic, I cannot say that there will also be no signs, the potential on that front is there, big government is suddenly fashionable again and there is such a thing as society.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 21, 2020)

Absolute chaos this morning at the depot - many vans barely able to get all their parcels into van.

Ive a pretty busy day ahead.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 21, 2020)

I feel guilty continuing to order things


----------



## bimble (Mar 21, 2020)

Friend holed up in a hotel in Benares (india). Says all restaurants ordered to shut today, shops shut. I think he’s mad to stay there but he’s got no home to come to back here .


----------



## Mr Moose (Mar 21, 2020)

Went out for a cycle this morning, mostly off road and some lanes. Went down one lane and then onto a long cut through path to get to another. About half way along I noticed a crowd gathering at the end of the cut through, about a dozen individuals, dressed as paramilitaries all in black, helmets and full visors on, carrying weapons.

Momentarily my mind raced. What new fucked up reality was this? For another moment I wondered if the village I was in had begun some sort of militia preparations.

However, it soon became apparent that this was a gathering of massive nerds off to romp around the countryside, dressed a bit like Imperial Stomtroopers and shoot paintball pellets at each other.  Bless.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 21, 2020)

The messages seem to be getting through - just looking at some webcams in the city centre.  The street below is in the Northern Quarter and usually always busy at dinertime on Saturday.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> The messages seem to be getting through - just looking at some webcams in the city centre.  The street below is in the Northern Quarter and usually always busy at dinertime on Saturday.
> 
> View attachment 202578


I was considering putting on a hi-vis and going round town telling people off.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 21, 2020)

Message obviously not getting through in Brighton! @brightonsnapper took this an hour ago:


----------



## brogdale (Mar 21, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Message obviously not getting through in Brighton! @brightonsnapper took this an hour ago:
> 
> View attachment 202580


Eldest lives on the front (up near Leg ends) and said the beach was really busy the other (sunny day). Fucsake


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 21, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Eldest lives on the front (up near Leg ends) and said the beach was really busy the other (sunny day). Fucsake


 was down there about 3 weeks ago and there was already posters warning about covid plastered over the front near the pier, yet people are twunts


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

FFS 









						Wetherspoons boss insists he will keep chain open as 'coronavirus doesn't spread in pubs'
					

Tim Martin also claimed that he would take opportunity to catch the coronavirus ‘under supervised conditions’




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## weltweit (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...


The man is a twat.


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 21, 2020)

Did anyone else hear the twat from easyjet on the radio a few days ago?  They'll be asking from funds from the govt to pay wages etc.  That's fair enough, but they're about to pay £170 million in dividends to shareholders 

The interviewer didn't press them in this as easyjet man said paying the dividends was a legal obligation.

 So's paying your fucking staff.   Sort your  priorities out


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 21, 2020)

weltweit said:


> The man is a twat.




And so say all of us


----------



## brogdale (Mar 21, 2020)

rubbershoes said:


> Did anyone else hear the twat from easyjet on the radio a few days ago?  They'll be asking from funds from the govt to pay wages etc.  That's fair enough, but they're about to pay £170 million in dividends to shareholders
> 
> The interviewer didn't press them in this as easyjet man said paying the dividends was a legal obligation.
> 
> So's paying your fucking staff.   Sort your  priorities out



Funny how these grotesquely wealthy tycoons are not coming out of this too well, innit?


----------



## elbows (Mar 21, 2020)

weltweit said:


> The man is a twat.



Fuck him, he said it before the ban anyway so his words on the matter are already obsolete.


----------



## platinumsage (Mar 21, 2020)

Matt Hancock has the power to demolish buildings under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, so perhaps he could start with Tim Martin's house.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 21, 2020)

House price collapse?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 21, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Message obviously not getting through in Brighton! @brightonsnapper took this an hour ago:
> 
> View attachment 202580


Just back from a nice 4 mile wander round town - weirdly quiet with very little traffic.  Some shops are still open, and there were some shoppers in the main shopping street but the rest of the centre just seemed to be people going for a walk to get out and about.  A helicopter was circling town for some reason - took a picture of it and it seems to be a private one rather than the police - this was its flight path this afternoon.  No idea what it was doing - maybe hired by a media company.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

People flocking to the countryside and coasts in cars loaded with food and supplies. Traffic Jams on some motorways and roads. Destination councils saying they do not have anywhere near the medical infrastructure to cope with anything close to the increase in tourists. 

London congestion charge dropped for key workers and lots of the parks crowded with traffic jams blocking access roads. 

Going well so far this


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> People flocking to the countryside and coasts in cars loaded with food and supplies. Traffic Jams on some motorways and roads. Destination councils saying they do not have anywhere near the medical infrastructure to cope with anything close to the increase in tourists.
> 
> London congestion charge dropped for key workers and lots of the parks crowded with traffic jams blocking access roads.
> 
> Going well so far this



Where do they think they're going to stay?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 21, 2020)

The beach is packed with picknickers, Preston Park rammed, Devils Dyke rammed, & Stanmer Park rammed. Lots of coffee shops still open on St. James’s St & London Rd.

Bonkers.


----------



## magneze (Mar 21, 2020)

Kiosks still open in Richmond Park and stupidly busy.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

rubbershoes said:


> Where do they think they're going to stay?


The Airbnb places they have booked probably


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

Rescue teams working on Snowdon warning they don't have the capacity to deal with incidents due to large number of people.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> The Airbnb places they have booked probably


Plus caravans and campsites it seems 

At least Wetherspoons will be open for them.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

__





						Cornwall fears influx of 'out-of-towners' will overwhelm NHS services | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Council, health body and tourist board urge people to stay away but roads from London to the south-west were busy on Friday




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

Snowdon crowded as rescuers say they can't guarantee help amid pandemic
					

Snowdonia busy as people urged to consider if they should be risking themselves and aiders as the covid-19 outbreak escalates



					www.dailypost.co.uk


----------



## Sue (Mar 21, 2020)

Ffs, ridiculous. People need to stay where they are and stop panicking or whatever the fuck they're doing. Seriously, they really need to get a grip.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

Spoke to mate in Cornwall who said it is not 'bank holiday' busy there but much busier than usual. Also saying quite a lot of the pubs and restaurants are 'open on the sly' and people turning a blind eye. 

Had a nose round (I work with a few travel boards and such) and whilst the councils are warning people away the hotels and campsites are actively promoting holidays and 'isolation breaks'  the official tourists boards are being slightly more sensible with advice but still sending marketing out online with lots of beach photos and such.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 21, 2020)

.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 21, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> .


Possibly, sounds like it'll be ours, though.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 21, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Possibly, sounds like it'll be ours, though.




I deleted what I said cos it was fairly irrelevant and assumptive.


----------



## Spymaster (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> FFS
> 
> 
> 
> ...


The stupid fucking cunt.


----------



## waxoyl (Mar 21, 2020)

common sense . fucking double cunt. wetherspoons boss. hope you catch  it you cunt.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Spoke to mate in Cornwall who said it is not 'bank holiday' busy there but much busier than usual. Also saying quite a lot of the pubs and restaurants are 'open on the sly' and people turning a blind eye.
> 
> Had a nose round (I work with a few travel boards and such) and whilst the councils are warning people away the hotels and campsites are actively promoting holidays and 'isolation breaks'  the official tourists boards are being slightly more sensible with advice but still sending marketing out online with lots of beach photos and such.



Middle of nowhere here - only difference I've seen is that there are more people walking their dogs in the valley.  

Have always put my dog on the lead when we see other dogs because she was really aggressive when I got her. Works out nicely now though because I don't want her to get too friendly to dogs of strange people


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 21, 2020)

BBC1 are showing the FA Cup quarter final from some time in the early 80s by the look of it (correction: 1987). Kind of nice to pretend the last 40 30 years were all a bad dream.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Middle of nowhere here - only difference I've seen is that there are more people walking their dogs in the valley.
> 
> Have always put my dog on the lead when we see other dogs because she was really aggressive when I got her. Works out nicely now though because I don't want her to get too friendly to dogs of strange people


They are near Bude so fairly touristy as a rule.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 21, 2020)

Back of an arsenic mine here so people usually pass us by


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)

Halifax last night 









						Hundreds of people queuing outside Yorkshire nightclub during coronavirus pandemic blasted by MP
					

An MP has criticised the people queuing to get into a West Yorkshire nightclub just hours after the government ordered pubs and clubs to close.




					www.yorkshirepost.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Mar 21, 2020)




----------



## wayward bob (Mar 21, 2020)

for fucking fucks sake


----------



## Sue (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 202641


I know it's the Mail but ffs, how utterly irresponsible.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 202641




IT'S CALLED HOME.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 21, 2020)

The local supermarket (which is co-op sized) has bought in queuing measure. 

Only 20 people allowed at once, no baskets allowed. Everyone takes a trolly no trolly? No trolley? No entry. You queue, keeping minimum 1m distance between people. 

You do your shopping. (shelves are full, my husband got big roll cuz we're running out working from home) 

You keep your distance. 

You pay. 

You leave. 

Lady disinfects your trolley and then gives it to the next customer in line. 

Photos (taken by my husband)


----------



## circleline (Mar 21, 2020)

Loads of bars and restaurants selling off their stock and advising you to 'bring a container' for beer and stuff.

Meanwhile, disturbing pictures on FB showing crowds sitting along the seawall at Whitstable enjoying a 'take-away' pint in the sunshine..


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 21, 2020)

By the way, I don't expect the full extent of Poland outbreak, especially here in Krakow to materialise until next weekend. When we went into lockdown we closed all the borders and most tourists have gone home. 

So dar most cases have been linked to Italy and people returning from holiday with some community spread. 

10 days incubation period. 

What we will see then (next Friday) is the true extent of tourism spread plus community spread. 

That's when the hard work really begins. 

According to out PM he reckons it will be "under control" read (peaking and levelling out) around April 10. 

That to me sounds entirely reasonable considering how pro active the population here (and how seriously) they've been taking it. 

The week before lockdown, only really tourists were in the pubs and restauraunts, so I hope the hyperchondia of Poles has paid off.

I think it's saved a lot of people


----------



## iona (Mar 21, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> The beach is packed with picknickers, Preston Park rammed, Devils Dyke rammed, & Stanmer Park rammed. Lots of coffee shops still open on St. James’s St & London Rd.
> 
> Bonkers.


Yeah, last few days haven't seemed any quieter than usual when I've been in town. Tightly packed queue right down the street outside Aldi this morning, loads of people busy buying tat in Tiger on North Street ffs. Someone's spray painted "stay home" on the side of Poundland on Western Road 

Farm I help at is right by Devil's Dyke and there's been lots of walkers out, think some farmers are a bit worried about twats with off lead dogs


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 21, 2020)

Still so surreal. Little girl bouncing on her trampoline all afternoon in a sunshiney nearby garden, I'm having nuts and beer while watching RuPaul's Drag Race and looking forward to playing some videogames.

Meanwhile everything is collapsing


----------



## Raheem (Mar 21, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Funny how these grotesquely wealthy tycoons are not coming out of this too well, innit?
> 
> View attachment 202590



Not sure I would call 60 million quid 'not coming out of this too well'.


----------



## LDC (Mar 21, 2020)

There's going to be a huge amount of people that live through this but have massive guilt at the way they behaved I think, especially if a family member or friend dies.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 21, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Not sure I would call 60 million quid 'not coming out of this too well'.


Absolutely...suppose I was thinking in terms of reputation/public awareness...but what would the psychopaths care?


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 21, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> im more concerned abut the new laws being rushed through allowing the police to nick people with suspected symptoms, and them not being rolled back when its all over
> 
> ( i am a little bit fucking mad too, and not in an ironic way )











						Boris Johnson faces Commons revolt over emergency coronavirus laws
					

Government hopes to fast-track sweeping powers through parliament within days




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## Mogden (Mar 21, 2020)

Lad next door is usually a good chap but I can hear through the wall he appears to be having a party


----------



## bimble (Mar 22, 2020)

bimble said:


> Friend holed up in a hotel in Benares (india). Says all restaurants ordered to shut today, shops shut. I think he’s mad to stay there but he’s got no home to come to back here .


Well. India’s fascist pm is doing a 15 hour curfew today, nobody is supposed to be out at all. I think it’s just a show of strength not going to do anything much at all but make day labourers hungry.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 22, 2020)

Has the UK stopped anyone coming in yet? Like e.g. Denmark, the US etc. I've either missed it or we are still letting everyone travel here?


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 22, 2020)

Does anyone have a link to a short video animation about how coronavirus spreads? I saw it a week or so ago - it was a simple, short animation about how the infection sits on surfaces, can be picked up on your hands, then transferred to your face. I want to show it to my kids so they understand why they need to keep washing their hands regularly, even though we're just stuck at home not seeing anyone else now. Can't seem to track it down on YouTube though.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 22, 2020)

I saw this this morning :-



there's a video somewhere where they used UV marker dye in a nursery - well scary ...


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 22, 2020)




----------



## weepiper (Mar 22, 2020)

__





						Scottish government 'furious' at travellers to Highlands and Islands | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Camper van and second home owners are ‘irresponsible’ to head to rural areas, say Scottish MPs




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## a_chap (Mar 22, 2020)

One of the most informative articles I've read so far:


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Mar 22, 2020)

I'm confused about this paying of 80% of wages thing. My mum works in a supermarket but I want her to stay home as my stepdad has copd and is over 70, her health isn't exactly great either. Can she isolate on that basis for the recommended 12 weeks and still get paid? I can't find any information on the specifics of this.


----------



## bimble (Mar 22, 2020)

Doctor Carrot said:


> I'm confused about this paying of 80% of wages thing. My mum works in a supermarket but I want her to stay home as my stepdad has copd and is over 70, her health isn't exactly great either. Can she isolate on that basis for the recommended 12 weeks and still get paid? I can't find any information on the specifics of this.


I think the answer to this is yes. Your Mum should definitely not be working in a supermarket now. 
But it has to be done by the supermarket she works for (they have to apply to get the money for her from the government). 




__





						COVID-19 financial support for businesses
					

Find out what financial support you can get for your business.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Mar 22, 2020)

FFS the fucking communication is shit. There's nothing there that says it applies in my case. Two people in that household are out working every day, that's two people risking infection being brought into the house. It's so stressful!

Not having a go at you, bimble obviously!


----------



## bimble (Mar 22, 2020)

You’re right. It’s really shit. Would talk to the supermarket though if you can .


----------



## killer b (Mar 22, 2020)

I'm not sure if this is true tbh - I think she's at the mercy of the supermarket's sickness policy. The 80% pay thing is for companies who have no cash coming in because large parts of the economy have stopped dead. Supermarkets are not among these companies.


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Mar 22, 2020)

killer b said:


> I'm not sure if this is true tbh - I think she's at the mercy of the supermarket's sickness policy. The 80% pay thing is for companies who have no cash coming in because large parts of the economy have stopped dead. Supermarkets are not among these companies.



I fear this is the case. So they tell people over 70 with health conditions to isolate but not the people who live with them who work in environments where crowds of people are panic buying. It's beyond absurd.


----------



## bimble (Mar 22, 2020)

killer b is right. But if gov guidelines are for all people over 70 to withdraw from contact with the public doesn't that mean her employer has to comply with that and then can choose to get the cash for her wages if they are half decent human beings? eta oh sorry your mum not that age i take it.


----------



## Chilli.s (Mar 22, 2020)

Doctor Carrot said:


> I'm confused about this paying of 80% of wages thing. My mum works in a supermarket but I want her to stay home as my stepdad has copd and is over 70, her health isn't exactly great either. Can she isolate on that basis for the recommended 12 weeks and still get paid? I can't find any information on the specifics of this.


Tell her to phone in sick, not to worry about the truthfulness, get her to take 2 weeks off.


----------



## killer b (Mar 22, 2020)

You'd think that maybe the supermarkets having taken an extra billion quid this month, might consider a more generous sickness policy atm. 

how about it... guys? hello??


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Mar 22, 2020)

bimble said:


> killer b is right. But if gov guidelines are for all people over 70 to withdraw from contact with the public doesn't that mean her employer has to comply with that and then can choose to get the cash for her wages if they are half decent human beings? eta oh sorry your mum not that age i take it.



She's near that age but not over 70. It just seems madness to not isolate if someone in the household is at heightened risk.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

Car boot sale at Brighton marina in full swing this morning


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Car boot sale at Brighton marina in full swing this morning


Likely my old man is up their. 

No doubt the house clearance companies will have a lot of work on over the coming months


----------



## agricola (Mar 22, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Car boot sale at Brighton marina in full swing this morning



well as long as everyone doesn't handle dozens of things and put them back, I am sure it will all be fine


----------



## Serge Forward (Mar 22, 2020)

ACG on the current "all in it together, national unity" bollocks:
Class War Not on Pause


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Mar 22, 2020)

Turns out they themselves suggested she stay home and are paying her the 80% so that's a relief!


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Victoria Park today 



Flower Market


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 22, 2020)

Those your photos?


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

S☼I said:


> Those your photos?


Nope. I am staying indoors apart from a daily stroll and shop. On twitter.


----------



## The Pale King (Mar 22, 2020)

Can't believe they didn't cancel the markets tbh. I know folk have to earn but seems crazy


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

There are loads of these on social media so won't waste this thread with more but this one in Hull was chilling:



People are cunts. Supermarkets should be doing a lot more to manage this and protect staff/public. Government have to act because the general public and weathly private sector supermarkets can't/won't.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

^^ Just seen that, what the actual fuck is wrong with people?!


----------



## Raheem (Mar 22, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> ^^ Just seen that, what the actual fuck is wrong with people?!


Not sure what exactly to think about it but tbf, anyone who hasn't been filling their living room with bogroll, pasta and cartons of fresh milk still needs to go shopping.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

People like this you mean?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Not sure what exactly to think about it but tbf, anyone who hasn't been filling their living room with bogroll, pasta and cartons of fresh milk still needs to go shopping.



Yeah I get that totally - I’ll have to go to my local Sains tomorrow - but I’ll come back home if there’s that many people.


----------



## hegley (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> People like this you mean?
> 
> View attachment 202783


Hope someone burns his fucking caravan down. 🤬


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

hegley said:


> Hope someone burns his fucking caravan down. 🤬


Yup. 

I am pretty placid at the moment but cunts like this deserve it. The government should be fining him/them substantial sums and confiscating the caravan to auction.


----------



## Ms Ordinary (Mar 22, 2020)

Doctor Carrot said:


> Turns out they themselves suggested she stay home and are paying her the 80% so that's a relief!



My sister is in a similar position - immune suppressed due to ongoing cancer treatment, so last week (before the announcement of the 80% wage thing) she agreed to take 2 months unpaid leave in order to self-isolate.

(Think the 2 months is because she calculated she has enough savings to pay rent & food for that long)

I am really hoping that the ‘unpaid leave’ was their way of saying ‘we’re keeping your job open for you’ & that they’ll now do the decent thing & stand her down at 80% wage...
Low paid so it’s 80% of fuck all - hope that works in her favour.
And they have been good so far with supporting her through the treatments.


----------



## platinumsage (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Yup.
> 
> I am pretty placid at the moment but cunts like this deserve it. The government should be fining him/them substantial sums and confiscating the caravan to auction.



They don't have the power to fine him or confiscate the caravan and auction it.

However the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 enables them to detain him indefinitely and destroy the caravan.


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Mar 22, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Not sure what exactly to think about it but tbf, anyone who hasn't been filling their living room with bogroll, pasta and cartons of fresh milk still needs to go shopping.


Yep. This week, I've had to do a series of small shops because I just can't do a big shop at the moment. Found pasta today for the first time in two weeks!


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

Doctor Carrot said:


> FFS the fucking communication is shit. There's nothing there that says it applies in my case. Two people in that household are out working every day, that's two people risking infection being brought into the house. It's so stressful!
> 
> Not having a go at you, bimble obviously!



People at risk COPD definitely will be receiving a letter from GP soon,  this will provide leverage to leave work i think

alll too late i reckon.


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Victoria Park today
> 
> View attachment 202779View attachment 202780
> 
> ...



OMG, get them off the streets, htis is a death sentence for at risk groups when they go home, etc.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> They don't have the power to confiscate the caravan and auction it.
> 
> However the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 enables them to detain him indefinitely and destroy the caravan.


Shame to waste something that could be sold and the funds used for good causes. However failing that I would like to see it destroyed and him detained/fined/embarrassed publicly.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> People like this you mean?
> 
> View attachment 202783



My parents live in the forest of dean.  They've noticed an influx of caravans and campervans and not all are using the campsites some are just pitching up in laybys or forest car parks.  The locals (foresters) are livid and they're not a mild mannered bunch when push comes to shove.  My parents are genuinely worried about the safety of these people in caravans or at least the safety of their vehicles.

They've already had an incident where a head teacher has been vilified (including death threats) because he continued with a school ski trip to Italy just as it was all beginning to kick off down there.  They had to come back early and they reckon the head has had to go into hiding because of the reaction.   

As soon the the first cases start arriving someone's going to get the blame and I wouldn't want to be in a caravan in a unlit layby.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> My parents are genuinely worried about the safety of these people in caravans or at least the safety of their vehicles.


Tell them not to worry


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Mar 22, 2020)

It's not bringing the best out in people, is it. French friend told me that the reaction of many Paris bourgeois on hearing of the imminent lockdown was to pack a case and drive out to the holiday home in Brittany. Bretons not impressed.


----------



## kazza007 (Mar 22, 2020)

treelover said:


> People at risk COPD definitely will be receiving a letter from GP soon,  this will provide leverage to leave work i think
> 
> alll too late i reckon.


I wonder if that's the case actually. There are 3 million estimated UK with copd according to NICE. According to asthma.org, there are 5.4 million asthmatics in UK.
There will apparently be 1.5 million texts/letters going out, so the math doesn't add up.
I think the key word in the statement is 'severe' respiratory disease, so things like cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and I suppose emphysema, as well as the other conditions - cancer patients, immunosuppressives, etc


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> There are loads of these on social media so won't waste this thread with more but this one in Hull was chilling:
> 
> 
> 
> People are cunts. Supermarkets should be doing a lot more to manage this and protect staff/public. Government have to act because the general public and weathly private sector supermarkets can't/won't.





Death magnets, hose them


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> People like this you mean?
> 
> View attachment 202783




i hope plod have contacted him, these are not normal times.


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

kazza007 said:


> I wonder if that's the case actually. There are 3 million estimated UK with copd according to NICE. According to asthma.org, there are 5.4 million asthmatics in UK.
> There will apparently be 1.5 million texts/letters going out, so the math doesn't add up.
> I think the key word in the statement is 'severe' respiratory disease, so things like cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and I suppose emphysema, as well as the other conditions - cancer patients, immunosuppressives, etc


I have been advised to S/I, M.E, Diabetes.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 22, 2020)

A large car boot sale has gone ahead in Derbyshire and the police have posted about the Bank Holiday-esque crowds in Matlock Bath. Idiots!!


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 22, 2020)

kazza007 said:


> I wonder if that's the case actually. There are 3 million estimated UK with copd according to NICE. According to asthma.org, there are 5.4 million asthmatics in UK.
> There will apparently be 1.5 million texts/letters going out, so the math doesn't add up.
> I think the key word in the statement is 'severe' respiratory disease, so things like cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and I suppose emphysema, as well as the other conditions - cancer patients, immunosuppressives, etc


The letters being issued to doctors are on this page, and outline what conditions are defined as extremely vulnerable and will be contacted.





__





						Coronavirus » Guidance and updates: Highest clinical risk patients
					






					www.england.nhs.uk


----------



## kazza007 (Mar 22, 2020)

treelover said:


> I have been advised to S/I, M.E, Diabetes.


It's confusing, I have asthma, albeit controlled, but work self employed in health care with poor protective equipment, so ideally I should seif isolate, but can't.
Anyway, the statement yesterday about 1.5 million severely ill people who need to self isolate for 3 months - we'll need to see who gets that letter or text next week.


----------



## kazza007 (Mar 22, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> The letters being issued to doctors are on this page, and outline what conditions are defined as extremely vulnerable and will be contacted.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Thanks, I'll take a look


----------



## a_chap (Mar 22, 2020)

Draft of my leaflet to the nearest streets to me (three dozen houses)

Do I just sound like a serial killer/fraudster?

Please comment....

*Edited to add:*

Hmm... no actual draft attached 

How do I attach a Word doc / PDF?

*Edited to add (again):*

Oh - seems to have worked now


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Watching disgraced Prime Minister Johnson and can't work out what he is saying.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 22, 2020)

neither can he


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 22, 2020)

More advice. Pleading. Silly prick


----------



## elbows (Mar 22, 2020)

Its pleading with people to actually follow the advice, with the implicit, and to an extent in this speech explicit, threat that they will ban more stuff if people dont do their bit.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 22, 2020)

elbows said:


> Its pleading with people to actually follow the advice, with the implicit, and to extent in this speech explicit, threat that they will ban more stuff if people dont do their bit.


Anyone who's worked in education knows that appealing to large groups of people to do the right thing and follow advice because it makes sense knows how well that works.


----------



## miss direct (Mar 22, 2020)

Don't wait for a letter!!! Why is the UK being so slow?!


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Drivel. 

Vulnerable people being 'urged' to isolate for 12 weeks. Likely they already are


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

Disgusting.


----------



## kenny g (Mar 22, 2020)

We are in an "act up" situation akin to the AIDS epidemic. Need to also prepare for how they intend to shaft us once this has blown over. We need to have a 1945 plan in action so something decent can come out of their ineptitude.


----------



## weepiper (Mar 22, 2020)

The message has certainly got through in central Edinburgh. This is the top of the Royal Mile. I've literally never seen it this empty even at 3am. This was 3 in the afternoon today and is my own picture


----------



## kenny g (Mar 22, 2020)

a_chap said:


> Draft of my leaflet to the nearest streets to me (three dozen houses)
> 
> Do I just sound like a serial killer/fraudster?
> 
> ...


Not enough spelling mistakes for a fraudster and most serial killers have easier ways to get victims. I reckon it's great. Nice one!


----------



## kenny g (Mar 22, 2020)

kenny g said:


> We are in an "act up" situation akin to the AIDS epidemic. Need to also prepare for how they intend to shaft us once this has blown over. We need to have a 1945 plan in action so something decent can come out of their ineptitude.



2m separation posters are the start so we can show we are on the side of public health over commerce. Need to make it clear a lock down is a total infringement. The financial crisis of 2008 was paid for by 10 years of austerity. This one will not be paid for by yet another debt burden we are told we are responsible for. Tesco are already raising tampon prices by 30% and claiming it is to prevent over stocking!


----------



## Raheem (Mar 22, 2020)

a_chap said:


> Draft of my leaflet to the nearest streets to me (three dozen houses)
> 
> Do I just sound like a serial killer/fraudster?
> 
> ...


Seems good to me. Only thing I would say is put your first name on. But maybe you've thought about it and don't want to.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 22, 2020)

a_chap said:


> Draft of my leaflet to the nearest streets to me (three dozen houses)
> 
> Do I just sound like a serial killer/fraudster?
> 
> ...


Some thoughts.


are *you *self-isolating?
I live on *Vienesse Whirl *Road*.*.. 
Add in that section collecting meds.
In the 'if you ask me...' paragraph suggest adding that you'll frequently wash your hands and/or use sanitiser.
In the sentence 'I washed my hands' [final sentence] add '*and I'm not a serial killer with a taste for human flesh*' 
Also probably worth adding something about that you aren't in a high-risk category, and this is intended as to support the vulnerable in the community.


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Mar 22, 2020)

a_chap said:


> Draft of my leaflet to the nearest streets to me (three dozen houses)
> 
> Do I just sound like a serial killer/fraudster?
> 
> ...


I think that's excellent. Agree with others that you should put your first name on it.


----------



## planetgeli (Mar 22, 2020)

Blimey. Just had my first Zoom (Coronavirus sponsored by Zoom) chat with family and friends in Spain, Germany and England. I was only watching "Years and Years" a few months ago and now I'm in it. Was fun, Technology 1 Virus 0.

Followed that with watching the mating ritual between blackbirds in my garden. Violent but interesting.

So quiet out there.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 22, 2020)

planetgeli said:


> So quiet out there.


Isn't that the most amazing thing about all of this?  It's wonderful.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 22, 2020)

Isn't it great that we've seen a lot of new members and lurkers emerging from the shadows in the last week or so?  Welcome all.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 22, 2020)

planetgeli said:


> Blimey. Just had my first Zoom (Coronavirus sponsored by Zoom) chat with family and friends in Spain, Germany and England. I was only watching "Years and Years" a few months ago and now I'm in it. Was fun, Technology 1 Virus 0.
> 
> Followed that with watching the mating ritual between blackbirds in my garden. Violent but interesting.
> 
> So quiet out there.


Keep the Zoom under 40 mins and it is free


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Keep the Zoom under 40 mins and it is free


I only use skype at work but isn't that totally free (apart from data usage)?


----------



## planetgeli (Mar 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Keep the Zoom under 40 mins and it is free



Aye we got timed out at 40 minutes.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

More images of the seafront in Brighton being rammed again today. I fucking despair.

@brightonsnapper


----------



## treelover (Mar 22, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> More images of the seafront in Brighton being rammed again today. I fucking despair.
> 
> @brightonsnapper
> 
> View attachment 202817



looks like the middle class as well.

plus chin waggers next to each other on far right, ffs.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

treelover said:


> looks like the middle class as well.
> 
> plus chin waggers next to each other on far right, ffs.



I don’t think class even comes into it - stupidity yes, & maybe some kind of “it won’t stop me from going out” kind of arrogance maybe?


----------



## killer b (Mar 22, 2020)

I think there's a lot going on. A lot of people are in denial, a lot of people think their journey is somehow essential or important in some way, a lot of people aren't paying attention and the mixed messages from government over the last week or so has really not helped. 

Why was brightonsnapper out taking that photo to tut about on the internet btw? 

At the end of the day there will always be enough people who're inconsiderate, stupid or selfish about that voluntary measures just won't work. They haven't worked anywhere else in the world, so they won't work here. Every day this goes on the death toll will be worse, and it's not really the fault of the people out in the sun on what they're expecting to be their last weekend of freedom - it's the fault of the government for not having a mandatory lockdown.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 22, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> stupidity yes, & maybe some kind of “it won’t stop me from going out” kind of arrogance maybe?


It's a failure to understand that we're all part of the same society. Statistically, whatever way you look at it, you're not at all that much risk (unless you're old, have other health conditions, immune-compromised, etc.) People look at those numbers, especially if they're young, and think that on balance they're happy with a 0.01% risk of dying versus a 100% chance of having a nice day out in the sun.


----------



## a_chap (Mar 22, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Seems good to me. Only thing I would say is put your first name on. But maybe you've thought about it and don't want to.





farmerbarleymow said:


> Some thoughts.
> 
> 
> are *you *self-isolating? *As far as is practicable and I'm now working from home so I never mix with anyone.*
> ...





littlebabyjesus said:


> I think that's excellent. Agree with others that you should put your first name on it.



Thanks for the suggestions. However, I've printed and posted them now 

I've not put my name on because I'm not doing it for self-publicity and I'd hate my neighbours to pretend to be _grateful _towards in the future me if you see what I mean.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

killer b said:


> I think there's a lot going on. A lot of people are in denial, a lot of people think their journey is somehow essential or important in some way, a lot of people aren't paying attention and the mixed messages from government over the last week or so has really not helped.
> 
> Why was brightonsnapper out taking that photo to tut about on the internet btw?
> 
> At the end of the day there will always be enough people who're inconsiderate, stupid or selfish about that voluntary measures just won't work. They haven't worked anywhere else in the world, so they won't work here. Every day this goes on the death toll will be worse, and it's not really the fault of the people out in the sun on what they're expecting to be their last weekend of freedom - it's the fault of the government for not having a mandatory lockdown.



Eddie Mitchel is a journalist, this is what journalists are reporting on, globally.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 22, 2020)

journalists surely must be a non-trivial vector in this?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 22, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> journalists surely must be a non-trivial vector in this?



I suppose if it hadn’t been for photojournalists reporting on the gatherings we’ve seen over this weekend, would the Gov have been made aware? The mop haired one was was certainly aware of it during his briefing today. I’m just as surprised as anyone that we’re not in full lock down. Let’s not slag photojournalists off thou, as we all know, the world goes blind.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 22, 2020)

not slagging, just musing.


----------



## Grace Johnson (Mar 22, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Has the UK stopped anyone coming in yet? Like e.g. Denmark, the US etc. I've either missed it or we are still letting everyone travel here?



Quick look at flight radar says loads of planes still pouring in. Noticeably less activity at regional airports including the big ones Manchester and Birmingham. London still heaving full of planes though. No controlled quarantine either. Just advisory self isolation.


----------



## Grace Johnson (Mar 22, 2020)

..............


----------



## lazythursday (Mar 22, 2020)

Grace Johnson said:


> The issue with asthma is not particularly the asthma its self. It's more to do with the use of steroids for it. The steroids can have an immunosuppressive effect and have seemed so far to be associated with worse outcomes. Not got source to hand but can find if anyone needs it.


I'm sure I've read that the illness, particularly pneumonia, could be worse with asthma regardless of steroids, but I'd feel a bit less anxious if you're right.


----------



## Raheem (Mar 22, 2020)

Inhalers don't act as immunosuppressents, but some pills taken for asthma can.



> Inhaled corticosteroids do not likely reduce your immune system’s ability to fight infections, but oral corticosteroids may.





			https://community.aafa.org/blog/coronavirus-2019-ncov-flu-what-people-with-asthma-need-to-know


----------



## kenny g (Mar 22, 2020)

Grace Johnson said:


> Quick look at flight radar says loads of planes still pouring in. Noticeably less activity at regional airports including the big ones Manchester and Birmingham. London still heaving full of planes though. No controlled quarantine either. Just advisory self isolation.


I saw flight radar as well. Sky had no vapour trails at today though. Saw one plane in the afternoon in the sky. Was really noticeable the difference.


----------



## Grace Johnson (Mar 22, 2020)

lazythursday said:


> I'm sure I've read that the illness, particularly pneumonia, could be worse with asthma regardless of steroids, but I'd feel a bit less anxious if you're right.



I'll find you the source the mate. Might take a while because there's a lot of Internet history to dig through cuz we've been on self isolation for 12 days now. 

 Should be able to find it though


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 22, 2020)

.


----------



## Grace Johnson (Mar 22, 2020)

lazythursday said:


> I'm sure I've read that the illness, particularly pneumonia, could be worse with asthma regardless of steroids, but I'd feel a bit less anxious if you're right.



This is the source I had seen. Having looked at the study again there are some issues with making assumptions from it in that it was only a limited study from one area and with things progressing at such a rapid rate although it is quite recent it has potentially become quite dated. I will remove my previous post because although the study was looking relevant at the time I read it there's not enough for information for it be conclusive. 

Error - Cookies Turned Off

Along with another that talked about the increased risk of steroid use but there being no increased risk from the the common inhalers. However that did not make reference to the asthma itself.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 23, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Isn't that the most amazing thing about all of this?  It's wonderful.


I'm sure I heard birds singing yesterday


----------



## hash tag (Mar 23, 2020)

on sort of practical notes, you may wish to make plans if you have a car service of MOT coming up soon.

Mrs T has a birthday coming up next month and I don't have to much as a card yet


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 23, 2020)

Well this is weird. First day at work under the new normal. I'm NHS staff - admin - not a nurse or anything frontline. We're split into 3 teams - a mixture of clinical and admin staff. Some working from home, the rest in the hospital but properly distanced from each other. I am currently working in a room on my own. We will probably get redeployed to other departments as time goes on. Feels like we're just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

At least I've got the kettle and the biscuits in here


----------



## ruffneck23 (Mar 23, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Well this is weird. First day at work under the new normal. I'm NHS staff - admin - not a nurse or anything frontline. We're split into 3 teams - a mixture of clinical and admin staff. Some working from home, the rest in the hospital but properly distanced from each other. I am currently working in a room on my own. We will probably get redeployed to other departments as time goes on. Feels like we're just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
> 
> At least I've got the kettle and the biscuits in here


good luck and thank you for helping us all out during what is no doubt going to be a difficult time  ♥


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 23, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> good luck and thank you for helping ua all out during what is no doubt going to be a difficult time  ♥


You're welcome but I don't feel like I'm actually doing anything at the moment! The waiting is....tricky.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 23, 2020)

They also serve who have kettle on and biscuits.


----------



## zahir (Mar 23, 2020)

hash tag said:


> on sort of practical notes, you may wish to make plans if you have a car service of MOT coming up soon.


I was dealing with this last week - be prepared for delays in getting hold of parts.


----------



## Indeliblelink (Mar 23, 2020)

I wonder if our attitude to people who are ill with colds/flu will permanently change after this is over. I think we might have higher expectations that people who have developed a cough at work or return too soon after they've had flu should stay at home until they're fully recovered.


----------



## Nine Bob Note (Mar 23, 2020)

Plenty of people with, shall we say, refined accents, in the shop asking where everything is as “we don’t know the area” clearly visiting the slums on their way to their static caravans and holiday cottages. Hope they only need food and bog rolls because they providently filled their Audi’s up with spare ventilators before leaving home


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 23, 2020)

Just heard from a friend who works there, that Next have stopped replenishment of their stores. The one warehouse that supplies all the stores in the country.
All the other warehouses are either home goods or online suppliers.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 23, 2020)

Daughter has woke up this morning feeling ill with a sore throat.

Turns out she was feeling bad before she arrived from her mothers last Friday but her mother didn’t say anything about it.

Daughters mother has now said she doesn’t want my daughter back with her till she’s well again and doesn’t want our son (who lives with me and gf) to visit her until daughter is better.


----------



## flypanam (Mar 23, 2020)

hash tag said:


> on sort of practical notes, you may wish to make plans if you have a car service of MOT coming up soon.



Has anything been said? My motor is booked in for Wednesday.


----------



## existentialist (Mar 23, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Daughter has woke up this morning feeling ill with a sore throat.
> 
> Turns out she was feeling bad before she arrived from her mothers last Friday but her mother didn’t say anything about it.
> 
> Daughters mother has now said she doesn’t want my daughter back with her till she’s well again and doesn’t want our son (who lives with me and gf) to visit her until daughter is better.


That was rather neatly done on her part . Mind you, I guess you didn't need confirmation as to why you're no longer together...


----------



## hash tag (Mar 23, 2020)

Not that I am aware of. I am conscious of having to get home after dropping the car off and getting back there to pick it up again.
Chap I use is 6 or so miles away.
NB have just tried buying a couple of birthday cards online; I am unable to register to the website for the life of me


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 23, 2020)

existentialist said:


> That was rather neatly done on her part . Mind you, I guess you didn't need confirmation as to why you're no longer together...



Yep, she’s a sly one.

But, I’m happy for the kids to be with me and the gf, no matter what the circumstances.


----------



## Knotted (Mar 23, 2020)

Fellow at work got forwarded a video by David Icke. He thought he was a nutter but he's "really talking sense about Coronavirus and international corporations". He made me watch the video as well. I won't bother reviewing it, except to say it was the usual highly dodgy global conspiracy stuff slightly (not even that slightly) sanitised for mass consumption. My colleague's fairly sort of middle of the road common sensical sort and I think I persuaded him that it was bollocks.

Just mention this because shows how the general situations amplified by the mixed messages from government are a fertile breeding ground for another type of virus.


----------



## Grace Johnson (Mar 23, 2020)

Just seen the local teenagers walking around with gloves and masks on. Wondered if they are just taking sensible precautions and the message is getting through or if they have become a fashion thing.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 23, 2020)

Grace Johnson said:


> Just seen the local teenagers walking around with gloves and masks on. Wondered if they are just taking sensible precautions and the message is getting through or if they have become a fashion thing.


Probably both


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 23, 2020)

Grace Johnson said:


> they have become a fashion thing


Billie Eilish was rather ahead of the curve...


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 23, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Just heard from a friend who works there, that Next have stopped replenishment of their stores. The one warehouse that supplies all the stores in the country.


No point replenishing stock if you're going to close all your stores down.


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 23, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> No point replenishing stock if you're going to close all your stores down.


There is only A/W 2019-20 stock being finished off anyhow.
Goods in are still working with the S/S 20 stock being stored.
As Wolfson said last week, people don’t buy new outfits to stay at home.
They expect a billion pound hit anyhoo!


----------



## danny la rouge (Mar 23, 2020)

Under fire MSP defends decision to keep office open but says he'll follow advice

Anyone who has heard of this prick knows he’s a silly fucker anyway, but he’s putting other people at risk here. It’s not about him being “brave”. It’s about the infection he could spread.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 23, 2020)

Anyone else having those moments when you think you watched a bizarre film last night and suddenly you think everything is weird then you remember and your brain does a WTF when you remember it's real. Quite odd.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 23, 2020)

I did not (could not) watch disgraced Prime Minister Johnson at 5pm.

Did I miss anything?


----------



## elbows (Mar 23, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I did not (could not) watch disgraced Prime Minister Johnson at 5pm.
> 
> Did I miss anything?



He wasnt on at 5 today, in a COBRA meeting that only started at that time, then will address the nation later.


----------



## iona (Mar 23, 2020)

Local drug service have done a thing of safety tips for using street drugs now that supply issues are likely to start affecting purity. There's one up in reception where I live. Had to do a (suitably disinfected and ppe'd up first, obvs) facepalm just now at the bit about never using on your own.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 23, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I did not (could not) watch disgraced Prime Minister Johnson at 5pm.
> 
> Did I miss anything?


He's in a Cobra meeting. You didn't miss much. Said he might comment later, presumably to announce a lockdown.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 23, 2020)

Knotted said:


> Fellow at work got forwarded a video by David Icke. He thought he was a nutter but he's "really talking sense about Coronavirus and international corporations". He made me watch the video as well. I won't bother reviewing it, except to say it was the usual highly dodgy global conspiracy stuff slightly (not even that slightly) sanitised for mass consumption. My colleague's fairly sort of middle of the road common sensical sort and I think I persuaded him that it was bollocks.
> 
> Just mention this because shows how the general situations amplified by the mixed messages from government are a fertile breeding ground for another type of virus.



David Icke is vanilla compared to some of the other conspiraloons.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 23, 2020)

Knotted said:


> Fellow at work got forwarded a video by David Icke. He thought he was a nutter but he's "really talking sense about Coronavirus and international corporations". He made me watch the video as well. I won't bother reviewing it, except to say it was the usual highly dodgy global conspiracy stuff slightly (not even that slightly) sanitised for mass consumption. My colleague's fairly sort of middle of the road common sensical sort and I think I persuaded him that it was bollocks.
> 
> Just mention this because shows how the general situations amplified by the mixed messages from government are a fertile breeding ground for another type of virus.




I made a thread for this kind of s stuff,  we can quarantine it away from the more sane and sensible stuff.









						Let's have a thread for C-19 conspiracy nonsense bollocks and outright lies!
					

Last Thursday I got a worried phone call from someone I barely know asking me about the riots in Brixton and Peckham. She said she'd seen the footage on WhatsApp. I was stood on quiet peaceful Brixton high street when she called and she wouldn't believe me as I kept repeating "There are no...




					www.urban75.net


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 23, 2020)

I spoke with a junior hospital doctor today, who is currently off work on paternity leave due a new baby. He’s in theory back to work in early May, but anticipating that he might be called in earlier to deal with covid cases.

He said he’s been participating in a Coronavirus discussion group on one of his doctor only chat groups and there is much theorising over the effect of viral load on the severity of the disease. This is the amount of virus you’re first exposed to at the time you are infected. The theory is apparently that a high viral load leads to a more severe illness and that info emerging from Italy suggests this may be why many otherwise healthy, young healthcare workers have been developing serious cases.  As an example of a high viral load, he cited if someone in your family gets ill with covid and you’re quarantined together with them, as opposed to catching the virus in a more fleeting encounter such as from an adjacent passenger on a bus journey.

Since most people who become ill with this will have family members living with them who then catch it, it doesn’t bode well that this might be a factor in how those family members fare with the disease.

I know all of the above is effectively hearsay based on my understanding of what he explained to me, and I cannot back it up with a documented source as it was just a conversation, but unless a doctor who is married to my wife’s best friend has a reason to lie to me, I am going to accept it.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 23, 2020)

Grace Johnson said:


> Just seen the local teenagers walking around with gloves and masks on. Wondered if they are just taking sensible precautions and the message is getting through or if they have become a fashion thing.



It was only a matter of time.









						The Quietus | News | Korn's Surgical Masks Sell Out Amid Coronavirus Fears
					

The line of branded masks suddenly sold out over the weekend as the outbreak of COVID19 worsens




					thequietus.com
				












						Coronavirus merch is somehow worse than I expected
					

Do we really need this?




					www.theverge.com
				












						South Korean designers using coronavirus masks as fashion items
					

YouTubers from the region are creating videos to help people do their make-up around wearing a face mask




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 23, 2020)

MrCurry said:


> I spoke with a junior hospital doctor today, who is currently off work on paternity leave due a new baby. He’s in theory back to work in early May, but anticipating that he might be called in earlier to deal with covid cases.
> 
> He said he’s been participating in a Coronavirus discussion group on one of his doctor only chat groups and there is much theorising over the effect of viral load on the severity of the disease. This is the amount of virus you’re first exposed to at the time you are infected. The theory is apparently that a high viral load leads to a more severe illness and that info emerging from Italy suggests this may be why many otherwise healthy, young healthcare workers have been developing serious cases.  As an example of a high viral load, he cited if someone in your family gets ill with covid and you’re quarantined together with them, as opposed to catching the virus in a more fleeting encounter such as from an adjacent passenger on a bus journey.
> 
> ...


Surely the initial dose you receive isn't relevant, but how effectively your immune system suppresses viral reproduction once it has infected your cells?  In theory you could catch a virus with one virion, and end up with a huge viral load.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 23, 2020)

Caravan parks and tourist hotspots in Wales to close
					

The message from the Welsh Government has changed after pressure



					www.walesonline.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Mar 23, 2020)

> The prime minister’s senior adviser has shot down reports he said it would be ‘too bad’ that elderly people would die of coronavirus as a result of the government’s strategy to tackle the disease.
> 
> Dominic Cummings outlined the strategy at the end of February as ‘herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad’, The Sunday Times reported.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

omg he's pre-recorded it. srs times


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

"whatever the fuck you do don't go off-script boz!"


----------



## Ax^ (Mar 23, 2020)

he not closing the offies right

 

how about some fucking testing for the population


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

can i get the police to enforce a delivery slot?


----------



## 8ball (Mar 23, 2020)

So much for not showing cocks on telly before the watershed


----------



## Ax^ (Mar 23, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> can i get the police to enforce a delivery slot?



online delivery services have a 5 week wait atm


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

errrrr translation pls?


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 23, 2020)

So 3 week lockdown else you’ll get dispersed by the fuzz if there’s more than two of you out.


----------



## Sue (Mar 23, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> errrrr translation pls?


That's what I said. Watched it and still didn't understand what he'd just said. Waffly.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

<sent mr b to the offy jik>


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

Ax^ said:


> online delivery services have a 5 week wait atm


i noticed


----------



## Ax^ (Mar 23, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> errrrr translation pls?



Me?

try looking online to get your shopping delivered

it was a 5 week wait for most services yesterday


just imagine what its going to be in the morning


----------



## elbows (Mar 23, 2020)

It is not a 3 week lockdown!

He mentioned reviewing it in 3 weeks. Probably because thats the sort of time you need to see quite how well the measures are working (although there should be some indicators that start earlier than that too, but maybe only weak signals). Nobody should automatically expect that it will end in 3 weeks.


----------



## hegley (Mar 23, 2020)

It's really straightforward. 

From tonight don't leave your house unless it's for the following reasons: you're a key worker and can't WFH; you need essential items - food or medication; you need to take physical exercise. 
Will be reviewed in three week's time.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 23, 2020)

Ax^ said:


> Me?


no, boris!


----------



## Mogden (Mar 23, 2020)

I am a key worker and can't work from home so I shall really very much enjoy walking to work now knowing I won't be faced with pavements full of coughers. Mind I think I've already had it. I'm assuming buses won't be running or very infrequently.


----------



## shifting gears (Mar 23, 2020)

Nothing on construction - I’m a key worker with no choice but a lengthy tube journey twice a day, fully expect to see the builders out in force in the morning - not their fault - until all non-essential sites are closed what are they expected to do?


----------



## 8ball (Mar 23, 2020)

elbows said:


> It is not a 3 week lockdown!
> 
> He mentioned reviewing it in 3 weeks. Probably because thats the sort of time you need to see quite how well the measures are working (although there should be some indicators that start earlier than that too, but maybe only weak signals). Nobody should automatically expect that it will end in 3 weeks.



No, there may be amended plans in 3 weeks, or a tentative schedule for them.

I really need an office chair for my back, wonder whether that comes under "essential items"...


----------



## 8ball (Mar 23, 2020)

shifting gears said:


> Nothing on construction - I’m a key worker with no choice but a lengthy tube journey twice a day, fully expect to see the builders out in force in the morning - not their fault - until all non-essential sites are closed what are they expected to do?



Stay indoors and don't think about The Event.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 23, 2020)

shifting gears said:


> Nothing on construction - I’m a key worker with no choice but a lengthy tube journey twice a day, fully expect to see the builders out in force in the morning - not their fault - until all non-essential sites are closed what are they expected to do?


Traffic is certainly down. Air traffic down. Building sites closed...that would be heaven as we suffer the lot here
 
spoken of earlier..mots under review https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/c...monitor&utm_term=Click to read the full story


----------



## 8ball (Mar 23, 2020)

Will help me out - my car is sure to fail its next one and I could do with time to save up.


----------



## Ax^ (Mar 23, 2020)

was told to take my pc home and see if it works on my home network,

stupidly set it up just before the Gobshite latest fucking speech to the nation

was messing around with stuff when the Chief office sent a email updating the latest changes in company policy due to it

Entitled "Our Prime Minister  Etc Etc"

Had to fight the friggin temptation to be fired in the morning with " Our Prime minister !!  i Never voted for the  Cunt"


----------



## Badgers (Mar 23, 2020)

> Sports Direct and Evans Cycles to stay open as bosses say staff are key workers


----------



## Badgers (Mar 23, 2020)




----------



## MrCurry (Mar 24, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Surely the initial dose you receive isn't relevant, but how effectively your immune system suppresses viral reproduction once it has infected your cells?  In theory you could catch a virus with one virion, and end up with a huge viral load.



I can’t answer that without starting to speculate about things I’m not qualified to talk about, however it does seem to me that if your initial viral load were just one virion, then after three days you’d expect to have far fewer viruses floating around inside you than if it had been 10,000 viruses which all arrived at the same time when your immune system had never met them before. But I am not a virologist!


----------



## prunus (Mar 24, 2020)

MrCurry said:


> I can’t answer that without starting to speculate about things I’m not qualified to talk about, however it does seem to me that if your initial viral load were just one virion, then after three days you’d expect to have far fewer viruses floating around inside you than if it had been 10,000 viruses which all arrived at the same time when your immune system had never met them before. But I am not a virologist!



This is basically correct. The early phases of an infection can be thought of as akin to an arms race, whereby the virus is trying to reproduce as fast as possible and the immune system is trying to gear up its specialist troops to meet the threat, relying on its generalists to keep the virus numbers under control under the specialists arrive. If there are too many to begin with the first line immune system will be overwhelmed and by the time the second line arrives it will be hopelessly outnumbered.  It may then have to try the tactical nukes, but unfortunately the battleground is your body, and the collateral damage possibly fatally high.

Very roughly analogised.  But yes initial infection load does make a difference.


----------



## Knotted (Mar 24, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I made a thread for this kind of s stuff,  we can quarantine it away from the more sane and sensible stuff.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thanks, I was looking a for a thread like that. Quick update - it turns out I didn't persuade this guy of anything. He's still going on about it.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 24, 2020)

Apparently my loss of appetite during this might be a good thing cos I will probably have lost some weight  I'll not name the source of this but suffice to say it's a pretty wrong thing to say at the best of times but now, really?!?


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 24, 2020)

elbows said:


> It is not a 3 week lockdown!
> 
> He mentioned reviewing it in 3 weeks. Probably because thats the sort of time you need to see quite how well the measures are working (although there should be some indicators that start earlier than that too, but maybe only weak signals). Nobody should automatically expect that it will end in 3 weeks.



indeed. It's what happened in Poland. Lock down started on 14th with the schools, universities, cinemas, theatres and gyms already being pretty much closed before then, with a review in two weeks. A week later they said expect this to be "under control" by April 10th. And what they mean by "under control" is the true picture of infection as of two weeks after the time of lock down.

And guys, when lockdown was announced we had around 50 cases officially diagnosed.

Next week we will see the number of infected when lock down occurred, and over the two weeks after we'll see the efficiency of Polish lock down, hopefully a drop in growth of infection.

So April 10th to see what lockdown has achieved.

If I were the UK I'd be expecting the same or even longer looking at the general behaviour of the nation.

We don't actually have any personal "laws" or "curfews" or whatever. The police can't arrest you for being out in a group. That's because everyone has behaved themselves and no one wants to be known as "that cunt" in the community. People here are still very concious of what others think about you, so I think that's a motivating factor. Plus no one actually wants to get sick - Poles in general tend towards hyperchondia (as do I), and also the Poles really care for their families. 2 weeks before lock down was announced I was warning people that I travel a lot on public transport (I teach in businesses and travel to by bus and tram to my classes), and people were asking me if I'd been to Italy or had met anyone who had been to Italy.

When the new semester started there was a woman who had been to Italy about to start,  and the class asked the school not to allow her to start until she had quarantined herself for two weeks. This was 4 WEEKS AGO.

I thought it was a bit harsh, but in hindsight it seemed the paranoia of the students was a good thing. They are really clued up here.

So UK,  expect 3 weeks lockdown and THEN some.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 24, 2020)

And I haven't left the house for 10 days.  It's so fucking dry.  Boring as hell.

I'll continue to do it until I can' psychologically bare it and then go for a run.


----------



## Throbbing Angel (Mar 24, 2020)

Tim Martin's video to staff

password is Tim2020 

ht tps://vim eo.com/399890982   link has spaces in 
	
	



```
https://vimeo.com/399890982
```


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Mar 24, 2020)

Someone needs to download that quickly!


----------



## Numbers (Mar 24, 2020)

Throbbing Angel said:


> Tim Martin's video to staff
> 
> password is Tim2020
> 
> ...


He even sounds like a cunt.


----------



## brix_kitty (Mar 24, 2020)

Has anyone actually got through to the Sainsburys hotline for elderly & vulnerable? My dad is in his late 70s but wasn't included on their list so has been trying all yesterday and this morning to get through but no luck so far.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 24, 2020)

brix_kitty said:


> Has anyone actually got through to the Sainsburys hotline for elderly & vulnerable? My dad is in his late 70s but wasn't included on their list so has been trying all yesterday and this morning to get through but no luck so far.


No, nor the Morrisons one either. And the online system for Ocado said there were 50,000 people in the queue.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 24, 2020)

I see Morrisons now deliver a meat box and veg box, each £35. You get what you are given. The logistics of this for them must be a lot simpler thus making the boxes easier to get hold of?
Drove Mrs T to supermarket and back earlier. There was controlled entry to shop, there was most things on the shelves. Much more controlled and orderly. There was a queuing system for tills, with marked out personal space. Each till was operated by two people, one to ring through, the other to wipe down conveyor belt and key pad after each use.


----------



## treelover (Mar 24, 2020)

not exactly good value, though there may be more than is in the photo

great to hear about S/M, Lidl are doing all this as well


----------



## Epona (Mar 24, 2020)

hash tag said:


> I see Morrisons now deliver a meat box and veg box, each £35. You get what you are given. The logistics of this for them must be a lot simpler thus making the boxes easier to get hold of?
> Drove Mrs T to supermarket and back earlier. There was controlled entry to shop, there was most things on the shelves. Much more controlled and orderly. There was a queuing system for tills, with marked out personal space. Each till was operated by two people, one to ring through, the other to wipe down conveyor belt and key pad after each use.



I just had a look at the veggie one, I feel the risk of getting a vegan tuna substitute is too high 🤮  - why put meat/fish substitutes in at all? A lot of vegetarians don't eat them.  Just include more eggs, cheese, veg, pulses, and grains...


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 24, 2020)

hash tag said:


> Drove Mrs T to supermarket and back earlier. There was controlled entry to shop, there was most things on the shelves. Much more controlled and orderly. There was a queuing system for tills, with marked out personal space. Each till was operated by two people, one to ring through, the other to wipe down conveyor belt and key pad after each use.



Which Supermarket company?

Our stocks are dwindling and I'll need to give one a go again by the end of the week.  I'm dreading it.


----------



## a_chap (Mar 24, 2020)

I went to the supermarket mid-afternoon when I thought it would be pretty quiet. It wasn't as quiet as I'd hoped but most people were clearly keeping their distance from each other.

I dug out an ancient pack of decorator's face masks to wear; I was the only person wearing one. That made me feel kind of smug.

The smugness lasted for all of two minutes when, with a faint twang, the aged elastic of the face mask snapped and shot across the aisle.

 (non face-touching face-palm)


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 24, 2020)

Not long returned from a stroll in the country park with gf - hardly anyone there and those out and about in full compliance with social distancing advice.


----------



## ska invita (Mar 25, 2020)

No doubt discussed elsewhere on the boards, so apologies, but the story "Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study" <if true, wouldnt it be coming up in testing? Or is the study saying we might have it AND it doesnt show up on tests? I know we're not testing much here in the UK, but presumably its simliar in other countries where testing is wider.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 25, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Which Supermarket company?
> 
> Our stocks are dwindling and I'll need to give one a go again by the end of the week.  I'm dreading it.


Waitrose.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

treelover said:


> not exactly good value, though there may be more than is in the photo
> 
> great to hear about S/M, Lidl are doing all this as well









Not really a 'meat' box is it? 
Am assuming that is just for illustration purposes as there is barely £10 worth of food there  

*



			A typical box may include:
		
Click to expand...

*


> Canned baked beans, soup and pasta sauce
> Milk
> Dairy products such as butter and cheese
> Bread
> ...



Fair play to them for doing this, even if (as the picture suggests) it is only really their own brand stuff


----------



## hash tag (Mar 25, 2020)

It's a quick simple way to get stuff out. So much easier for them than processing a proper order. Needs must.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

hash tag said:


> It's a quick simple way to get stuff out. So much easier for them than processing a proper order. Needs must.


Yeah. It is, I am being cynical as per


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

hash tag said:


> It's a quick simple way to get stuff out. So much easier for them than processing a proper order. Needs must.


Yeah. It is, I am being cynical as per


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

WTF


----------



## existentialist (Mar 25, 2020)

elbows said:


> It is not a 3 week lockdown!
> 
> He mentioned reviewing it in 3 weeks. Probably because thats the sort of time you need to see quite how well the measures are working (although there should be some indicators that start earlier than that too, but maybe only weak signals). Nobody should automatically expect that it will end in 3 weeks.


I think that was a careful managing of expectations. I can't imagine that anyone with any degree of knowledge of this expects it to be done and dusted in 3 weeks. But, in 3 weeks, people will be more used to the lockdown routine, and the resistance to saying "Ah. Erm. Three months" will be much less than if they dropped the whole lot on us at once.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 25, 2020)

ska invita said:


> No doubt discussed elsewhere on the boards, so apologies, but the story "Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study" <if true, wouldnt it be coming up in testing? Or is the study saying we might have it AND it doesnt show up on tests? I know we're not testing much here in the UK, but presumably its simliar in other countries where testing is wider.


Claiming no expertise/knowledge here...but...AFAIA the only testing undertaken in the UK is for the presence of the live virus in those already hospitalised presenting with symptoms (plural). So, if people have been exposed, but their immune system has killed the viral infection, then they'd presumably test negative.

Seems like the only way of resolving the varying academic schools is widespread testing for antibodies, and that's not available yet.


----------



## ska invita (Mar 25, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Claiming no expertise/knowledge here...but...AFAIA the only testing undertaken in the UK is for the presence of the live virus in those already hospitalised presenting with symptoms (plural). So, if people have been exposed, but their immune system has killed the viral infection, then they'd presumably test negative.
> 
> Seems like the only way of resolving the varying academic schools is widespread testing for antibodies, and that's not available yet.


but if its spread as widely as 50% it would also be doing so in other countries, and where they are testing widely wouldn't they be finding much higher infection rates in poeple showing no/little symptoms but without the virus killed off totally yet IYSWIM.

Im sure Oxford bods have an answer to this, im just curious what it is

Im also curious on a personal level. I feel fine, but keep having occasional unusual experiences. Last night for example by 10pm felt very week, crashed out hard, feverish dreams for what felt like 8 hours straight, yet feel fine now and felt fine at 9pm last night. And keep having similiar little spells like that on and off, especially in the evenings (though last night particularly intense)


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 25, 2020)

a_chap said:


> I went to the supermarket mid-afternoon when I thought it would be pretty quiet. It wasn't as quiet as I'd hoped but most people were clearly keeping their distance from each other.
> 
> I dug out an ancient pack of decorator's face masks to wear; I was the only person wearing one. That made me feel kind of smug.
> 
> ...




A doctor chap answering questions on Radio 4 yesterday explained why ordinary facemasks actually increase risk:

If you touch the outside of the mask with contaminated hands, the virus is now on the face mask, close to transmission zones, making it far easier to accidentally transmit the virus from the mask to your nose or eyes. If the virus lands on the mask by any means at all, either from your own hands or from somone coughing or sneezing in your immediate vicinity, the mask is now contaminated. The moisture from your breathing will then dampen the mask, giving the virus the environment it likes, and making it possible for it to be drawn through the relatively huge pores of the mask directly into your own mouth and nose.

Don’t use any masks that aren’t designed to keep pathogens out.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 25, 2020)

ska invita said:


> but if its spread as widely as 50% it would also be doing so in other countries, and where they are testing widely wouldn't they be finding much higher infection rates in poeple showing no/little symptoms but without the virus killed off totally yet IYSWIM.
> 
> Im sure Oxford bods have an answer to this, im just curious what it is
> 
> Im also curious on a personal level. I feel fine, but keep having occasional unusual experiences. Last night for example by 10pm felt very week, crashed out hard, feverish dreams for what felt like 8 hours straight, yet feel fine now and felt fine at 9pm last night. And keep having similiar little spells like that on and off, especially in the evenings (though last night particularly intense)




A lot of people are reporting intermittent symptomology. Don’t assume you’re not contagious if you’re cycling between poorly and fine.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 25, 2020)

ska invita said:


> but if its spread as widely as 50% it would also be doing so in other countries, and where they are testing widely wouldn't they be finding much higher infection rates in poeple showing no/little symptoms but without the virus killed off totally yet IYSWIM.
> 
> Im sure Oxford bods have an answer to this, im just curious what it is
> 
> Im also curious on a personal level. I feel fine, but keep having occasional unusual experiences. Last night for example by 10pm felt very week, crashed out hard, feverish dreams for what felt like 8 hours straight, yet feel fine now and felt fine at 9pm last night. And keep having similiar little spells like that on and off, especially in the evenings (though last night particularly intense)


Yes, I do SWYM, but many of us are probably operating well beyond the bounds of our knowledge.

I suppose what slightly alarms me about the Oxford theorising is that it will help to substantiate the views of many of us that we've had contact with the virus already and reinforce in some the (probably false) notion that they're now immune, not shedding virus and can get back out there a la Nadine Dorries.


----------



## Cid (Mar 25, 2020)

ska invita said:


> but if its spread as widely as 50% it would also be doing so in other countries, and where they are testing widely wouldn't they be finding much higher infection rates in poeple showing no/little symptoms but without the virus killed off totally yet IYSWIM.
> 
> Im sure Oxford bods have an answer to this, im just curious what it is
> 
> Im also curious on a personal level. I feel fine, but keep having occasional unusual experiences. Last night for example by 10pm felt very week, crashed out hard, feverish dreams for what felt like 8 hours straight, yet feel fine now and felt fine at 9pm last night. And keep having similiar little spells like that on and off, especially in the evenings (though last night particularly intense)



There’s a bit of discussion over on the UK thread. It’s very hard to tell, but yeah, there do seem to be issues. There were some more knowledgeable people on a related twitter thread pointing out several flaws; that it doesn’t stack up well when compared to areas with known high infection rates (bergamo, the diamond princess), that they haven’t given their confidence levels, that their code isn’t published.

And yeah, think you’re right that it would be showing in SK, Germany etc. Even in the UK a quick look indicates we’ve done 80k tests to about 8k confirmed cases... and presumably, given our testing regime, those are on the most at risk people. Dunno how long testing is viable after recovery mind you... but it does seem inconsistent with what we know.


----------



## 2hats (Mar 25, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> A lot of people are reporting intermittent symptomology. Don’t assume you’re not contagious if you’re cycling between poorly and fine.


The most recent research has observed that infected and then 'recovered' people continue to shed viral genetic material for weeks afterwards.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

Cunt 









						Kirstie Allsopp slammed for taking infected family to second home in Devon
					

Location, Location, Location star Kirstie Allsopp has come under fire by the public for self-isolating in her luxurious second home in Devon with her family after believing she had contracted the coronavirus.




					www.ok.co.uk
				




Wonder what the police can do about this  sadly not much I guess. 
Sending caravan/campervan cunts is one thing but cunts with second homes is trickier to deal with.


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2020)

I'm not sure where best to post this, but Richard Seymour's latest mailout had some interesting passages about 'panic buying' - thought some of you might find them useful.

_There has been a lot of talk about panic buying and selfish hoarders. This talk has superficial plausibility. It is morally intuitive, concrete, resonates with bits of experience, and touches on everyday social resentments. We've all seen people behave selfishly, stupidly. We've all seen the empty shelves glaring back at us like the abyss. Blaming consumers is more satisfying, somehow, than blaming supply chains.

As Greg Callus of the Financial Times points out, the actual increase in demand is overall quite modest. The supermarkets say it's equivalent to a pre-Christmas shopping season: except they haven't had months to prepare for it. And the rationale for people stocking up on versatile foods and staples is sound, given that people are preparing for social distancing, possible quarantine and lockdown. As food experts at City University explain, scapegoating consumer behaviour elides the government's responsibility. They predicated their strategy on manipulating consumer behaviour while leaving market provision in place. Forced to look after themselves, people "cannot be blamed for acting within their viable realm of influence". The result, however, is to aggravate "existing problems" such as the "more than 8.4 million people in the UK" who are food-insecure. The issue here is that the chronic inadequacies of market mechanisms have suddenly become acute.

Most informed analysts will tell you, the supply chain is the problem. There is not actually a shortage of toilet roll and pasta. Rather, the problem arises from how supply chains have been rationalised in recent years. In distribution, there is a well-known problem called the "bullwhip effect". Small changes in consumer demand at one end of a supply chain can be felt as big disruptions at the other end. The bullwhip effect can be totally eliminated, in principle, if orders precisely match purchases in a given period of time. There are two good ways to cope with this issue. One is to collapse the supply chain, so that - even as it spans the globe - it has as few steps as possible. The other is to maximise transparency of distribution, using big data, so that stores can optimise their inventories and minimise costly surpluses.

That's the issue with British supermarkets, perhaps more than others. Tesco and Sainsbury's, for example, have been under a lot of competitive pressure from Aldi and Lidl over the last decade. Profit margins have been cut from 6.4 to 2.7 percent. This has led to rationalisation of inventories and staffing. Their distribution is optimised, during 'normal' periods, for lots of small, regular purchases of the staples that are now being bought in bulk. That has only become the 'norm' fairly recently; the so-called 'panic buying' we're now seeing is a mild version of the big weekly or fortnightly shop that households used to do all the time. But the effect is that during a period like this, which is akin to holiday season without the advantage of several months of preparation, both inventories and staffing become a problem. Demand routinely outstrips supply, even where there is no shortage. The worry now is that staff absences are likely to reach 5-10 percent, causing chaos.
_


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Mar 25, 2020)

Makes sense. I was thinking that last week as I picked up a second tin of baked beans. I would normally only have taken one. If everyone does that, the baked beans disappear very quickly.


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2020)

Totally - the narrative that it was selfish hoarders snatching the last bag of penne from exhausted NHS workers was ludicrous - what else are people going to do under these circumstances than do a big shop, and also maybe get an extra bag or two of things that they know are short when they see them?


----------



## elbows (Mar 25, 2020)

ska invita said:


> No doubt discussed elsewhere on the boards, so apologies, but the story "Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study" <if true, wouldnt it be coming up in testing? Or is the study saying we might have it AND it doesnt show up on tests? I know we're not testing much here in the UK, but presumably its simliar in other countries where testing is wider.



There is plenty of backwards thinking in those headlines, although the study does still say some things that can allow such a headline to be generated.

What the Oxford model is really supposed to do is define a relationship between how many people will require hospitalisation, and how many are already immune.

So the model is not supposed to be a replacement for antibody studies in the population. Rather, it desperately needs that testing to be done, so that the results can be fed into their model, and estimates for hospitalisation over time generated as a result.



> Our simulations are in agreement with other studies that the current epidemic wave in the UK and Italy in the absence of interventions should have an approximate duration of 2-3 months, with the number of deaths lagging behind in time relative to overall infections. Importantly, the results we present here suggest the ongoing epidemics in the UK and Italy started at least a month before the first reported death and have already led to the accumulation of significant levels of herd immunity in both countries. There is an inverse relationship between the proportion currently immune and the fraction of the population vulnerable to severe disease'.





> This relationship can be used to determine how many people will require hospitalisation (and possibly die) in the coming weeks if we are able to accurately determine current levels of herd immunity. There is thus an urgent need for investment in technologies such as virus (or viral pseudotype) neutralization assays and other robust assays which provide reliable read-outs of protective immunity, and for the provision of open access to valuable data sources such as blood banks and paired samples of acute and convalescent sera from confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 to validate these. Urgent development and assessment of such tests should be followed by rapid implementation at scale to provide real-time data. These data will be critical to the proper assessment of the effects of social distancing and other measures currently being adopted to slow down the case incidence and for informing future policy direction.











						Dropbox - File Deleted
					

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!




					www.dropbox.com


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 25, 2020)

2hats said:


> The most recent research has observed that infected and then 'recovered' people continue to shed viral genetic material for weeks afterwards.




Yes. I’ve been s saying this for a couple of weeks. It’s worth repeating.

Also, some indications that the virus was detected on hard surface on the Diamond princess for up to 17 days after it must have landed on the surface.


----------



## platinumsage (Mar 25, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Yes. I’ve been s saying this for a couple of weeks. It’s worth repeating.
> 
> Also, some indications that the virus was detected on hard surface on the Diamond princess for up to 17 days after it must have landed on the surface.



Just because viral RNA is detected doesn't mean that creates a risk of infection.


----------



## weltweit (Mar 25, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Just because viral RNA is detected doesn't mean that creates a risk of infection.


You are going to have to explain that to me in English please?


----------



## 2hats (Mar 25, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Just because viral RNA is detected doesn't mean that creates a risk of infection.


Correct. It's an unknown. It may represent a risk and so should be treated as such for the purposes of infection control.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 25, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Just because viral RNA is detected doesn't mean that creates a risk of infection.




This is true. And hopefully it was just evidence of diligent checking.

But it indicates the potential for extended contagion on surfaces. We need to err on the side of caution right now. Absence of proof of the potential for extended contagion isn’t proof of absence.

The postman who came to my door this morning isn’t someone I've seen before. He stood close to the door and handed me a parcel. He seemed confused when I stepped back. Having seen reports that the virus can survive for 24 hours on cardboard and seeing that Postie was neither going to step back nor lay the parcel down on my doormat I very gingerly took it from him and set it down on the floor. 

Normally I’m very relaxed about hygiene but in the current circumstances I’m taking every possible precaution.

I really ought to have asked him to step back or to lay down the parcel, but pre-virus etiquette stopped me.


----------



## Raheem (Mar 25, 2020)

2hats said:


> Correct. It's an unknown. It may represent a risk and so should be treated as such for the purposes of infection control.


Not sure whether it is an unknown (which I guess makes it one of those unknown unknowns).

A while ago, an expert on Radio 4 said that there's a threshold. You need a certain quantity of the virus in one place for it to be infectious.


----------



## T & P (Mar 25, 2020)

Is it right that I am more excited about having found a box of eggs in the shop this morning than I ever was when I managed to score pills at nightclubs in the 90s?


----------



## 2hats (Mar 25, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Not sure whether it is an unknown (which I guess makes it one of those unknown unknowns).
> 
> A while ago, an expert on Radio 4 said that there's a threshold. You need a certain quantity of the virus in one place for it to be infectious.


And that is? Known? Quantified?


----------



## planetgeli (Mar 25, 2020)

T & P said:


> Is it right that I am more excited about having found a box of eggs in the shop this morning than I ever was when I managed to score pills at nightclubs in the 90s?



I don't believe you. The bit about finding the eggs.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 25, 2020)

WOT - no MOT -


hash tag said:


> WOT...no link people!
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## T & P (Mar 25, 2020)

planetgeli said:


> I don't believe you. The bit about finding the eggs.


Half an hour ago at the Co-op in Tulse Hill there were four packs of rather expensive organic eggs, Well, three after I bought mine. There were also three or four packs of duck's eggs.


----------



## Raheem (Mar 25, 2020)

2hats said:


> And that is? Known? Quantified?


From what he was saying, yes. The bottom line being that there could be traces of RNA on a surface for a very long time, but it will only be infectious for a much shorter time, ranging up to a few days.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 25, 2020)

I've found a new way to pass the time (for me at least). I've been online trolling gun nuts.*  Some of them seem to think they can solve the current problem by buying more guns.  The poor naïve souls have no idea what's coming for them.  No gun is going to save them from sickness or bankruptcy.  

* Full disclosure:  I'm a gun owner.  I used to shoot competitively.  I do not, however, think guns are there to solve all of our problems.


----------



## 2hats (Mar 25, 2020)

Raheem said:


> From what he was saying, yes. The bottom line being that there could be traces of RNA on a surface for a very long time, but it will only be infectious for a much shorter time, ranging up to a few days.


Researcher/group?


----------



## Raheem (Mar 25, 2020)

2hats said:


> Researcher/group?


Like I was saying: (Expert on Radio 4 2020). You're not obliged to believe it if you have a good reason not to.


----------



## 2hats (Mar 25, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Like I was saying: (Expert on Radio 4 2020). You're not obliged to believe it if you have a good reason not to.


It's not a question of belief, but one of ascertaining references.


----------



## Supine (Mar 25, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Not sure whether it is an unknown (which I guess makes it one of those unknown unknowns).



it’s just an unknown. Unknown unknowns are subjects we don’t even know about!


----------



## Raheem (Mar 25, 2020)

Supine said:


> it’s just an unknown. Unknown unknowns are subjects we don’t even know about!


Maybe it's an unknown with self-doubt.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 25, 2020)

hash tag said:


> Waitrose.



Ha.  I didn't need to know, I just wanted to trick you into outing yourself.

Get him urban!


----------



## hash tag (Mar 25, 2020)

If you reread my earlier post, you will conclude it was not me that shopped as I am shielding.
besides which, I have previously defended Waitrose for the way they treat their staff....just saying like


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## weepiper (Mar 25, 2020)

People in the Highlands are losing patience.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 25, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> No gun is going to save them from sickness or bankruptcy.


Technically that statement is untrue.


----------



## treelover (Mar 25, 2020)

GP thinks i have C19, what is revealing is she says many many others are presenting with similar symptoms, I suspect there are massive amounts of cases more than official stats.


----------



## Raheem (Mar 25, 2020)

treelover said:


> GP thinks i have C19, what is revealing is she says many many others are presenting with similar symptoms, I suspect there are massive amounts of cases more than official stats.


What are your symptoms?


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 25, 2020)

treelover said:


> GP thinks i have C19, what is revealing is she says many many others are presenting with similar symptoms, I suspect there are massive amounts of cases more than official stats.



There most certainly is.  Hopefully testing will become available soon and I hope your experience like most is pretty minor.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 25, 2020)

Hardly surprising as it appears to be spreading like wildfire and very few people are getting tested. Also possible many have it without knowing or thinking about it.
We are firefighting with both legs tied together, hands cuffed behind our backs and blindfolded.


----------



## treelover (Mar 25, 2020)

Raheem said:


> What are your symptoms?



will post them later


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 25, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Technically that statement is untrue.



Well, I suppose they could blow their brains out if they get sick, or pawn the gun if they need money.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 25, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> Well, I suppose they could blow their brains out if they get sick, or pawn the gun if they need money.


Or rob a bank.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 25, 2020)

go coventry \o/


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## elbows (Mar 25, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> go coventry \o/



I shall be watching Johnson closely to see if he is playing some kind of SAR-CoV-2 bingo in his press conferences. If he starts going on about covering the coveted covenant covertly then I shall have my answer.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

Did I miss anything of value from disgraced Prime Minister Johnson today?


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 25, 2020)

Another surreal delivery route today.  Out of 164 drops only 3/4 people not home.  Roads clear and few people with gloves and face masks on.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 25, 2020)

London City Airport suspends all flights

Will accommodate military flights I am told.


----------



## elbows (Mar 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Did I miss anything of value from disgraced Prime Minister Johnson today?



Today was mostly journalists grilling them about the slow and crap uk response, and various questions about tests. Johnson said little of value even by his standards, some of the other answers were informative in regards tests. The Oxford model we spoke about here recently was brought up by Johnson, but Vallance pointed out that actual tests are needed to see if it has any merit. The false impression that millions of tests might be sitting around in the chemists next week, just waiting for people to randomly snap them up, was shot down.

To be honest I got so wrapped up in various journalists questions about the UK response, and all the detail about tests, that I probably didnt even notice if anything else was spoken about by Johnson & co.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 25, 2020)

I've also had some entertainment watching the police pull speeders over in front of my house today.  Usually there's so much traffic that you couldn't speed if you tried.  Today, people have been blazing past a good 20 mph over the limit.  I thought one was going to be a police chase.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 25, 2020)

Don’t know if this has been posted on here already.









						Chloe Middleton: Woman, 21, died with 'no underlying health issues'
					

The family of Chloe Middleton say they are "shattered beyond belief".



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Tragic for someone so young to die of this virus.


----------



## treelover (Mar 25, 2020)

Very angry with tesco's

other s/markets are attemping new ways of helping self isolating, those who can't get to shops, but not tesco's, you also can't easily contact customers services.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Did I miss anything of value from disgraced Prime Minister Johnson today?


bozzer was sporting a _very_ homemade haircut


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 25, 2020)

treelover said:


> Very angry with tesco's
> 
> other s/markets are attemping new ways of helping self isolating, those who can't get to shops, but not tesco's, you also can't easily contact customers services.


tl whereabouts are you? is there anything i could do at a distance with a sainsbos pass (not vulnerable, but next in line for any available slots) if you wanna pm me your postcode i can do a regular check x


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 25, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Tragic for someone so young to die of this virus.


i'm not sure i appreciate any kind of ranking of value-of-life atm, appreciate that might not be your intent, tbf.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 25, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> i'm not sure i appreciate any kind of ranking of value-of-life atm, appreciate that might not be your intent, tbf.



It’s not my intent, rather that many youngsters feel invincible to this virus - my 17yr old son being one of them.  I’ve forwarded the article to him to highlight just how serious this pandemic is for everyone.


----------



## treelover (Mar 25, 2020)

Tx, there are plenty of urbanites nr me, i may need to call on them soon. can't shift this virus.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 25, 2020)

treelover said:


> Tx, there are plenty of urbanites nr me, i may need to call on them soon. can't shift this virus.


i'd suggest for calling on them sooner rather than later. there's nothing like the anxiety of an empty fridge to amplify any other daily living challenges. there are people who are ready and willing to help it's just about getting hooked up. all the best x


----------



## ATOMIC SUPLEX (Mar 25, 2020)

What's going on with hospital appointments? I have two yearly check ups coming up, neither urgent as far as I am aware, but there has been no cancellation information.


----------



## Sue (Mar 26, 2020)

ATOMIC SUPLEX said:


> What's going on with hospital appointments? I have two yearly check ups coming up, neither urgent as far as I am aware, but there has been no cancellation information.


I got this by text from my GP yesterday.

"We are getting lots of phone calls from patients asking us if they should attend their hospital appointment. Please call the phone number on your hospital letter to see if your appointment has been cancelled or not. Thank you Xxx Practice"


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 26, 2020)

ATOMIC SUPLEX said:


> What's going on with hospital appointments? I have two yearly check ups coming up, neither urgent as far as I am aware, but there has been no cancellation information.


I had a routine consultant appointment by phone - he rang me a week before the scheduled slot.  I suppose it depends on what the appointment is for, do they need to do any tests, etc.  Worth giving them a ring.


----------



## ATOMIC SUPLEX (Mar 26, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> I had a routine consultant appointment by phone - he rang me a week before the scheduled slot.  I suppose it depends on what the appointment is for, do they need to do any tests, etc.  Worth giving them a ring.


One could probably be done by phone but the other involves blood tests and stuff. I tried finding out about the blood one a week ago and still have not got a response. Have not been able to get through to the other one.


----------



## hegley (Mar 26, 2020)

ATOMIC SUPLEX said:


> What's going on with hospital appointments? I have two yearly check ups coming up, neither urgent as far as I am aware, but there has been no cancellation information.


My mum had a 6-monthly breast cancer check up appointment in the diary for mid-June at East Surrey - got a txt yesterday saying this will now be a telephone appointment only.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 26, 2020)

Drivers now issued with this sign to put in front of van window and additional letter as one of our drivers was pulled over by police yesterday and questioned as to why he was driving.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 26, 2020)

I'd be surprised if Police have the time and resources to be pulling drivers over just to check that their journey is necessary.  Perhaps its more the van thing and the police are wary of dodgy fuckers using this as an opportunity to go rob as many empty commercial premises as they can.


----------



## Numbers (Mar 26, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Drivers now issued with this sign to put in front of van window and additional letter as one of our drivers was pulled over by police yesterday and questioned as to why he was driving.
> 
> View attachment 203379


One could print one of dem at home.


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 26, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Or rob a bank.


Well, that's where the money is, you see.


----------



## existentialist (Mar 26, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I'd be surprised if Police have the time and resources to be pulling drivers over just to check that their journey is necessary.  Perhaps its more the van thing and the police are wary of dodgy fuckers using this as an opportunity to go rob as many empty commercial premises as they can.


They've been doing it in quite a few places round here (West Wales)


----------



## hegley (Mar 26, 2020)

existentialist said:


> They've been doing it in quite a few places round here (West Wales)


Same here (Scotland).


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 26, 2020)

Must be the high levels of thievery in Wales and Scotland.


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 26, 2020)

hegley said:


> My mum had a 6-monthly breast cancer check up appointment in the diary for mid-June at East Surrey - got a txt yesterday saying this will now be a telephone appointment only.


I’ve supposedly got an appointment with my oncologist regarding my ongoing chemotherapy next week. I was advised last week this would probably be by phone, though I am supposed to have blood tests to see if my immune system has restored enough for my next dose. I was advised that I would be expected to go for my treatment a couple of hours earlier to have tests and treatment on same day. But I’m now hearing of Chemotherapy treatments being suspended in areas of the country overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases. So will wait and see.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 26, 2020)

Just thanked the post person as she dropped off 25 days' supply of coffee beans (felt somewhat over-privileged   )
In a day or two I hope to get a seal for my pressure cooker ordered via Amazon and I will feel similarly grateful.

My lovely boss phoned me up yesterday - mostly because she knows I live alone and am getting on a bit - this is not how I envisaged my last months of working life to go (been there almost exactly 38 years)  ... I need to hand my notice in sooner rather than later and HR have gone home along with everyone else.


----------



## Spandex (Mar 26, 2020)

Fucking hell.

One of the local homeless smackheads just shambled past my house, coughing his lungs out, shot up in next door's front yard, then spluttered off again. He looked like shit, but then he usually does.

What can even be done about people in that situation? The council could put him up in the penthouse suite of the Hilton for the next 2 weeks to self isolate, but if they didn't give him 2 weeks smack to go with it there's no way he'd stay put.


----------



## nemoanonemo (Mar 26, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Just thanked the post person as she dropped off 25 days' supply of coffee beans (felt somewhat over-privileged   )
> In a day or two I hope to get a seal for my pressure cooker ordered via Amazon and I will feel similarly grateful.
> 
> My lovely boss phoned me up yesterday - mostly because she knows I live alone and am getting on a bit - this is not how I envisaged my last months of working life to go (been there almost exactly 38 years)  ... I need to hand my notice in sooner rather than later and HR have gone home along with everyone else.


That must be a very large pressure cooker or a very small seal.


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 26, 2020)

This Ted video with Bill Gates is well worth a watch. It was just posted today and in it Bill explains very clearly (from 16:35) why full lockdown for 8-10 weeks is necessary, despite the economic pain. He covers quite a number of other questions, but that was the most interesting segment to me.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 26, 2020)

How is everyone treating their shopping? Are you cleaning it off with anti-viral stuff once you get it home, given the information about how long the virus can survive on surfaces (and how many people might have coughed on it between the packager and the shelf)?


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 26, 2020)

Mostly I've just been quarantining it for a minimum of a few days  - though I suppose it may be time to get more serious as there will be more and more infected people out there.
This morning I had two bags of coffee beans arrive by post and I opened the Jiffy, gelled my hands then rubbed-down the packets.
But I imagine Hasbean are being massively careful.


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 26, 2020)

I have a soapy spray bottle which I blast plastic groceries with, then wipe down. Soap is great at killing viruses - you don’t need special alcohol gel or whatnot.


----------



## treelover (Mar 26, 2020)

If you may have it, can you go downstairs, into the communal garden, wiping handles, etc.


----------



## treelover (Mar 26, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> How is everyone treating their shopping? Are you cleaning it off with anti-viral stuff once you get it home, given the information about how long the virus can survive on surfaces (and how many people might have coughed on it between the packager and the shelf)?



I simply don't have the energy to do all these precautions, especially now i may have it.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> How is everyone treating their shopping? Are you cleaning it off with anti-viral stuff once you get it home, given the information about how long the virus can survive on surfaces (and how many people might have coughed on it between the packager and the shelf)?


I hardly keep any food (apart from some jars and tins) in original packaging. So wash hands, empty stuff into designated jar/tupperware/recepticle and bin packaging. Then wash hands and wipe sides etc. 

Without being massively industrial the best we can really do is precaution.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> If you may have it, can you go downstairs, into the communal garden, wiping handles, etc.


My OCD neighbour keeps disinfecting doors and such 

Honestly if you know you have it I don't think it is safe practice to go into any shared areas


----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)

8pm Clap For Our Carers









						How to join in with tonight's national 'Clap For Our Carers' event for NHS and key workers
					

People use hashtag #ClapForOurCarers to celebrate key workers, including the NHS




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 26, 2020)

I wonder (but not enough to Google) if there's been any Coronagrot made. Mainstream porn will surely have been shut down.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)

Would it be against the spirit of the thing for me to walk down the middle of the road where I live at 8pm with my held aloft?


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Mar 26, 2020)

Finally some good news.  My 92 year old cousin, who was thought to have Covid19 is on the mend. 

I fear for a couple of my cousins.  They're nurses who have volunteered to go the NYC. 

I feel very lucky to be safe and working at home for the duration., big wuss that I am


----------



## weltweit (Mar 26, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> Finally some good news.  My 92 year old cousin, who was thought to have Covid19 is on the mend.
> 
> I fear for a couple of my cousins.  They're nurses who have volunteered to go the NYC.
> 
> I feel very lucky to be safe and working at home for the duration., big wuss that I am


Glad to hear about your cousin, every survivor is a victory! 

And I am also working from home and feeling a little like a big wuss also


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 26, 2020)

Heard a police car earlier briefly sounding the sirens and then using a megaphone to shout at people to go home.   Obviously plenty of wrong 'uns round here.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 26, 2020)

Spandex said:


> Fucking hell.
> 
> One of the local homeless smackheads just shambled past my house, coughing his lungs out, shot up in next door's front yard, then spluttered off again. He looked like shit, but then he usually does.
> 
> What can even be done about people in that situation? The council could put him up in the penthouse suite of the Hilton for the next 2 weeks to self isolate, but if they didn't give him 2 weeks smack to go with it there's no way he'd stay put.


Maybe end the murderous policy of prohibition?


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 26, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 203462



Dear god, that is cringeworthy shit.

Its amazing the level of self - righteous waffle that gets thrown about trying to politically point score.


----------



## smmudge (Mar 26, 2020)

Getting a bit tired of seeing these daytime tv programmes with presenters sitting away from each other, as though they just walked in and sat down, no hair, makeup, micing up and all.


----------



## editor (Mar 26, 2020)

Thank heavens cartridge save are here to reach out and ask the important questions - and get the answers sent out via their PR agency. And don't forget - wear your bra!



> We know that we’re living in unprecedented times right now and we’re all trying to navigate our new normal, and for many people that means adapting to working from home for the first time.
> 
> Cartridge Save has reached out to business leaders who know what it takes to make working from home successful. Here are some of the best tips to keeping your business productive, your team motivated and your mental health on track...
> 
> ...


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 26, 2020)

Some twats are having a party - anti-social pricks!


----------



## Mogden (Mar 26, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Some twats are having a party - anti-social pricks!


Might be the applause for the NHS.


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 26, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Might be the applause for the NHS.


hence my post - whoosh!


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Mar 26, 2020)

Big clap in my street just now. I thought it was a naff idea, but actually it's quite touching.


----------



## Leafster (Mar 26, 2020)

I could hear clapping, whistling and cheering right across the valley here! There was even someone with a trumpet!


----------



## Mogden (Mar 26, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> hence my post - whoosh!


Ah! Bit tired. Can't read between the lines so well when I'm shattered.


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 26, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Big clap in my street just now. I thought it was a naff idea, but actually it's quite touching.


I was still too English/lazy/cynical to join in


----------



## circleline (Mar 26, 2020)

Really grateful to _Elbows _for all his updates in the above thread. On this (his) information I looked to Italy for any precedent relevant to us here.   In casual work discussions, I mentioned the above precedent and shouldered feeling as if I were over-reacting, as I felt (privately) reliably well-informed.  I acted upon this information by insisting to WFH (due to daughter's acute health conditions) from 17th March. 

I am extremely grateful for this reliable and informative posting.

_Round of applause right here_


----------



## planetgeli (Mar 26, 2020)

I live in a village, population 50, houses spread randomly everywhere.. There were loads of people clapping. It was heartwarming.


----------



## eatmorecheese (Mar 26, 2020)

Screaming and clapping over Streatham... That was weird and moving, cynic as I am...


----------



## circleline (Mar 26, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Big clap in my street just now. I thought it was a naff idea, but actually it's quite touching.




Same here... All neighbours were out and we're not on a main road or anything...no posing, just generally and genuinely grateful, I believe..


----------



## Badgers (Mar 26, 2020)

Was really surprised and a bit touched. Almost the whole street were at their doors and windows clapping for a good few minutes  

Lots of wooping and lights being flashed on and off.


----------



## discokermit (Mar 26, 2020)

our street went mad, clapping, whooping, cheering and fireworks. powerful.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 26, 2020)

I swallowed my inner mardy hermit and joined in. I don't feel moved particularly but everyone was out making a lot of noise and I can't help pondering on just how strange life has become. How something really, really big is happening and who knows where it's all going to end up.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 26, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Big clap in my street just now. I thought it was a naff idea, but actually it's quite touching.




I forgot it was happening, heard it and was surprised it was taken up so widely and enthusiastically in my area, and joined in. To my own surprise I suddenly burst into tears.

I thinks that’s about connection at this time of separation.

Presumably most NHS folk will be either far too busy, travelling, sleeping etc to hear it or kinda not wanting it to happen (judging by what Urban NHS folk have said on their thread). So it occurred to me that this out-loud demonstration is a way for everyone to acknowledge that we’re all sharinng this thing. 

Only connect etc.


ETA
I broke a really good wooden spoon though, banging on a saucepan.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 26, 2020)

circleline said:


> Really grateful to _Elbows _for all his updates in the above thread. On this (his) information I looked to Italy for any precedent relevant to us here.   In casual work discussions, I mentioned the above precedent and shouldered feeling as if I were over-reacting, as I felt (privately) reliably well-informed.  I acted upon this information by insisting to WFH (due to daughter's acute health conditions) from 17th March.
> 
> I am extremely grateful for this reliable and informative posting.
> 
> _Round of applause right here_




I’ve  been thinking that elbows may well have made a material difference to numbers and outcomes . I reckon some people have been more switched on and cautious and responsible than they would otherwise have been, directly because of elbows ‘s calm clear informative posting.

(Also weltweit  and others who kept the discussion going in the early days so kept the thread bumped to the top)


 For sure I was nagging people with facts and warnings as early as 28 Feb because of elbows posts.


----------



## elbows (Mar 26, 2020)

Oh dear, I'm very grateful for these lovely sentiments but I'm not good at knowing how to respond to them.

And I could not have said all the things I said about this pandemic if it were not for all the other people posting about it too, having people to bounce stuff off and learn from and nitpick over and just bloody well argue with at times. 

As the present fades into the past, lets resist the urge to oversimplify things as being more about me and my words than I believe was actually the case. What I firmly believe helped prepare people was everyone, all of us having these discussions here, coming to terms with a rapidly changing situation. Yes, I got really lucky with my prior knowledge and my timing, perhaps I was able to offer far more spoliers for this pandemic than I could possibly have imagined. But even if that was sort of true for a time, it grows less true with every passing month, there are still some aspects of the pandemic that might be expected to follow an assumed script, but in other areas we really are in uncharted territory. I expected to be less use in March than I was in February, and I think that has been the case. Anyway now I am rambling on and dont know how to finish. So cheers, be safe, hope to get through this and then after the pandemic I might feel like being cheeky and asking for some help & friends to bring meaning to my existence.


----------



## treelover (Mar 26, 2020)

smmudge said:


> Getting a bit tired of seeing these daytime tv programmes with presenters sitting away from each other, as though they just walked in and sat down, no hair, makeup, micing up and all.



actually many are doing their own make up, ITV NEWS anchor Mary Nightingale tweeted she is not ill just doing her own make up, after enquiries into her health!

she looks great actually.


----------



## kalidarkone (Mar 26, 2020)

elbows said:


> Oh dear, I'm very grateful for these lovely sentiments but I'm not good at knowing how to respond to them.
> 
> And I could not have said all the things I said about this pandemic if it were not for all the other people posting about it too, having people to bounce stuff off and learn from and nitpick over and just bloody well argue with at times.
> 
> As the present fades into the past, lets resist the urge to oversimplify things as being more about me and my words than I believe was actually the case. What I firmly believe helped prepare people was everyone, all of us having these discussions here, coming to terms with a rapidly changing situation. Yes, I got really lucky with my prior knowledge and my timing, perhaps I was able to offer far more spoliers for this pandemic than I could possibly have imagined. But even if that was sort of true for a time, it grows less true with every passing month, there are still some aspects of the pandemic that might be expected to follow an assumed script, but in other areas we really are in uncharted territory. I expected to be less use in March than I was in February, and I think that has been the case. Anyway now I am rambling on and dont know how to finish. So cheers, be safe, hope to get through this and then after the pandemic I might feel like being cheeky and asking for some help & friends to bring meaning to my existence.


Just take it man 😍


----------



## fieryjack (Mar 27, 2020)

I may have missed something: is any genuine change of circumstance being foisted on major land/lease holders? A lot of the corporate douchebaggery, wetherspoons etc, has to be linked to rates/rent payments. I would like to think that those organisations who own prime land are willingly joining in with the general loss of earnings/all in this together/bullshit blitz spirit, but I expect to be disappointed. A rent holiday doesn't count.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 27, 2020)

Wow! 









						Coronavirus: Food worth $35,000 'deliberately' coughed on in supermarket — Sky News
					

A supermarket has had to throw away $35,000 (£28,500) of groceries after a woman "deliberately" coughed on fresh food.




					apple.news


----------



## Sprocket. (Mar 27, 2020)

It was heartwarming to see and hear the support shown for the NHS last night. Will this become a weekly event?


----------



## weltweit (Mar 27, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> It was heartwarming to see and hear the support shown for the NHS last night. Will this become a weekly event?


I think in Spain and Italy it is every evening.


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 27, 2020)

I didn't know about it as I'm not bothering to watch the news atm


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 27, 2020)

At least in my street - and area come to that, there will be very few Tory voters


weltweit said:


> I think in Spain and Italy it is every evening.


I'm still holding out for the musicians in my street to get together .. I'm fairly certain my voice coach neighbour was singing Italian opera yesterday 
I felt somewhat "English" when I forced myself to clap and then bash a bicycle frame with a coat-hanger.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 27, 2020)

rubbershoes said:


> I didn't know about it as I'm not bothering to watch the news atm


I may have a peek at some point - having heard about the "him and her" tag teams sitting 2 metres apart and looking relatively unkempt to demonstrate solidarity ..


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 27, 2020)

Rationing myself to checking (written only) news twice a day. I haven’t watched tv news for years as it’s too enraging. Am in the privileged position of being insulated from seeing or hearing Boris Johnson spaff on about shit - why put yourself through such an ordeal? I can only keep a calm head if I process stuff like this by only reading about it


----------



## two sheds (Mar 27, 2020)

Yes me too, I can't even listen to it on radio because you can't skim over the boring/annoying bits.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 27, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Rationing myself to checking (written only) news twice a day. I haven’t watched tv news for years as it’s too enraging. Am in the privileged position of being insulated from seeing or hearing Boris Johnson spaff on about shit - why put yourself through such an ordeal? I can only keep a calm head if I process stuff like this by only reading about it


A government survey popped up the other day asking me where I got my information about CV19 - long list of disgusting rags ... TV and radio ... "social media" ...then did I actually watch government announcements ?

I suspect I came across as ill-informed ...

It may be time to start "sleeping" Facebook groups again - I already tired of taking the piss out of French "big pharma" conspiranuts on one group who repeatedly post chloroquine bollocks (several French and Belgian connections) - they have a brilliant health service over there, but are also massively into "bio" ("organic") and woo ... I can't even be arsed to get to deeply into understanding all that ...

I confess I made two frivolous sorties into town last week in panicked search of a replacement bike (which I may well now not get to use in anger for a month) - albeit taking care to keep my distance - and it took the official "stay at home" instructions to make me take real notice.

I suppose I ought to make the effort to learn a bit more about virology ... and I don't even know nearly enough about the basics of how the DNA-RNA thing works in cell biology - I feel the need to know because I fix the printers of people who work in that field ...


----------



## weltweit (Mar 27, 2020)

Oh I am a bit of a news hound, I like to know the max what is going on. My dad was the same while my son seems to only get occasional snippits via messenger.


----------



## weltweit (Mar 27, 2020)

Apparently some government moves to get the rough sleepers off the streets and into shelter. 

Hope it works for the homeless as well as the councils.


----------



## treelover (Mar 27, 2020)

tescos still not prioritising disabled, sick, elderly with its online service, new update had no mention, just going bagged again, etc.


----------



## Aladdin (Mar 27, 2020)

Rescue Helicopter has been overhead a few times on the past 2 days. They land at the hospital which is about 1km away. Word is numbers in icu are increasing and the plan is for the hospital to move icu upwards through the hospital as required. So the entire hospital will become a giant icu. There are 4 small hospitals in the region and they are reportedly supposed to take up all other emergencies and necessary treatments.
Worrying for staff. Most of whom as yet do not have PPE. The immediate icu staff have but outside of the current icu there are no masks


----------



## elbows (Mar 27, 2020)

I saw the thumbnail for Johnsons self-isolation video and I just thought.....


Wot, no PPE?


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 27, 2020)

what's PPE? Presumably not Politics Philosphy Economics


----------



## elbows (Mar 27, 2020)

Personal Protective Equipment.

If I had time to make the joke all over again I might say Wot, no tests? instead.


----------



## treelover (Mar 27, 2020)

weltweit said:


> I think in Spain and Italy it is every evening.



every night now

tbh, i think it will make those on their own feel even more alone, lots of families out, etc.


----------



## treelover (Mar 27, 2020)

Abbey Road zebra crossing repainted in coronavirus lockdown
					

Council workers take advantage of the empty streets to spruce up the crossing featured on the cover of the Beatles’ 1969 album




					www.theguardian.com
				




The G music journo has made a big article out of it as not much else for her to write about.


----------



## scifisam (Mar 27, 2020)

I just ordered some booze from an off-licence via Uber-eats and the offie has changed the name of Corona beer to Colona


----------



## brogdale (Mar 27, 2020)

This evening's No. 10 pressa is a bit like Liverpool in the cup.


----------



## killer b (Mar 27, 2020)

treelover said:


> Abbey Road zebra crossing repainted in coronavirus lockdown
> 
> 
> Council workers take advantage of the empty streets to spruce up the crossing featured on the cover of the Beatles’ 1969 album
> ...


You've read the guardian before havent you? This kind of ephemera is in it every day.


----------



## scifisam (Mar 27, 2020)

scifisam said:


> I just ordered some booze from an off-licence via Uber-eats and the offie has changed the name of Corona beer to Colona



And they phoned me to change a couple of items (I said a polite no to the fruity Jacobs Creek or whatever thing which isn't actually wine - not a snob, it's fruit juice with a little wine in - but they had something else), and they added a free chocolate bar for some reason, and their delivery guy arrived wearing a motorbike helmet despite not being on a motorbike, which I have to say (and said to him from a safe distance) is a very good idea.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 27, 2020)

scifisam said:


> I just ordered some booze from an off-licence via Uber-eats and the offie has changed the name of Corona beer to Colona



Genius!


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 27, 2020)

As this lockdown progresses - I think people are going to start to slowly take chances and start going out and lose discipline.


----------



## Serge Forward (Mar 27, 2020)

Yeah but fuck off.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 27, 2020)

‘Lockdown shaming’ becomes a thing by Derbyshire police using drones.









						Coronavirus: Peak District drone police criticised for 'lockdown shaming'
					

Derbyshire Police is accused of "nanny policing" after sharing aerial shots of Peak District walkers.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Hollis (Mar 27, 2020)

Just went for my daily 'exercise' a stroll around Wood Green - virtually empty - but quite a visible police prescence - seems they were looking to disperse any groups of people.


----------



## treelover (Mar 27, 2020)

Letter sent to major supermarket chains and UK Government
 from UK M.E. charities and the All Party Parliamentary Group on M.E. Friday 27 March 2020 ...
"While those who are house/bed-bound are not necessarily included in the Government’s official category of “vulnerable,” this does not give the full picture.
This group of increasingly desperate people are unable to visit a store and many have no friends or family to support them.
 They need urgent help now – please will you:
Include those house/bed-bound by M.E./CFS in your priority access group for your online service?
Allow those with M.E./CFS, who are able to leave the house, access to priority shopping times in store?
We would be happy to provide our members with a resource they can download that shows they have a chronic neurological condition and are eligible to use this service.”

actionforme.org.uk

www.actionforme.org.uk
https://www.actionforme.org.uk/uplo...ZA1HRM4cDEIcTRr7lojX9Hoz2ytUcb9PaAIF98VBOpdJ4


----------



## B.I.G (Mar 27, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> ‘Lockdown shaming’ becomes a thing by Derbyshire police using drones.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



You know who else has a hard on for “lockdown shaming”. Katie Hopkins.

You are Katie Hopkins and I claim my £5.

Both despicable nazi cunts.


----------



## weltweit (Mar 28, 2020)

Hollis said:


> Just went for my daily 'exercise' a stroll around Wood Green - virtually empty - but quite a visible police prescence - seems they were looking to disperse any groups of people.


When I was a student there was a careers software package that we used to try to see what our future could hold, some of the questions like do you like making sure other people stick to rules? to which my response was always no thanks. But that is police for you, they are people that love to tell others what to do, they love to enforce rules, rules that often they don't think apply to them, see speeding for example. One of the worse aspects of this epidemic is giving more power to the police to tell us what to do, more than they do already. Yes it has to be done but that does not mean we have to like it.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Mar 28, 2020)

Local kids going a bit bonkers in my street, climbing over walls, throwing bricks, shouting and screaming. Cops turned up and they pissed off. 
Small beer, but i would imagine this will be a growing problem, especially if we have warm weather and all the normal teen hangouts are closed.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 28, 2020)

Actor Mark Blum has died of coronavirus complications.

RIP.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 28, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> Local kids going a bit bonkers in my street, climbing over walls, throwing bricks, shouting and screaming. Cops turned up and they pissed off.
> Small beer, but i would imagine this will be a growing problem, especially if we have warm weather and all the normal teen hangouts are closed.



I worry that families will be criminalised over stuff like this. And of course it will be poorer families with no outdoor space for their kids to play in that get the brunt of it.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 28, 2020)

I might be delivering test kits soon.





__





						Redirect Notice
					





					www.google.com


----------



## Numbers (Mar 28, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> Local kids going a bit bonkers in my street, climbing over walls, throwing bricks, shouting and screaming. Cops turned up and they pissed off.
> Small beer, but i would imagine this will be a growing problem, especially if we have warm weather and all the normal teen hangouts are closed.


It’s going to be a very longggg summer.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 28, 2020)

Just had a text off the gf - local country park has just been closed down due to too many people going.


----------



## bimble (Mar 28, 2020)

My sister says she just suddenly lost her sense of smell yesterday, even when sticking her nose over bottle of vinegar. That must be so strange.
Sorry if it’s already been posted but looks like advice is going around to look out for this and behave accordingly even if it’s your only symptom:


			https://www.entuk.org/sites/default/files/files/Loss%20of%20sense%20of%20smell%20as%20marker%20of%20COVID.pdf


----------



## B.I.G (Mar 28, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Just had a text off the gf - local country park has just been closed down due to too many people going.



“Lockdown shaming”


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

One of the people who set up our street WhatsApp group has finally stepped in and said "please can we keep this group to useful local updates and helping each other".

All manner of shit has been sent round. Last night a load of really unfunny clips, mostly not even on the topic of coronavirus, were sent round and this morning, someone shares a clip from a Chinese TV show from 2002 which featured a deadly coronavirus with the comment "I don't know what to think". Then someone else sent some other cospiraloon thing that I didn't even watch. I lost it and replied that this is all ridiculous nonsense. Probably should have been more measured but the conspiracy stuff is really angering me.

Then we got the message to keep the group to useful stuff. Lots of people sent agreement, including the person who had sent the conspiracy shit in the first place.

At least my phone won't be going off every 5 minutes now. I hope.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 28, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Just had a text off the gf - local country park has just been closed down due to too many people going.



Brilliant, so now people can keep their distance while crammed onto the pavements


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 28, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> One of the people who set up our street WhatsApp group has finally stepped in and said "please can we keep this group to useful local updates and helping each other".
> 
> All manner of shit has been sent round. Last night a load of really unfunny clips, mostly not even on the topic of coronavirus, were sent round and this morning, someone shares a clip from a Chinese TV show from 2002 which featured a deadly coronavirus with the comment "I don't know what to think". Then someone else sent some other cospiraloon thing that I didn't even watch. I lost it and replied that this is all ridiculous nonsense. Probably should have been more measured but the conspiracy stuff is really angering me.
> 
> ...



You can mute notifications on Whatsapp groups.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> You can mute notifications on Whatsapp groups.


Can you? I want to get notifications for other things. Just not this group. Anyway....delicious silence from them now.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Mar 28, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Can you? I want to get notifications for other thing. Just not this one. Anyway....delicious silence from them now.



You can do it for individual groups. Go onto the group chat, go to the three dots at top right, then pick mute notifications on the drop down menu. You can do it for an hour, day, or until further notice.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Mar 28, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Can you? I want to get notifications for other things. Just not this group. Anyway....delicious silence from them now.


You can mute notifications for individual chats.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 28, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Yes me too, I can't even listen to it on radio because you can't skim over the boring/annoying bits.




I get round this by listening to it later on the Sounds app and spooling through the dross.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

Thank you SpookyFrank and Rutita1 !!! Wish i'd known this earlier.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Mar 28, 2020)

I have just suggested to our street group that those of us with gardens consider making them available to those in the street who live on the upper floors and don't. I am also offering seeds, soil and pots to anyone living in a flat that wants to grow things on their window sills.


----------



## Doodler (Mar 28, 2020)

Giving joggers the bodyswerve when out and about. With all their puffing, panting and gasping they're like virus-spreading steam locomotives.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 28, 2020)

Call me eccentric, but I've reactivated my political window for the duration ...
Since there should be no one out and about at night, I will probably only illuminate it on Thursdays ...



And I stuck a "thankyou" over the letterbox for the delivery people.


----------



## xenon (Mar 28, 2020)

As well as the NHS staff, carers, people working in the supply chain of essentials, check out staff, utility workers, take away operators, delivery drivers, posties, should add waste and recycling workers to the list who deserve thanks and gratitude.

Thank fuck the bins and recycling are still being collected.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 28, 2020)

difficult to express all that.
I will stick a notice to my wheelie bin


----------



## treelover (Mar 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> My sister says she just suddenly lost her sense of smell yesterday, even when sticking her nose over bottle of vinegar. That must be so strange.
> Sorry if it’s already been posted but looks like advice is going around to look out for this and behave accordingly even if it’s your only symptom:
> 
> 
> https://www.entuk.org/sites/default/files/files/Loss%20of%20sense%20of%20smell%20as%20marker%20of%20COVID.pdf



happened to me i spray lemon myrtle around my flat, it has a lovely but pungent spray, can't smell nowt, could be allergy season, but think its C19.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 28, 2020)

Good luck you guys ... I suppose if we're lucky, we get a minor viral hit in a non-critical place and get to make antibodies ready for bigger exposures ...


----------



## Pingety Pong (Mar 28, 2020)

xenon said:


> Thank fuck the bins and recycling are still being collected.



We got a message today that our council (in Greater Manchester) aren't collecting the green or blue bins anymore. Only the black ones every fortnight, and once a month the bottles.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 28, 2020)

xenon said:


> As well as the NHS staff, carers, people working in the supply chain of essentials, check out staff, utility workers, take away operators, delivery drivers, posties, should add waste and recycling workers to the list who deserve thanks and gratitude.
> 
> Thank fuck the bins and recycling are still being collected.



I think they’ve been given key-worker status now.

But they’re not well protected or supported.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 28, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> difficult to express all that.
> I will stick a notice to my wheelie bin




Yeah, I’m doing this too.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> happened to me i spray lemon myrtle around my flat, it has a lovely but pungent spray, can't smell nowt, could be allergy season, but think its C19.




This symptom I should now widely reported. 

Zinc deficiency caused loss of small and taste. We use zinc to power up the immune syste.

It’s possible that it’s an early symptom because the immune system is detecting and responding to the infection, and so using up zinc.

Top up your zinc :
Meat
Dairy
Eggs
Nuts
Seeds (esp sesame, pumpkin)
Legumes


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

They've started again on the WhatsApp group. I'm going to have to just ignore it. I'm  not sure whether to just leave the group but will I then be the miserable cunt who doesn't want to pull together in these difficult times?


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

It's making me feel like a real bloody awful misanthrope and I'm not. I just don't want random thoughts from someone up the street.

I think I need to quietly leave the group. If I leave the group, does a notification show up or do you just disappear?


----------



## killer b (Mar 28, 2020)

it says [name] has left the conversation. I'd just mute it for a week - these groups are just full of crap atm because there isn't _that_ much for them to do yet - that might be different next week. Probably will be.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

OK. I dont really want to flounce and I am in a foul mood today. I'll just ignore it.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Mar 28, 2020)

Maybe I am an awful misanthrope


----------



## killer b (Mar 28, 2020)

not at all, the mutual support facebook group I've joined is full of similar bollocks - I'd have turned it off last week if I was getting an alert everytime someone posted some bullshit conspiracy or another awful meme to it.


----------



## hash tag (Mar 28, 2020)

Rationing, stuff difficult to get hold of, black market economy, DONT PANIC
Dads Army is still showing


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 28, 2020)

Amazon have stopped drivers leaving parcels with neighbours today.


----------



## kenny g (Mar 28, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Amazon have stopped drivers leaving parcels with neighbours today.



GOOD. Really felt for my neighbour last week. Apparently he had about five parcels for different neighbours in his front hall. New arrival so he couldn't exactly tell them to fuck off but did seem bizarre in terms of where we are nowadays.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 28, 2020)

discokermit said:


> our street went mad, clapping, whooping, cheering and fireworks. powerful.



Yeah, same here - I nearly shit myself, didn’t know anything about this clapping, cheering thing.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

Went to Boots to see if could order some hayfever tablets online - 68,940 people ahead of me just to access the website.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 29, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> Maybe I am an awful misanthrope




I think this place serves a similar need/purpose, but is way better than a WhatsApp group. We only log in when we want to, have to opt in (not out) of alerts and only follow threads that interest us.


----------



## xes (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Went to Boots to see if could order some hayfever tablets online - 68,940 people ahead of me just to access the website.
> 
> View attachment 203881


At least you can sort out your own on hold music.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

xes said:


> At least you can sort out your own on hold music.


And the excitement builds - I am now at 38,415 in the queue.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

Anyone want anything ordering from Boots while I'm in the giant queue?


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 29, 2020)

Lockdown possibly till June.









						Coronavirus: Boris Johnson reveals 20,000 ex-NHS staff have returned to help fight COVID-19 — Sky News
					

Boris Johnson has revealed 20,000 ex-staff have returned to the NHS to help fight coronavirus after Britons were warned restrictions on their lives may last for at least six months.




					apple.news


----------



## Badgers (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Anyone want anything ordering from Boots while I'm in the giant queue?


Codeine and Viagra


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Codeine and Viagra


I'll see if they sell that online.  I've just noticed they've used a bloody awful awful phrase 'shopping the website'  

Now at 15,055.


----------



## xes (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Anyone want anything ordering from Boots while I'm in the giant queue?


I hope you're all 2 meters apart!


----------



## xes (Mar 29, 2020)

There's now 146,442 in the queue.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

xes said:


> I hope you're all 2 meters apart!


What puzzles me is how much demand can there be for stuff boots sells?  I understand the supermarkets being swamped, but there's only so much shampoo and stuff any individual can possibly buy so why do they need a queue.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

xes said:


> There's now 146,442 in the queue.


Blood hell!  Now at 12,145.  If my browser crashes I'll be very unhappy.


----------



## JuanTwoThree (Mar 29, 2020)

This about shopworkers from Grace Dent in the Guardian

I hope we remember the selfless hard work of the till workers and midnight shelf-stackers, the people on self-service checkouts who sort our unexplained item in the baggage area problems without maintaining a safe distance. Forever touching the screens we’ve just touched, keeping the queues moving and, by default, breathing in our germs. As shoppers ransacked the pasta and fought over UHT, they had no time to plan for their own families or to watch rolling news or to think too hard if their sweat was the mark of hard work or a fever. I would hug, if I could, the team at my Sainsbury’s Local, who open at dawn every day, always jolly, with the shelves restocked with small amounts of almost all vital items. I’m especially indebted to the drivers whom I’m trusting to get to my mother. They’re taking up the slack on what is now my biggest life problem. I’m trusting total strangers to feed her, not upset her, not frighten her, to keep their distance and to leave the boxes somewhere handy. And to explain to her why there are no rich teas. I wouldn’t call that job unskilled at all.


----------



## A380 (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Blood hell!  Now at 12,145.  If my browser crashes I'll be very unhappy.


Don’t let anyone turn the microwave on...


----------



## Espresso (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Anyone want anything ordering from Boots while I'm in the giant queue?



One of those darling low calorie cous cous salads with artisan rye croutons, unicorn eyeballs and pink Himalayan salt, a five hundred pound Dyson hairdryer and the medium sized 4711 cologne stick, please.
Failing that,  the largest bottle of hydrogen peroxide you can carry so I can bleach my 'tache and scrub the front path.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> I'll see if they sell that online.  I've just noticed they've used a bloody awful awful phrase 'shopping the website'
> 
> Now at 15,055.


I was actually joking about the viagra but have a fucking toothache  might pop into boots Monday


----------



## xes (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Blood hell!  Now at 12,145.  If my browser crashes I'll be very unhappy.


you an play dare by hovering your finger over 'refresh' and see how close you can get to pushing it.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> What puzzles me is how much demand can there be for stuff boots sells?


prescriptions? all the drugs??


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

I'm now on the site - 2 hours and 35 minutes later.  They have hayfever tablets in stock but the little spinny thing is going round and round trying to add it to the basket.  God this is painful - like doing online shopping with a 56k modem.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> prescriptions? all the drugs??


They do deliver prescriptions, but they have a separate online order and delivery site it seems which doesn't have a queue.  There is a tab on the main site for prescriptions, but not sure how that works for home delivery.  The only things I can are standard OTC drugs, but looking round the site lots of products are out of stock including things like electric razors.  Who panic buys electric shavers?

Now the bloody site won't let me checkout...the button doesn't respond at all.


----------



## wayward bob (Mar 29, 2020)

they didn't want my custom the other day when they closed the pharmacy for 2 hours over lunch either


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> they didn't want my custom the other day when they closed the pharmacy for 2 hours over lunch either


It's annoying when the pharamcists bugger off exactly when you want to pick up a prescription.  Their site is annoying me now - I don't mind if they displayed a message saying they can only process x number of orders per minute or whatever, but the checkout function just doesn't work.   

Going to leave the tab open to see if I can place the order later, but I bet they'll cancel the basket.  I've opened a tab on the phone browser so will try later on today when hopefully it'll have quietened down a bit.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

Just looked out the window - a car stopped at a junction apparently lost, and a couple walking their dog went and leaned in to the driver's open window to give directions.


----------



## xes (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Just looked out the window - a car stopped at a junction apparently lost, and a couple walking their dog went and leaned in to the driver's open window to give directions.


Are you sure he wasn't just giving them sweeties?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 29, 2020)

xes said:


> Are you sure he wasn't just giving them sweeties?


Viral sweeties no doubt.


----------



## Aladdin (Mar 29, 2020)

Sun splitting the rocks here. 
About half an hour ago a voice came over a loudspeaker,
"Please go home immediately after your walk".
The gardai were driving around telling people to make sure they went home. 
There were roughly 10 people passed the window in the space of 10 minutes. Definitely not a crowd. 

Sat in the back garden with a cup of tea and listened to the birds. It isn't often I can hear them. Usually their little songs are drowned out with traffic noise. But today it's like being in the countryside. 
Just lovely. 🙂


----------



## skyscraper101 (Mar 29, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> I'm now on the site - 2 hours and 35 minutes later.  They have hayfever tablets in stock but the little spinny thing is going round and round trying to add it to the basket.  God this is painful - like doing online shopping with a 56k modem.



Had you considered using Amazon? I know a lot of people boycott them (with good reason), but I've never seen such queue system madness there. I'm pretty sure you can get hayfever tablets.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 29, 2020)

JuanTwoThree said:


> This about shopworkers from Grace Dent in the Guardian
> 
> I hope we remember the selfless hard work of the till workers and midnight shelf-stackers, the people on self-service checkouts who sort our unexplained item in the baggage area problems without maintaining a safe distance. Forever touching the screens we’ve just touched, keeping the queues moving and, by default, breathing in our germs. As shoppers ransacked the pasta and fought over UHT, they had no time to plan for their own families or to watch rolling news or to think too hard if their sweat was the mark of hard work or a fever. I would hug, if I could, the team at my Sainsbury’s Local, who open at dawn every day, always jolly, with the shelves restocked with small amounts of almost all vital items. I’m especially indebted to the drivers whom I’m trusting to get to my mother. They’re taking up the slack on what is now my biggest life problem. I’m trusting total strangers to feed her, not upset her, not frighten her, to keep their distance and to leave the boxes somewhere handy. And to explain to her why there are no rich teas. I wouldn’t call that job unskilled at all.



👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 29, 2020)

skyscraper101 said:


> Had you considered using Amazon? I know a lot of people boycott them (with good reason), but I've never seen such queue system madness there. I'm pretty sure you can get hayfever tablets.



I’ve just ordered 2 face masks but they don’t arrive until May😕  Amazon hand out disposable rubber gloves every morning but not masks.

Going to see if my dad has any painters masks I can use as I’m sure he said he had some.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 30, 2020)

skyscraper101 said:


> Had you considered using Amazon? I know a lot of people boycott them (with good reason), but I've never seen such queue system madness there. I'm pretty sure you can get hayfever tablets.


Tried there - none of the ones that work for me even listed for sale, even though the drug name comes up as a search suggestion.  Went back onto boots an hour ago (another queue so left the browser window open) and now they've sold out.  So I'll have to go to see if I can find some in the shops today as I've now ran out.


----------



## Hollis (Mar 30, 2020)

Never thought placing a shopping order with Tesco would generate the same adrenaline rush as trying to get tickets for Glastonbury.. ho hum..  😬


----------



## two sheds (Mar 30, 2020)

Hollis said:


> Never thought placing a shopping order with Tesco would generate the same adrenaline rush as trying to get tickets for Glastonbury.. ho hum..  😬



Quite - they seem to open the third-week-in-advance slots around midnight on Sunday. Well I say that - I have a slot for about a month away, whether they let me actually order things is a separate matter, and also whether what I order is available when it comes to delivery is another matter. I think you need to go in the day before and find out what they're not going to supply so you can give alternatives.


----------



## Hollis (Mar 30, 2020)

Yep - that's what i had to do with previous order at Asda - first thing is to secure the slot - then figure out what to buy later..


----------



## Hollis (Mar 30, 2020)

Right after all that excitement, time to chill out with some Hawkwind.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 30, 2020)

Blimey that was weird.
I did my first shop in nearly two weeks ... small Tesco had queues, Aldi was self-regulating until the checkout ... I still can't bring myself to wear a mask in public.
I accidentally grabbed 6 soy milks instead of 4. 

This morning I had an embarrassment.
In addition to posters in my front window, I stuck a "thank you" on the wheelie bin and the guy looked like he assumed there would be a fiver in the plastic bag - made me feel a bit patronising. 

I may brave the more compact Polish shop later ... then back to self-isolation so I can be sure I didn't catch anything...


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 30, 2020)

Success - walked to superdrug and scored two packs.  

Town was dead - as if most humans had been abducted by aliens.  A bit weird - but at least I could walk straight across major roads without even bothering to look as there is barely any traffic at all. 

Disappointed I didn't get stopped and asked to show my papers.


----------



## xes (Mar 30, 2020)

Last day of work tomorrow for who knows how long. 

Happy and sad at the same time.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 30, 2020)

You couldn’t make this story up 









						Coronavirus: Police stop driver on 224-mile trip to collect £15 windows - with wife in boot — Sky News
					

Police have stopped a driver on a 224-mile round trip to collect £15 windows he bought on eBay during the UK's coronavirus lockdown - when officers discovered his wife was in the boot.




					apple.news


----------



## Dogsauce (Mar 30, 2020)

We’re on 12-week lockdown due to my immunosuppressant medication, although the OH still goes out if we need stuff and for the odd run. 

My 75-year old mum just turned up at the gate with a big tin containing a chocolate cake she’d baked. Nice gesture, but she really shouldn’t be out, especially as my asthmatic dad gets floored by any chest infection doing the rounds. There’s no telling her though, she’s being careful but I’d rather she stayed in. Some people are hard to persuade!


----------



## Dogsauce (Mar 30, 2020)

I’m also feeling slightly guilty for ordering some artificial grass off eBay, but the tiny sunless back yard is the only safe outdoor space for the kids to play and it’s currently surfaced in coarse and dirty gravel, which the youngest would likely eat. Going to be our little twelve square metre oasis.


----------



## Leafster (Mar 30, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Success - walked to superdrug and scored two packs.
> 
> Town was dead - *as if most humans had been abducted by aliens*.  A bit weird - but at least I could walk straight across major roads without even bothering to look as there is barely any traffic at all.
> 
> Disappointed I didn't get stopped and asked to show my papers.


Those aliens must have dropped your local humans (and their cars) around here. I cut short my designated exercise because of them - they're everywhere!


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 30, 2020)

Dogsauce said:


> I’m also feeling slightly guilty for ordering some artificial grass off eBay, but the tiny sunless back yard is the only safe outdoor space for the kids to play and it’s currently surfaced in coarse and dirty gravel, which the youngest would likely eat. Going to be our little twelve square metre oasis.


I wouldn't feel guilty about that - that's a reasonable thing to do in the circumstances.


----------



## Marty1 (Mar 30, 2020)

Social distancing still an issue for commuters.


----------



## Badgers (Mar 30, 2020)

#grubbycunt


----------



## scifisam (Mar 30, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> This morning I had an embarrassment.
> In addition to posters in my front window, I stuck a "thank you" on the wheelie bin and the guy looked like he assumed there would be a fiver in the plastic bag - made me feel a bit patronising.



Do you mean that people where you are are writing thank you on plastic bags with money included and attaching them to wheelie bins? Otherwise I don't understand, sorry - you did a nice thing, you thanked them.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 30, 2020)

scifisam said:


> Do you mean that people where you are are writing thank you on plastic bags with money included and attaching them to wheelie bins? Otherwise I don't understand, sorry - you did a nice thing, you thanked them.


I don't know what others are doing - there's a Facebook group ... all the enthusiasm for things seems to be further down the street ... I'll see if someone realises it's my house with the posters and stuff and brings up the subject ...

I tried to think of the right thing to say in Aldi and the deli later and failed ... it all seems so inadequate ...


----------



## elbows (Mar 30, 2020)

I think Vallance might have said the word lag in todays press conference nearly as many times as I said it here in February.


----------



## scifisam (Mar 30, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> I don't know what others are doing - there's a Facebook group ... all the enthusiasm for things seems to be further down the street ... I'll see if someone realises it's my house with the posters and stuff and brings up the subject ...
> 
> I tried to think of the right thing to say in Aldi and the deli later and failed ... it all seems so inadequate ...



Don't feel bad for not putting money out - they're out doing their job as quickly as they can so they won't be looking for money on top of bags or whatever. It is good to say thank you, and just be polite, keep your distance, etc. I know what you mean though.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 30, 2020)

Anyone seen this?  How generous of HMG.


----------



## editor (Mar 30, 2020)

This is a great story 



> Residents confined to their homes in a corner of northern Paris have been plunged back to one of the darkest moments of the city’s past.
> 
> Two streets – Rue Berthe and Rue Androuet – in Montmartre in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur basilica have been left in a timewarp of the Nazi occupation after they were returned to 1942 for a film set.
> 
> The film-makers were forced to abandon the set when France went into coronavirus lockdown, leaving the streets with fake facades for corset shops, tailors, a shoe repairer and mirror-maker, and dotted with war propaganda, anti-communist tracts and signs in German.























						Paris lockdown leaves streets stuck in 1942 for abandoned film set
					

Two locations frozen in period of Nazi occupation after coronavirus interrupts filming




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Espresso (Mar 31, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Town was dead - as if most humans had been abducted by aliens.  A bit weird - but at least I could walk straight across major roads without even bothering to look as there is barely any traffic at all.



I didn't bother to look yesterday and nearly got run over by a fucking electric car, the silent ninja  bastard
(Yes, i know it was my fault, I just felt like such a fool, not looking before I crossed the road. I am a cockwomble. I know)


----------



## Hollis (Mar 31, 2020)

Looks like the A-Team have finally shown up... scientists, epidermologists, armchair internet "experts" take a back seat... 'cause Kenneth Copeland's now in town:


----------



## two sheds (Mar 31, 2020)

Espresso said:


> I didn't bother to look yesterday and nearly got run over by a fucking electric car, the silent ninja  bastard
> (Yes, i know it was my fault, I just felt like such a fool, not looking before I crossed the road. I am a cockwomble. I know)



Nearly happened to me the other week. I have a deaf friend and realized that she's going to be a lot safer crossing the road with these around than I am.


----------



## elbows (Mar 31, 2020)

I'm going to see if the next few days give me a chance to take something of a break, at least compared to my quantity of posts over the last 2 months. I am repeating myself too much and rather than have the same conversations over and over again, I would rather wait till I have a bit more data about various countries including the UK, if I am lucky then such data might give me something new to say.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 31, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Anyone seen this?  How generous of HMG.
> 
> View attachment 204156


Wouldn't even get you back home if you were stranded in Calais ferry port.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 31, 2020)

Fancy some stylish non-compliant PPE for when you have to step out for supplies ?
$10


----------



## LDC (Mar 31, 2020)

So many threads, really have no idea where this should go... hopefully here is OK.









						The Land Army - Connecting Farms & Workers
					

Our goal is simple; stop harvests rotting in our fields. To do this we're pulling together an army of workers to plug the labour gap and work on farms across the UK. Register your interest below and help feed Great Britain.




					www.thelandarmy.org.uk


----------



## Helen Back (Mar 31, 2020)

Is this the right thread to ask where people are getting masks from?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 31, 2020)

I wonder if we could have a civilian PPE and hygeine thread. Things that people are doing to stay safe, sharing tips and tricks, trying to get a handle on worries, best gloves and masks etc.

Several people on here have been talking about how they avoid bringing the virus home with them, I’ve learned some stuff from them. But also I need to retain some perspective: I worked in a food shop today and brought some groceries home with me. It took me almost 90 minutes to feel as if I and  everything I’d brought home was clean enough for me to eat and relax.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 31, 2020)




----------



## SheilaNaGig (Mar 31, 2020)




----------



## Azrael (Apr 1, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I wonder if we could have a civilian PPE and hygeine thread. Things that people are doing to stay safe, sharing tips and tricks, trying to get a handle on worries, best gloves and masks etc.
> 
> Several people on here have been talking about how they avoid bringing the virus home with them, I’ve learned some stuff from them. But also I need to retain some perspective: I worked in a food shop today and brought some groceries home with me. It took me almost 90 minutes to feel as if I and  everything I’d brought home was clean enough for me to eat and relax.


Still under self-imposed quarantine, but speaking to friends about it, they've been following Hong Kong approach of cleaning soles of shoes with bleach, putting clothes in wash and immediately showing on return. 

I've run up a bleach spray to clean packaging and surfaces, but do try not to get too OCD about it. Realistically, we're not going to make homes aseptic theatres, but can reduce the risk, and the number/condition of any viral particles that do sneak through. Research is of course continually ongoing, but biggest risk appears to be aerosol from face-to-face contact with an infected person, not a bag of Walkers.


----------



## Kaka Tim (Apr 1, 2020)

Seen more people walking about and in cars wearing masks. Is there any point? My understanding was that they are only useful for preventing infection from face to face. contact. I. E You don't get it from the air but from n infected surfaces and being within 2 meters of someones sneezy bits.


----------



## Supine (Apr 1, 2020)

Azrael said:


> Still under self-imposed quarantine, but speaking to friends about it, they've been following Hong Kong approach of cleaning soles of shoes with bleach, putting clothes in wash and immediately showing on return.
> 
> I've run up a bleach spray to clean packaging and surfaces, but do try not to get too OCD about it. Realistically, we're not going to make homes aseptic theatres, but can reduce the risk, and the number/condition of any viral particles that do sneak through. Research is of course continually ongoing, but biggest risk appears to be aerosol from face-to-face contact with an infected person, not a bag of Walkers.



You are also adding a risk of skin burns if your throwing bleach everywhere. Be careful.


----------



## bimble (Apr 1, 2020)

That is really interesting, Czech republic and Slovakia making it mandatory to wear a mask when you go out, and doing this knowing that it would be down to citizens with sewing machines to make them.








						Czechs get to work making masks after government decree
					

Republic and Slovakia are only countries in Europe to make coronavirus mask-wearing mandatory




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Supine (Apr 1, 2020)

Very big read - overview and status



			https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/RRA-seventh-update-Outbreak-of-coronavirus-disease-COVID-19.pdf


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 1, 2020)

Kaka Tim said:


> Seen more people walking about and in cars wearing masks. Is there any point? My understanding was that they are only useful for preventing infection from face to face. contact. I. E You don't get it from the air but from n infected surfaces and being within 2 meters of someones sneezy bits.


It stops you from touching your own face, and acts as a strong prompt to keep up all the other social distancing practices.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 1, 2020)

Influx of new delivery drivers today on Amazon yard to cope with volume of parcels!


----------



## chainsawjob (Apr 1, 2020)

Azrael said:


> Still under self-imposed quarantine, but speaking to friends about it, they've been following Hong Kong approach of cleaning soles of shoes with bleach, putting clothes in wash and immediately showing on return.
> 
> I've run up a bleach spray to clean packaging and surfaces, but do try not to get too OCD about it. Realistically, we're not going to make homes aseptic theatres, but can reduce the risk, and the number/condition of any viral particles that do sneak through. Research is of course continually ongoing, but biggest risk appears to be aerosol from face-to-face contact with an infected person, not a bag of Walkers.


I did my first trip a to a supermarket yesterday since all this started, so I was wondering how much of this sort of stuff to do on my return. I was careful whilst I was there, and wore a face covering (not a proper mask) and gloves, sanitised my hands before driving. I decided not to disinfect what I'd bought. 

The worst risk infection I think was from/to the people stacking the shelves. They had no PPE (don't think even gloves) and people weren't giving them 2 metres, nor they trying to give customers space. Must be a very difficult job to do and maintain the required distance though, but I'm not sure what other approach would work. I was told off by one shopper for not following the arrows round the aisles, but tbf they weren't so obvious in some places, and I generally shop by leaving my trolley somewhere and nipping into aisles for things.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 1, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> It stops you from touching your own face, and acts as a strong prompt to keep up all the other social distancing practices.



Hmmm.

I was abroad (SE Asia) when the shit really started hitting the fan with all this and moving around countries and airports I saw a lot of people wearing masks.  The conclusion I came to is broadly the UK government has the right line on this.

I saw a lot of masks being worn as chin warmers.  I saw people taking masks down to talk, to drink and to eat.  I saw people constantly adjusting their masks and I even saw a few people lifting the mask to their face every time they passed near someone.  In short I saw people with masks constantly touching their faces, far more than people without.

I came to the conclusion that unless you're extremely disciplined with mask use (and that is put them on and don't touch them again) then the use of masks is actually counter productive.  There is also the other issue that we know the virus can live on surfaces for a number of days (depending on the surface).  If your mask isn't brand new and sterilized who's to say the mask itself isn't contaminated and in that case you're about to have it attached to your mouth and nose for how many hours...?  That seems a sure fire way to get ill and far more dangerous then brushing your nose with your sleeve.

Another weird thing I've noticed recently was when I had to go to the supermarket, the mask wearers were one of the worst groups for not respecting distancing, like the masks gave them super immunity or something.  Make of that what you will.

My conclusion.  Unless you're in a medical setting just make sure you don't touch your face and regularly wash your hands.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 1, 2020)

You see people in cars by themselves with the windows shut wearing masks. Like wearing flippers on dry land.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 1, 2020)

NB:  some people can't wear masks cos of claustrophobia


----------



## crossthebreeze (Apr 1, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> So many threads, really have no idea where this should go... hopefully here is OK.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


NFU vice president was calling for exception to minimum wage for fruit & veg pickers yesterday 😡


----------



## chainsawjob (Apr 1, 2020)

Yeah, I've read something along those lines too Teaboy, that masks give a false sense of security and are counterproductive cos they're often not used correctly. I was thinking my main motivation for covering my face was in case I've got it, so as not to breathe it onto anyone else. It was the first time I'd worn a mask and tbh yes there was a lot of adjusting and it falling down. My hands were gloved, but once you've touched things with them that makes no difference. I wore regular woolly gloves, and then put them somewhere where I won't touch them for several days, might wash them. Latex gloves seem tricky to take off without touching the outside of them, I read a info thing on how to put them on and take them off properly somewhere. Again if they're not used properly they may be more of a risk than a protection. 

Yesterday was the first time I'd seen anyone in a mask (waiting at a bus stop), I've barely been out though and live in a small place. In the store there were very few of us in them, and although most people were trying to be careful, a handful weren't making any effort at all, including a mum with a 7/8 year old who was just skipping around all over the place. Not everyone was taking notice of 'don't bring anyone else shopping with you unless you're unable to do it by yourself', or (as with a young child) they have to come with you because there's no one else can have them.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 1, 2020)

crossthebreeze said:


> NFU vice president was calling for exception to minimum wage for fruit & veg pickers yesterday 😡



Fucking scumbag.

Does he want to pick sprouts for less than minimum wage? Yeah, thought not.


----------



## Sue (Apr 1, 2020)

crossthebreeze said:


> NFU vice president was calling for exception to minimum wage for fruit & veg pickers yesterday 😡


My first thought on reading your comment was that they were wanting to pay them more than minimum wage, given the potential shortage of people to do the work but no.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 1, 2020)

Sue said:


> My first thought on reading your comment was that they were wanting to pay them more than minimum wage, given the potential shortage of people to do the work but no.


lol - pretty sure there's no barrier to paying your workers more than minimum wage.


----------



## Sue (Apr 1, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> lol - pretty sure there's no barrier to paying your workers more than minimum wage.


Some employers do seem to treat it as more like a maximum wage for some jobs these days...


----------



## two sheds (Apr 1, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Hmmm.
> 
> I was abroad (SE Asia) when the shit really started hitting the fan with all this and moving around countries and airports I saw a lot of people wearing masks.  The conclusion I came to is broadly the UK government has the right line on this.
> 
> ...



Interesting post, and I'd find a mask all the time really uncomfortable. 



Teaboy said:


> I saw people taking masks down to talk to drink and to eat.



Bit messy otherwise though  

And I'm still trying to find that interview someone posted with a news anchor handing over to the woman reporter wearing a mask for some enlightening coronavirus comments. Anyone?


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 1, 2020)

crossthebreeze said:


> NFU vice president was calling for exception to minimum wage for fruit & veg pickers yesterday 😡



Think I made a prediction a few weeks ago that we’d start seeing this kind of crap, though sort of expecting it to come from the government. It’ll be sold under the guise of ‘helping out struggling businesses in the National Interest’. Expect all kinds of nasty shit while we ‘get back on our feet again’ (for the benefit of those with their boot on our throats). Like ten years of Austerity and we’re still having to make cuts.


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 1, 2020)

& in the short term making it easier/cheaper to sack people might also help businesses out, surprised that one hasn’t been spun out by the CBI or similar yet. Maybe they’re afraid of us, we can always cough at them.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Apr 1, 2020)

Dogsauce said:


> Think I made a prediction a few weeks ago that we’d start seeing this kind of crap, though sort of expecting it to come from the government. It’ll be sold under the guise of ‘helping out struggling businesses in the National Interest’. Expect all kinds of nasty shit while we ‘get back on our feet again’ (for the benefit of those with their boot on our throats). Like ten years of Austerity and we’re still having to make cuts.


Yes I figure that with fruit and veg industry they have realised that there's a lot of people that have become unemployed and have sunk through the cracks of the various compensation schemes (so that labour might not actually be in as short supply as is being advertised).  But also there is so much talk on this issue from various people (especially on twitter) - whether they're "Buy British" brexiters or people concerned about food sustainability - plus of course those anti-brexiters happy to go along with stereotype that British working class lazy compared to Europeans - that they'll think they can get consensus that something has to be done and that something is of course downgrading pay and conditions.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 2, 2020)

Italy lockdown extended to April 13th for now


----------



## Mation (Apr 2, 2020)

Espresso said:


> scrub the front path.


fnar


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 2, 2020)

Guardian is whinging about self-employed people who pay themselves a dividend from a limited company rather than a wage not getting government support.

If memory serves the only reason to use the dividend arrangement is to dodge taxes, so fuck those people.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 2, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Guardian is whinging about self-employed people who pay themselves a dividend from a limited company rather than a wage not getting government support.
> 
> If memory serves the only reason to use the dividend arrangement is to dodge taxes, so fuck those people.



Yup, you're quite right.  They pay themselves a pitifully low salary through PAYE thereby attracting very little tax and then pay larger dividends which attract a much lower tax burden than if it was added to the salary.  It is a tax dodge but a deliberate one allowed to encourage entrepreneurialism. 

To an extent this was justifiable if that entrepreneurialism meant that companies would be growing and creating jobs.  Unfortunately it mostly meant people setting up on their own (with no intention of employing anyone else) and doing exactly the same job they used to do but invoicing a daily rate to their old employer.  Ironically often to the likes of employers such as HMRC.  This had the added benefit that they could put all sorts of expenses such as commuting and sustenance through their companies and again alleviate the whole pesky paying tax thing.

In fairness the government did try and close this loophole with redefining IR35 which has caused a lot of chaos and was supposed to come in exactly now. However with the whole country falling apart and about to enter two decades of crippling recession thing the government have deferred the changes for 12 months.

I know all this because this is exactly how my g/f earns her crust.  She's on a London wide whatsapp group for freelancers in her niche work sector and despite enjoying decades of this perk they are all howling at how unjust it is that the government aren't bailing them out.  Perhaps as a company not an individual (a distinction many of them seem not to have grasped) they should have been leaving some money aside in their business for a rainy day instead of drawing down all those lovely low tax dividends.

ETA: Of course I imagine its largely coincidence that a lot of journo's operate this way and the Guardian was just standing up for the little guy.


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 2, 2020)

is also a way of reducing "income" for child support purposes.

mr b was a contractor/self-employed for a while and was planning to go back to it for the cash. possibly best non-decision he ever made to put that off for a bit  (now wfh)


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 2, 2020)

My brother's been a self-employed piano-tuner since 1984.
He'd know how to be an advanced brain-surgeon better than he'd know how to set up a limited company.

He just pays himself from the fees (old-style cheques, not cash!).
But fuck knows how he's getting on right now -- even in Cambridge, he won't be going into any houses and schools/colleges to tune pianos atm -- there's _normally_ no shortage of work in that particular city!


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 2, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> My brother's been a self-employed piano-tuner since 1984.
> He'd know how to be an advanced brain-surgeon better than he'd know how to set up a limited company.
> 
> He just pays himself from the fees (olld-style cheques, not cash!).
> But fuck knows how he's getting on right now -- even in Cambridge, he won't be going into any houses and schools/colleges to tune pianos atm -- there's _normally_ no shortage of work in that particular city!



Yes, a there is a distinction between a lot of self-employed who are likely sole-traders and do self-assessment tax and all that and often scrape by hand to mouth.  Then there is the likes of what I describe above who have accountants and are Ltd companies and VAT registered etc.  Big difference between the two.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 2, 2020)

Went to the hospital to get my bloods checked. Hoped we would get stopped by the police.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 2, 2020)




----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 2, 2020)

I only have a stuffy nose left from the major lurgy of a month ago, but the temperature I entered into the cv19 app today was 32.5 degrees !

Am I reptilian ?


----------



## two sheds (Apr 2, 2020)

Have you checked your pulse?


----------



## platinumsage (Apr 2, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> I only have a stuffy nose left from the major lurgy of a month ago, but the temperature I entered into the cv19 app today was 32.5 degrees !
> 
> Am I reptilian ?



Is that a toe thermometer?  

Stick it up your bum!


----------



## two sheds (Apr 2, 2020)

Will gg get his toe up his bum?


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 2, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> View attachment 204519



Rope?


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 2, 2020)

judging my some traffic i'm hearing from airlines..

this situation is expected atm to be still the plan till about the end of may at the earliest


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 2, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Is that a toe thermometer?
> 
> Stick it up your bum!


Unlike apparently most people, I don't find the sensation remotely pleasurable.
Giving myself an enema prior to my sigmoidoscopy was a nightmare...


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 2, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Went to the hospital to get my bloods checked. Hoped we would get stopped by the police.
> View attachment 204498


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 2, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Yup, you're quite right.  They pay themselves a pitifully low salary through PAYE thereby attracting very little tax and then pay larger dividends which attract a much lower tax burden than if it was added to the salary.  It is a tax dodge but a deliberate one allowed to encourage entrepreneurialism.
> 
> To an extent this was justifiable if that entrepreneurialism meant that companies would be growing and creating jobs.  Unfortunately it mostly meant people setting up on their own (with no intention of employing anyone else) and doing exactly the same job they used to do but invoicing a daily rate to their old employer.  Ironically often to the likes of employers such as HMRC.  This had the added benefit that they could put all sorts of expenses such as commuting and sustenance through their companies and again alleviate the whole pesky paying tax thing.
> 
> ...


Back in my freelancing days, I worked with people who did this, and they were very keen to tell me all about it, how great it was and how much less tax they were paying than me. I'm sorry but they should not be getting the 80 per cent right now - or at most they should be getting a waaay reduced amount. May sound harsh, but tough shit. I still remember the smugness with which I was gleefully informed of this arrangement, which as you say is purely a tax dodge. There are lots of 'self-employed' who have little choice because the sector they work in is so fucked up. Bicycle couriers in London, for instance. Don't think many of them are limited companies.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 2, 2020)

Clap for Carers: UK applauds the NHS and other key workers
					

People clapped, banged pots and pans, and played the bagpipes to honour key workers battling the virus.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Wondered what all the noise was for, the neighbours even had cow bells.


----------



## ignatious (Apr 2, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Back in my freelancing days, I worked with people who did this, and they were very keen to tell me all about it, how great it was and how much less tax they were paying than me. I'm sorry but they should not be getting the 80 per cent right now - or at most they should be getting a waaay reduced amount. May sound harsh, but tough shit. I still remember the smugness with which I was gleefully informed of this arrangement, which as you say is purely a tax dodge. There are lots of 'self-employed' who have little choice because the sector they work in is so fucked up. Bicycle couriers in London, for instance. Don't think many of them are limited companies.


Don’t they calculate the dividend from the profit though, which is what the 80% is also calculated from. Why would a dividend payment effect the amount they receive?


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 2, 2020)

ignatious said:


> Don’t they calculate the dividend from the profit though, which is what the 80% is also calculated from. Why would a dividend payment effect the amount they receive?


* I'm not an accountant * but as I understand it they pay themselves a small wage then take the dividend. I guess they'll get 80 percent of what they declare as their earnings. tbh they should count themselves fortunate if they get that. Presumably it will be at least 80 per cent of minimum wage. Still a lot better than the horrible pittances that are the universal credit and ssp.

or maybe as company owners they get nothing? Dunno.


----------



## ignatious (Apr 2, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> * I'm not an accountant * but as I understand it they pay themselves a small wage then take the dividend. I guess they'll get 80 percent of what they declare as their earnings. tbh they should count themselves fortunate if they get that. Presumably it will be at least 80 per cent of minimum wage. Still a lot better than the horrible pittances that are the universal credit and ssp.
> 
> or maybe as company owners they get nothing? Dunno.


I’m pretty sure the 80% figure is based on the previous 3 years’ profits rather than whatever salary they pay themselves. I can only assume they‘re taking a post-dividend profit figure, whatever that’s called (retained earnings?)


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 2, 2020)

ignatious said:


> I’m pretty sure the 80% figure is based on the previous 3 years’ profits rather than whatever salary they pay themselves. I can only assume they‘re taking a post-dividend profit figure, whatever that’s called (retained earnings?)


Ah Ok, I'm confused then. Fuck it.


----------



## killer b (Apr 2, 2020)

ignatious said:


> I’m pretty sure the 80% figure is based on the previous 3 years’ profits rather than whatever salary they pay themselves. I can only assume they‘re taking a post-dividend profit figure, whatever that’s called (retained earnings?)


it's because they aren't self employed - they are a limited company so the only thing they can do is furlough themselves and then pay themselves 80% of their (minimum) wage.


----------



## ignatious (Apr 2, 2020)

killer b said:


> it's because they aren't self employed - they are a limited company so the only thing they can do is furlough themselves and then pay themselves 80% of their (minimum) wage.


Ah, yes, that makes sense.


----------



## killer b (Apr 2, 2020)

although as a limited company there may be other support available which aren't available to us lowly employees actually - interest free loans, rates relief, that kind of thing.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Apr 2, 2020)

I thought next door had friends around due to the shouting and  egging each other on to do shots. Now I realise they are having a virtual session with their mates through the wonder of the internet. legends


----------



## likesfish (Apr 2, 2020)

got home yesterday to the Mrs having symptoms so had to tell work and it was fuck 14 days off feel fine myself but rules is rules


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 2, 2020)

killer b said:


> it's because they aren't self employed - they are a limited company so the only thing they can do is furlough themselves and then pay themselves 80% of their (minimum) wage.


So it is what I thought. So they're fine. Sorry, what's the whingeing about? I'm still confused. What on earth do they have to complain about?


----------



## killer b (Apr 2, 2020)

having drastically less money than they are used to and have budgeted for I guess.


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 2, 2020)

killer b said:


> having drastically less money than they are used to and have budgeted for I guess.


Ok. I will sarcastically say 'boo hoo' feeling no guilt then.


----------



## Raheem (Apr 3, 2020)

My brother's got it. He had to take my neice into A&E five days ago, so I reckon that's probably where he picked it up.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 3, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Ok. I will sarcastically say 'boo hoo' feeling no guilt then.



Quite.  To put some numbers to it.  If they furlough themselves they can only claim 80% of what they pay themselves through PAYE which would likely mean taking home something like £600 - £700 a month.  This is against a typical salary with dividends of maybe £3500 (take home) per month or more.  They're not happy because their dividends cannot be included in their salary for the purposes of furloughing. 

Its proper tiny violin time for sure.


----------



## Raheem (Apr 3, 2020)

Raheem said:


> My brother's got it. He had to take my neice into A&E five days ago, so I reckon that's probably where he picked it up.



Update: He says he feels like he's over the worst of it already.


----------



## likesfish (Apr 3, 2020)

feeling fine Mrs is up and about so thats good probably drinking too much though. supermarket had food so fridge and freezer well stocked


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 3, 2020)

Heard on the radio on way bk from work that the authorities are concerned people are going to go out this weekend due to the sunny forecast.


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 3, 2020)

Mask usage up near me in Bristol.
I found I actually had an unused full-spec mask..
Learned yesterday that one technology that's used in the N95 mask is basically like an electrostatic precipitator - though they use an electret material - as with electret mics that simulate condenser mics, but with no external bias voltage required.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 3, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Update: He says he feels like he's over the worst of it already.




Beware.... This virus (and other coronaviruses) have an intermittent presentation: feel better, feel bad again, feel better, feel worse.  It’s a neat trick, it means that the carrier goes back into the community and spreads the virus around when they feel better.

That thing where you stay home with a cold and then feel better and go back to work and then a week later you come down with another cold...? If’s not a new cold, it’s the same cold. It’s a characteristic of coronaviruses.


----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Apr 3, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Beware.... This virus (and other coronaviruses) have an intermittent presentation: feel better, feel bad again, feel better, feel worse.  It’s a neat trick, it means that the carrier goes back into the community and spreads the virus around when they feel better.
> 
> That thing where you stay home with a cold and then feel better and go back to work and then a week later you come down with another cold...? If’s not a new cold, it’s the same cold. It’s a characteristic of coronaviruses.


I was reading about  the typical point that someone was admitted to ICU and it was surprisingly late on after initial symptoms. After reading that I’ll certainly be isolating for 14 days after symptoms, not 7. Taking it super easy.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 3, 2020)

Yes, particularly before mixing with vulnerable people.


----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Apr 3, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Beware.... This virus (and other coronaviruses) have an intermittent presentation: feel better, feel bad again, feel better, feel worse.  It’s a neat trick, it means that the carrier goes back into the community and spreads the virus around when they feel better.
> 
> That thing where you stay home with a cold and then feel better and go back to work and then a week later you come down with another cold...? If’s not a new cold, it’s the same cold. It’s a characteristic of coronaviruses.


And yeah sufferers in Orkney- not confirmed, only 3 are- spoke of this up and down and up and down in terms of symptoms, one wrote a diary for the whole period she was ill. Totally, as soon as you have symptoms isolate for the duration.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 4, 2020)

Not specifically COVID-19 news bit a sign of 'savings' to come. 


> Families hit by lost income from the coronavirus outbreak are facing a “double whammy” after the government quietly axed universal free school meals for primary school infants, children’s charities and trade unions have warned.











						Free School Meals Cuts 'Sneaked Out' During Coronavirus Outbreak
					

Education secretary accused of trying to "sneak out" axeing of universal provision for 5-to-7-year-olds



					m.huffingtonpost.co.uk


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 4, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> That thing where you stay home with a cold and then feel better and go back to work and then a week later you come down with another cold...? If’s not a new cold, it’s the same cold. It’s a characteristic of coronaviruses.


Indeed.
Hopefully this experience will permanently fix a lot of workplace sickness absence policies. Doctor's note ? WTF ?
In my case, I have always had the requirement to get on my bike and cycle 4 miles to the highest point with a Bristol postcode to determine whether I'm ready for work and that invariably covers the "false dawn".

I hope at some point they'll redefine "cold" and "flu" ...  I never have "a cold", I am always laid low by viral infections - sometimes spectacularly and usually with no secondary symptoms beyond a few sneezes.
I imagine at some point there will be home testing kits to identify the specific virus.


----------



## weltweit (Apr 4, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Beware.... This virus (and other coronaviruses) have an intermittent presentation: feel better, feel bad again, feel better, feel worse.  It’s a neat trick, it means that the carrier goes back into the community and spreads the virus around when they feel better.
> 
> That thing where you stay home with a cold and then feel better and go back to work and then a week later you come down with another cold...? If’s not a new cold, it’s the same cold. It’s a characteristic of coronaviruses.


This was mentioned in the South Korea interview on the sensible information thread, they described it as some people seeming to get re-infected after apparently achieving immunity.


----------



## Aladdin (Apr 4, 2020)

Coronavirus: Twins born during India lockdown named 'Corona and Covid'
					

The siblings - a girl and a boy - were born in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh during an ongoing nationwide lockdown.




					news.sky.com
				




Coronavirus: Twins born during India lockdown named 'Corona and Covid'


😳🙂😁


----------



## tonysingh (Apr 4, 2020)

I'm studying with the OU at moment, doing two 30 credit modules. Had email earlier saying the end of module assignments, which is what stands in for a full exam in some modules are now cancelled because of coronavirus. 

Instead they'll work out our average marks over other assignments and allocate them accordingly. I'll pass, that's not in doubt but I wanted to earn my marks. 

I know this is a really fucking minor gripe in all this and I get why the OU have done it. I just needed to moan.


----------



## t0bytoo (Apr 4, 2020)

tonysingh said:


> I'm studying with the OU at moment, doing two 30 credit modules. Had email earlier saying the end of module assignments, which is what stands in for a full exam in some modules are now cancelled because of coronavirus.



Blimey. Just read a message from my tutor saying to look out for emails about changes to assessment. I guess this is what they will say. Wonder why they are cancelling the EMAs. I know lots of folk are finding it hard to get any work done, but I'm sure others are keen to have something to work on. Well, I am, when my personal situation calms down a bit.


----------



## tonysingh (Apr 4, 2020)

t0bytoo said:


> Blimey. Just read a message from my tutor saying to look out for emails about changes to assessment. I guess this is what they will say. Wonder why they are cancelling the EMAs. I know lots of folk are finding it hard to get any work done, but I'm sure others are keen to have something to work on. Well, I am, when my personal situation calms down a bit.



I'm only on level 1 of a path that'll lead to a goal I'm too shy to say so scores aren't counted towards the degree itself. I just want to earn my 80% not be given it. I'm gonna carry on studying like, one of the modules especially is a great help to mental health stuff as a distraction.


----------



## t0bytoo (Apr 4, 2020)

tonysingh said:


> I'm only on level 1 of a path that'll lead to a goal I'm too shy to say so scores aren't counted towards the degree itself. I just want to earn my 80% not be given it. I'm gonna carry on studying like, one of the modules especially is a great help to mental health stuff as a distraction.



Level 1 is pass/fail, if I remember right. The end result is usually the lesser of the ongoing assessment and the final exam or assessment.

They are usually pretty generous in bumping up the grades. A couple of times I've been given the benefit of some sort of doubt and got a higher grade than I expected.

But many of us are doing it for the learning, so big shame not to complete the course


----------



## tonysingh (Apr 4, 2020)

t0bytoo said:


> Level 1 is pass/fail, if I remember right. The end result is usually the lesser of the ongoing assessment and the final exam or assessment.
> 
> They are usually pretty generous in bumping up the grades. A couple of times I've been given the benefit of some sort of doubt and got a higher grade than I expected.
> 
> But many of us are doing it for the learning, so big shame not to complete the course




Yeah, level 1 is a pass/fail thing. I've absolutely passed, one module I'm hitting mid 60s but it's a slog. Other one I'm much more into and hitting mid to high 80s so it's fine. 

I just really was focused on the EMAs is all. It's feels like being a boxer, psyching yourself up for a big fight and then the opponent pulls out. 

Again, i 100% get that it's just one of them things with this crisis but it's still annoying.


----------



## Wilf (Apr 5, 2020)

tonysingh said:


> . It's feels like being a boxer, psyching yourself up for a big fight and then the opponent pulls out.


Or going ahead with the fight and finding out your opponent is Audley Harrison.


----------



## tonysingh (Apr 5, 2020)

Wilf said:


> Or going ahead with the fight and finding out your opponent is Audley Harrison.



I was gonna use Fraudley in my explanation of all this on Facebook.   

Mate of mine had a European title fight lined up for a couple weeks from now, at the York Hall. Obviously that's just been postponed, not cancelled.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 5, 2020)

Second home owners ‘sharing tips on avoiding police’ to sneak into Wales at night
					

Second home owners are sharing tips so that they can sneak into Wales while avoiding police enforcing a ban on unnecessary travel, an MP has said. Dwyfor Meirionnydd MP Liz Saville Roberts said that tourists were sneaking in at night in order to avoid detection, or even accepting the £60 …



					nation.cymru


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 5, 2020)

So work have informed that we’ve got to fill out a pre-work form on an app they’ve linked - it mainly covers van checks, with clicking yes or no responses to whether various aspects of your van are in order, oil levels, tyre tread above legal requirements etc - but now they’ve added a feature requiring what your body temperature is in the morning in case you’ve got a fever, a symptom of coronavirus.  If you don’t give a reading then you aren’t offered work - I haven’t got a thermometer at present so am going to have to get one by Tuesday when I return to work.


----------



## Mogden (Apr 5, 2020)

Been out today for the first time in a week. Went to Aldi to do a shop before what I suspect will be full lockdown this week, especially given the weather. The shoppers were doing okay with distancing although there was one thoroughly unwashed chap wafting round in a sick-up-in-the-back-of-the-throat way, and I've got a pretty good constitution 🤢

It was actually the Aldi workers who kept breezing past me within millimeters. Not impressed  Having not been out for a week I'm bloody knackered now. I've been playing freezer and fridge Jenga and now need a nap before I get back to the garden.


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (Apr 5, 2020)

Mogden said:


> before what I suspect will be full lockdown this week, especially given the weather


Do you think so? It does seem like that would be wiser that this vague 'advice' statements leaked by their press sources. Also given the numbers of deaths and comparable measures in Europe it would seem likely.


----------



## Mogden (Apr 5, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Do you think so? It does seem like that would be wiser that this vague 'advice' statements leaked by their press sources. Also given the numbers of deaths and comparable measures in Europe it would seem likely.


Given how much extra resource has had to go into cutting people off from visiting parks and seasides this weekend, and the 2nd home owners sneaking to their other residences under the cover of darkness, I don't see how they can avoid it. At least one park carpark was closed here yesterday because of the sheer number of people turning up in their cars for a walk


----------



## Spymaster (Apr 5, 2020)

There are 8 coppers on Paddington Rec at the moment including these 4:



I just whistled at them and gave them a bollocking for ignoring social distancing rules on gatherings of more than 2 people and they moved apart


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 5, 2020)

I've realised what all this reminds me of:

You know when you're at a really muddy festival, like the epic-biblical mud ones, and you spend the entire time making sure your hands and clobber are clean enough, avoiding getting mud into your tent, sitting down cautiously and consciously so as to avoid getting mud on the back of your jacket, jealously guarding your bog roll so you've got enough dry clean stuff to be used, checking your own hands before diving into your pockets to get your lighter out, looking ahead to see if the rowdy teens coming towards you are going to swerve you or splash past without a care, eyeing up the road ahead for potential danger, constantly on duty with it all in a way that's tiresome and tiring...? All that, it's the same skill set that I'm using to avoid this virus. Signifiant differences include the fact that mud is visible, C-19 isn't; mud isn't dangerous; there's music and drugs and friends and plenty of outdoor exercise at a festival, lockdown, not so much; and you know that you can go home for a hot bath and a wind down in a few days when the festival ends, while lockdown seems to be never-ending. But at least the weather is decent, which isn't the case at a mud-fest.


----------



## Mogden (Apr 5, 2020)

I repeat my assertion that total lockdown is coming reinforced by the Brighton webcam with a group of twats on the right of the picture currently sitting next to each other having a chat   









						【LIVE】 Webcam Brighton Pier | SkylineWebcams
					

Watch our Brighton webcam overlooking the Brighton Pier! Follow the city's major events and explore our free HD cams in the UK.




					www.skylinewebcams.com


----------



## elbows (Apr 5, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I repeat my assertion that total lockdown is coming reinforced by the Brighton webcam with a group of twats on the right of the picture currently sitting next to each other having a chat
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Other reasons for tightening things further real soon might include the government wanting to be seen to be doing more during the peak of hospitalisations and deaths. And there might be some advice from psychologists about some desirable knock on impacts that can stem from tightening things at certain moments rather than relaxing them. I dont know much about that latter point, I'm just presuming it is a thing.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 5, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> So it is what I thought. So they're fine. Sorry, what's the whingeing about? I'm still confused. What on earth do they have to complain about?



I think because some people were kinda tricked into it. Working in EFL I saw loads of people being coerced into ltd companies, and even after that was tightened up, accountants were really good at getting people to sign up to various schemes. They came around to language schools in person and they were well-oiled shysters. 

None of the EFL teachers were rich, mostly earning not much over the tax threshhold, and they'll definitely be caught out now.

I think it's the same for some in construction industry and other areas.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Apr 5, 2020)

You know what's getting really weird? I pretty much forget about it all when I'm in my flat, watching TV and pottering about.

Then I go outside. And there's hardly anyone around. There are people in masks and social distancing queues at Tesco. There are posters at the bus stops saying "don't go out - you could kill someone". 

It's fucking weird out there.


----------



## likesfish (Apr 5, 2020)

took the dog up the downs for his usual walk hardly ever meet anyone usually on this walk  ran into a dozen people and some twats having a fucking barbeque with toddlers twats


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 5, 2020)

elbows said:


> Other reasons for tightening things further real soon might include the government wanting to be seen to be doing more during the peak of hospitalisations and deaths. And there might be some advice from psychologists about some desirable knock on impacts that can stem from tightening things at certain moments rather than relaxing them. I dont know much about that latter point, I'm just presuming it is a thing.



Without being able to see who the twats were it might of been the street homeless which you do get around towns down by the coast
Normally the tourists traffic, seasonal work and better weather leaded to groups being around
I don't think you would be able to get all of these people inside regardless of the situation
so just don't want to due to bad experiences in  the past


----------



## Annonymouse1 (Apr 5, 2020)

should we really be prioritising staff instead of testing the public wouldnt that stop people being admitted to hospitals


----------



## weepiper (Apr 5, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> You know what's getting really weird? I pretty much forget about it all when I'm in my flat, watching TV and pottering about.
> 
> Then I go outside. And there's hardly anyone around. There are people in masks and social distancing queues at Tesco. There are posters at the bus stops saying "don't go out - you could kill someone".
> 
> It's fucking weird out there.


Yeah, it's surreal. I went into my little local chemist that I always use for prescriptions and they suddenly have desk-to-ceiling perspex screens like an old-fashioned bank, and they were all wearing aprons, gloves and safety glasses. Just fucking weird


----------



## two sheds (Apr 5, 2020)

weepiper said:


> Yeah, it's surreal. I went into my little local chemist that I always use for prescriptions and they suddenly have desk-to-ceiling perspex screens like an old-fashioned bank, and they were all wearing aprons, gloves and safety glasses. Just fucking weird



but healthy


----------



## Septimus Rufiji (Apr 5, 2020)

the chemist down the road from me has people wait outside and then they come out in ppe and sort out their prescriptions, no-one allowed in the shop at all. Very strange when I'm coming home from mixing with 80 people at work.

I think it's (work) making me less sensitive to other peoples worries and concerns.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 6, 2020)

It really does remind me of 9/11.  There's no airplanes and the sky is deep blue.  There's little traffic in front of my house, even though I live on one of the busiest streets in the city.   People I haven't heard from in ages are making an effort to call.  I hate to admit this, but I'm enjoying the quiet. and an odd kind of togetherness.  (Yes, I know that's an awful thing to say.)


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 6, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> It really does remind me of 9/11.  There's no airplanes and the sky is deep blue.  There's little traffic in front of my house, even though I live on one of the busiest streets in the city.   People I haven't heard from in ages are making an effort to call.  I hate to admit this, but I'm enjoying the quiet. and an odd kind of togetherness.  (Yes, I know that's an awful thing to say.)


You're not wrong.  I live in a city centre and it's so quiet I could be in the middle of the countryside.  It's weird, but makes a lovely change from the normal background noise.  It'll be sad when things inevitably return to the normal background din.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 6, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> It really does remind me of 9/11.  There's no airplanes and the sky is deep blue.  There's little traffic in front of my house, even though I live on one of the busiest streets in the city.   People I haven't heard from in ages are making an effort to call.  I hate to admit this, but I'm enjoying the quiet. and an odd kind of togetherness.  (Yes, I know that's an awful thing to say.)



The 7th of July bombings here weren't on the same level, but I've been reminded of them a bit too.

[Edited: I rambled]


----------



## Mogden (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> You're not wrong.  I live in a city centre and it's so quiet I could be in the middle of the countryside.  It's weird, but makes a lovely change from the normal background noise.  It'll be sad when things inevitably return to the normal background din.


Same. The air is clearer and quieter when I visit my homeland of East Sussex but here right now in the concrete paradise of Derby it's just as quiet. I must remind myself to see if the light pollution has dropped too tonight and do a spot of star gazing.


----------



## smmudge (Apr 6, 2020)

What I can't get used to is those 10 seconds immediately after waking up, that slow dawning realisation every morning that life is Not Normal right now.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 6, 2020)

smmudge said:


> What I can't get used to is *those 10 seconds immediately after waking up*,



At about 8:30 am


----------



## prunus (Apr 6, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> At about 8:30 am



Well aren’t you the lucky one? 3am for me, heart pounding, mouth dry, most nights 

(No not in a tribute to those KLF- and ecstasy-fuelled nights of 1990).


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 6, 2020)

prunus said:


> Well aren’t you the lucky one? 3am for me, heart pounding, mouth dry, most nights
> 
> (No not in a tribute to those KLF- and ecstasy-fuelled nights of 1990).



Sorry to read this -- I hope you get well soon 

(We've been lucky here -- good health for both of us  )


----------



## Numbers (Apr 6, 2020)

For some reason I woke up at 2am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.  Wasn’t even lying there thinking or stressing about anything, was just awake with no thoughts except thinking what should I think about.

Ended up making a herbal tea and sitting in the garden for an hour, clear skies, no additional light pollution so the stars were gorgeous. 

Feel knackered now when supposed to be working.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 6, 2020)

Person on my local group asks if the post office has special times for elderly/at risk people. I look it up, and they do, though it varies by branch. It's a fair question to ask, given that supermarkets have times for such people too, so it's not like this group of people doesn't exist. And for a post office it might well be something you need to do in person.

Another person on my local group plays the shame game and says that anyone classed as at risk shouldn't be out at all, ever. Ever, ever, ever. Refuses to acknowledge that "at risk" does not always mean must be locked down for 12 weeks and never leave the house at all. That's why there are the special hours, FFS. 

I guess at least if these Covid shamers stick to their guns they'll only be doing it online or shouting out their windows.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 6, 2020)

scifisam said:


> I guess at least if these Covid shamers stick to their guns they'll only be doing it online or shouting out their windows.



And yet somehow, inexplicably, they all seem to know exactly what's been going on in the local parks and open spaces they've been so dilligently staying away from


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 6, 2020)

Septimus Rufiji said:


> the chemist down the road from me has people wait outside and then they come out in ppe and sort out their prescriptions, no-one allowed in the shop at all. Very strange when I'm coming home from mixing with 80 people at work.
> 
> I think it's (work) making me less sensitive to other peoples worries and concerns.



I suspect this is a fairly widespread factor: some who are forced by circumstances to be in closer proximity to others are going to be a bit more blasé about the risk : I’ve not caught it yet, so either I’m immune, or the risk isn’t that great. Or fatalistic: it’s inevitable I’m going to get it and there’s fuck all I can do about that so whatevs.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 6, 2020)

smmudge said:


> What I can't get used to is those 10 seconds immediately after waking up, that slow dawning realisation every morning that life is Not Normal right now.




Very much this. I wake with that sense of “.....wait... something really big and bad has happened...” like you get after a death or a breakup.


----------



## treelover (Apr 6, 2020)

smmudge said:


> What I can't get used to is those 10 seconds immediately after waking up, that slow dawning realisation every morning that life is Not Normal right now.



Chronically ill, many disabled people have that feeling most days.


----------



## treelover (Apr 6, 2020)

> Urgent appeal we are in desperate need of thermometers at Herries Lodge care home ours have broken and everywhere is sold out we can send a taxi to collect or you can drop off at our front door please help us if you can many thanks our phone number is 0114 2318861



for those in sheff, pls circulate


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 6, 2020)

scifisam said:


> Person on my local group asks if the post office has special times for elderly/at risk people. I look it up, and they do, though it varies by branch. It's a fair question to ask, given that supermarkets have times for such people too, so it's not like this group of people doesn't exist. And for a post office it might well be something you need to do in person.


My high street struggles to support a post office so it's now in a cramped vape / booze convenience store - I regretted not wearing a mask in there the other day queuing to collect a package - the bloke in front of me coughed into his hand.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 6, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> My high street struggles to support a post office so it's now in a cramped vape / booze convenience store - I regretted not wearing a mask in there the other day queuing to collect a package - the bloke in front of me coughed into his hand.



They can do one-in-one-out though with spacing in the queue.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 6, 2020)

scifisam said:


> They can do one-in-one-out though with spacing in the queue.




They can if they’ve got someone to stand on the door. If there’s no-one there to police it some will happily comply, many won’t, for any number of spurious or legitimate reasons.


ETA
Having said that, my local POs is inside a Nisa store and whenever I’ve had to queue for the PO I’ve policed my own space ahead and behind. It’s resulted in most people apologetically correcting themselves and a few pissed off huffers and puffers who seemed to think they were being force down to indulge my whacky neurotic personal demands. I can see that some people would find it pretty easy to ask others to stay back while some people just can’t  bring themselves to do it.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> You're not wrong.  I live in a city centre and it's so quiet I could be in the middle of the countryside.  It's weird, but makes a lovely change from the normal background noise.  It'll be sad when things inevitably return to the normal background din.



It will and when it does we'll all sigh in relief that things are "better."  Including me.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 6, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> They can if they’ve got someone to stand on the door. If there’s no-one there to police it some will happily comply, many won’t, for any number of spurious or legitimate reasons.
> 
> 
> ETA
> Having said that, my local POs is inside a Nisa store and whenever I’ve had to queue for the PO I’ve policed my own space ahead and behind. It’s resulted in most people apologetically correcting themselves and a few pissed off huffers and puffers who seemed to think they were being force down to indulge my whacky neurotic personal demands. I can see that some people would find it pretty easy to ask others to stay back while some people just can’t  bring themselves to do it.



I think they will be policing it whatever store it's in. Mine was last week (didn't go in, but saw the queue to go in) and it's in a newsagent's. The mini Sainsbury's was too.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 6, 2020)

scifisam said:


> I think they will be policing it whatever store it's in. Mine was last week (didn't go in, but saw the queue to go in) and it's in a newsagent's. The mini Sainsbury's was too.




Yeah, but my point is that not everywhere will be able to pay for someone to stand on the door.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 6, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> ETA
> Having said that, my local POs is inside a Nisa store and whenever I’ve had to queue for the PO I’ve policed my own space ahead and behind. It’s resulted in most people apologetically correcting themselves and a few pissed off huffers and puffers who seemed to think they were being force down to indulge my whacky neurotic personal demands. I can see that some people would find it pretty easy to ask others to stay back while some people just can’t bring themselves to do it.


It amused me today walking through town that people were weaving along the street - clearly mentally calculating the two metre distance between each other.  Must have looked weird if it was filmed from above.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> It amused me today walking through town that people were weaving along the street - clearly mentally calculating the two metre distance between each other.  Must have looked weird if it was filmed from above.


And to watching seagulls?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 6, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> And to watching seagulls?


The poor things are probably wondering wtf is going on with humans at the moment.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> The poor things are probably wondering wtf is going on with humans at the moment.


Where have all the chip givers gone?
By Pete Seegergull.


----------



## phillm (Apr 6, 2020)

Killer question at the briefing just now,  how come, Boris, is well enough to still be running the country whilst being sick enough to occupy a hospital bed. No answer forthcoming just waffle.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 6, 2020)

Highlights of my day so far:

Washing the van and gf’s car.

Sitting in the sun in back garden.

Reading existentialist jumping through hoops.

Highlights to come:

Got an Indian takeaway on order, will have a pint with it.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 6, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Where have all the chip givers gone?
> By Pete Seegergull.



(((seagulls)))

I'm sure cupid_stunt has a government licence to go out and feed chips to the lovely seagulls.  Sadly I live too far from the coast to do so.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 6, 2020)

phillm said:


> Killer question at the briefing just now,  how come, Boris, is well enough to still be running the country whilst being sick enough to occupy a hospital bed. No answer forthcoming just waffle.


This was spot on tbf.  Unsurprisingly it wasn't answered.


----------



## Ceej (Apr 6, 2020)

Boris is reported as being in intensive care now...


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> The poor things are probably wondering wtf is going on with humans at the moment.



Seagulls will be fine - they do that rapid tap dancing on grass to lure worms out fooled into thinking it’s raining.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 6, 2020)

Ceej said:


> Boris is reported as being in intensive care now...


Hope the NHS cuts won't lessen his chance of survival


----------



## lefteri (Apr 6, 2020)

the people not keeping their distance thing is really annoying but i think it’s down to some very deep-rooted and probably subconscious ideas people have about the way they carry themselves in public - at one extreme you have people not far off richard ashcroft in that verve video and at the other furtive types that might ordinarily cross the road to avoid passing someone else and all shades in between

some people towards the former end of the spectrum just can’t or won’t change


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 6, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Seagulls will be fine - they do that rapid tap dancing on grass to lure worms out fooled into thinking it’s raining.


Blackbirds and song thrushes beating them to it around here over the weekend.


----------



## Espresso (Apr 6, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> The poor things are probably wondering wtf is going on with humans at the moment.


One came and sat on my widow ledge today and peered in at me, the cheeky git. I wasn't even eating chips. 
I've lived by the seaside for a very long time and no seagull has ever landed on my window ledge before and peered in at me.
Mind you, that said, I would usually be at work in the day, so who knows? Maybe they do peer in windows.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 6, 2020)

Espresso said:


> One came and sat on my widow ledge today and peered in at me, the cheeky git. I wasn't even eating chips.
> I've lived by the seaside for a very long time and no seagull has ever landed on my window ledge before and peered in at me.
> Mind you, that said, I would usually be at work in the day, so who knows? Maybe they do peer in windows.


They do now and they know where you hide from them!


----------



## Mogden (Apr 7, 2020)




----------



## Numbers (Apr 7, 2020)

I am so fucking angry right now. 

Found out this morning our niece who lives with my wife’s Mum and her own Mum has been moving every day or 2 between where she lives and her boyfriends house, using public transport. 

My MiL is 80 this year and has pulmonary edema.

FFS I Love my niece but what a dickhead.  She’s getting calmly dragged across the coals today when we can get hold of her.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 7, 2020)

I don't want to sound callous but I'm finding it really puzzling as to how the same virus can affect people in such different ways.  At the start of all this it was all about 'underlying medical conditions' but that seems to be relied on.  Why do some people get no or virtually no symptoms yet for others its terrible.

Whilst its clear baseline health is a factor there has to be something else at play here.  Do genetics play a factor?  It certainly seems to affect men worse.  Also there is this whole concept of viral load and if you're exposed to a lot of the virus as just opposed to a small amount.

I am hopeful that in the future a lot will be learnt from this and hopefully we'll be in a much better position to fight the next pandemic when it comes along , as it positively will.  Obviously this is not much use to those in the middle of the whirlwind right now.


----------



## platinumsage (Apr 7, 2020)

Could be genetics, lifestyle, previous immune system exposure, or some combination of these.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Apr 7, 2020)

Teaboy - this posted was a good read & will answer your questions - 


[/QUOTE]


Supine said:


> Interesting thread on how the virus works


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 7, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I don't want to sound callous but I'm finding it really puzzling as to how the same virus can affect people in such different ways.  At the start of all this it was all about 'underlying medical conditions' but that seems to be relied on.  Why do some people get no or virtually no symptoms yet for others its terrible.
> 
> Whilst its clear baseline health is a factor there has to be something else at play here.  Do genetics play a factor?  It certainly seems to affect men worse.  Also there is this whole concept of viral load and if you're exposed to a lot of the virus as just opposed to a small amount.
> 
> I am hopeful that in the future a lot will be learnt from this and hopefully we'll be in a much better position to fight the next pandemic when it comes along , as it positively will.  Obviously this is not much use to those in the middle of the whirlwind right now.


It’s genetic and how your immune system over reacts when the patient builds immunity to the virus. The patients immune system goes into overdrive and impedes your lungs.
It’s the reason some heavy drinkers and smokers develop different cancers and others breeze through with no problems. We all have similar DNA, it’s just some parts of the ladder have dodgy rungs.


----------



## Mogden (Apr 7, 2020)

Some people are very unaware of their social activities and the impact of those on their immune systems. Smoking rapidly drops levels of vitamin C hence smokers are usually the first and regularly get a touch of the sniffles. Excessive alcohol consumption compromises immune systems, drug taking impacts it too. See also an unvaried and fruit and veg free or scant diet. Add all those together and I would hypothesize that it creates an interesting host environment and does not have any of the "underlying medical conditions" list of scenarios. Just my lockdown mind having a think.

ETA Sprocket saying similar things and beat me to it.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 7, 2020)

I just got this, thankfully we’ve been doing this for three weeks. Glad someone had their fingers on the pulse.  Attached to a text saying I’m extremely vulnerable and basically I guess if I do cop for covid-19 I stand a better chance swinging a dead cat around my head in a graveyard at midnight.






						COVID-19: guidance for people whose immune system means they are at higher risk
					

Guidance for people aged 12 and over whose immune system means they are at higher risk of serious illness if they become infected with coronavirus (COVID-19).




					www.gov.uk


----------



## treelover (Apr 7, 2020)

The chocolate and confectionery giant Mars has donated 1m Easter eggs to NHS workers, food banks and community groups.
The Easter treats, which include products under the Maltesers, M&Ms, Galaxy and Mars brands, have been handed out directly to hospitals including the new Nightingale hospital in London and the Countess of Chester hospital in the north-west. They will also be available via food banks and other community projects supplied by the national FareShare food distribution charity.

Good on them


----------



## Anju (Apr 7, 2020)

Just seen a BBC article posted on Facebook about the efforts to trace the contacts of a guy who died from covid 19 in one of India's largest slums.  Loads of people commenting that maybe it won't spread there because the people have strong immune systems.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 7, 2020)

Does anyone know what temperature you’ve got to be to be classed as possibly having a fever?

According to Amazon, if your temp over 37.5°C you’ve got to self quarantine for 72hrs.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 7, 2020)

Just had another text from GovUk and NHS saying I must not go outside of my property. Though I can open a window.
For the next twelve weeks!!
Bah.


----------



## elbows (Apr 7, 2020)

Anju said:


> Just seen a BBC article posted on Facebook about the efforts to trace the contacts of a guy who died from covid 19 in one of India's largest slums.  Loads of people commenting that maybe it won't spread there because the people have strong immune systems.



When there was the story about how the TB vaccine could maybe help in this pandemic, and I was looking into the broader background of such claims, there was actually some interesting stuff on that note. I forgot the detail, but something along the lines of that vaccine seeming to make very little apparent difference in some places, and theories about why that is. One of them involves the idea that if people had already naturally picked up certain bacterial infections, those infections had done a similar 'immune system priming' job to that the vaccine can offer.

Polio is another one. The theory is that increased public health/hygiene/clean environment in some countries meant polio epidemics could occur, often affecting middle class families at the time, in a way that simply didnt used to happen in the past. Because in the old days the mother passed some immunity to their child, and the child was likely to be exposed to polio in the environment early, while this immunity was still offering them some protection. But when the environment was cleaner, the young were catching it much later on, when the temporary immunity they had gotten from their mother had long since passed, and the risk of complications was greater.


----------



## Cid (Apr 7, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Just had another text from GovUk and NHS saying I must not go outside of my property. Though I can open a window.
> For the next twelve weeks!!
> Bah.



Was it this?



> NHS Coronavirus Service: Your condition means you are at high risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus. Please remain at home for 12 weeks unless a healthcare professional tells you to leave. You will get a letter from the NHS to confirm this.
> 
> Support is available for you if you need it to get help with getting food and basic care. Please complete this short form to tell us whether you need this: www.gov.uk/coronavirus-extremely-vulnerable.
> 
> ...



I got that... my condition, such as it is, is not on the list. Odd.

Bit fucking scary if you are...


----------



## elbows (Apr 7, 2020)

I think when it was first announced that they would send those texts/letters out, the government had left wiggle room in their guidelines so that individual GPs could add individual patients they considered to be at risk to the list. It was also acknowledged that the original set of data they used was incomplete.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 7, 2020)

elbows, this is what my oncologist said when we had a phone consultation ten days ago. He said he had put appropriate forms in. But I had already started to follow the guidelines but didn’t know about not going outside of my property. I have been going on dog walks with Mrs S. Though we are sleeping in different rooms and trying be as distant as possible. It is truly despairing.
But it’s the way of things.
I am expecting my chemo sessions to be suspended if these first scans next week show no change. It’s become all about increasing the longevity of my life after that. Ho hum!


----------



## Anju (Apr 7, 2020)

elbows said:


> When there was the story about how the TB vaccine could maybe help in this pandemic, and I was looking into the broader background of such claims, there was actually some interesting stuff on that note. I forgot the detail, but something along the lines of that vaccine seeming to make very little apparent difference in some places, and theories about why that is. One of them involves the idea that if people had already naturally picked up certain bacterial infections, those infections had done a similar 'immune system priming' job to that the vaccine can offer.
> 
> Polio is another one. The theory is that increased public health/hygiene/clean environment in some countries meant polio epidemics could occur, often affecting middle class families at the time, in a way that simply didnt used to happen in the past. Because in the old days the mother passed some immunity to their child, and the child was likely to be exposed to polio in the environment early, while this immunity was still offering them some protection. But when the environment was cleaner, the young were catching it much later on, when the temporary immunity they had gotten from their mother had long since passed, and the risk of complications was greater.



OK, I can understand how that would work, I think. I was working under the, quite possibly false, assumption that having to fight against the levels of disease, combined with poor diet, lack of rest and all the other stresses of those living conditions would leave immune systems compromised.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 7, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Does anyone know what temperature you’ve got to be to be classed as possibly having a fever?


----------



## Anju (Apr 7, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Just had another text from GovUk and NHS saying I must not go outside of my property. Though I can open a window.
> For the next twelve weeks!!
> Bah.



My wife got that today as well. She had only received the message that everyone got before. She's not taking any of the medication they listed but has in the past for ulcerative colitis and sacoidosis but they have been under control for over 3 years. 

She did contact our doctor last week as she needed proof of sarcoidosis to get a reduction on our water bill so was thinking they may have added her to the list.


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Apr 7, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Does anyone know what temperature you’ve got to be to be classed as possibly having a fever?
> 
> According to Amazon, if your temp over 37.5°C you’ve got to self quarantine for 72hrs.




That's interesting. I had a cough about 4 weeks back (very dry and unpleasant), I had no fever as far as I was aware, but I did feel tired a lot, and I had bare headaches and muscle aches.

I measured my temperature twice a day and the highest it got up to was 37.4 one afternoon, for about half an hour. 

This was around the time I came on the blob.

Tbh, it wouldn't have stopped me going6to work, and it didn't knock me out enough not to partake in the odd glass of wine or three. 

I know hormones play a part in temperature differences and thought nothing of it.

Could I have had the Lurgey?

My husband never got sick, and I stayed at home (cuz the cough was nasty and has taken 4 weeks to clear up.... But I always get a cough when I get sick...)


----------



## HAL9000 (Apr 7, 2020)




----------



## Marty1 (Apr 7, 2020)

FabricLiveBaby! said:


> That's interesting. I had a cough about 4 weeks back (very dry and unpleasant), I had no fever as far as I was aware, but I did feel tired a lot, and I had bare headaches and muscle aches.
> 
> I measured my temperature twice a day and the highest it got up to was 37.4 one afternoon, for about half an hour.
> 
> ...



Me and my gf had same symptoms as you mention, possibly around the same time you mention of approx a month ago, I did comment about it on here too.

I didn’t check my temp at the time but my gf is convinced that we both had coronavirus.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Apr 7, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Does anyone know what temperature you’ve got to be to be classed as possibly having a fever?
> 
> According to Amazon, if your temp over 37.5°C you’ve got to self quarantine for 72hrs.


I'm not a medic or involved in healthcare, but NHS website says 37.8 C (under fever in adults), or feeling hot to the touch on chest or back (on the coronavirus page).


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 7, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> It certainly seems to affect men worse.


this doesn't tally with current welsh figures









						The locations of all Covid-19 cases in Wales as one area has most in UK
					

The figures break down the picture according to local authorities, confirming that Newport has the most cases in Wales and the UK




					www.walesonline.co.uk
				




although on this topic i heard have 2 X chromosomes is generally associated with improved immune response (for certain definitions of improved).


----------



## Supine (Apr 7, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> this doesn't tally with current welsh figures
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Lots of data presented in that article but it is subject to huge margins of error. I think they are trying to over analyse limited data and could well be drawing very wrong conclusions. Read with interest though as a very good friend is a nurse on a Welsh covid ward.


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 7, 2020)

fair enough, was jut the most recent breakdown i've seen and the sex ratios were notable for not fitting into what i'd come to expect. luckily i understand little enough about statistics to seek any particular solace or real understanding in them either way...


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 7, 2020)

Supine said:


> Lots of data presented in that article...


is mostly unhelpful links and blank space for me, had to scroll for fucking ever to find the numbers.


----------



## Supine (Apr 7, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> is mostly unhelpful links and blank space for me, had to scroll for fucking ever to find the numbers.




Yeah. Terrible website design


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Apr 7, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Me and my gf had same symptoms as you mention, possibly around the same time you mention of approx a month ago, I did comment about it on here too.
> 
> I didn’t check my temp at the time but my gf is convinced that we both had coronavirus.




My mum had something similar in London around that time too.. Thing is, I'm in Krakow, and when I came down with it, it started as a scratchy larynx, and it was before any lock down had happened at all, only1 week after first diagnosed case.....

That's why it made me wonder.

I've honestly had far worse illnesses most years.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 7, 2020)

elbows said:


> When there was the story about how the TB vaccine could maybe help in this pandemic, and I was looking into the broader background of such claims, there was actually some interesting stuff on that note. I forgot the detail, but something along the lines of that vaccine seeming to make very little apparent difference in some places, and theories about why that is. One of them involves the idea that if people had already naturally picked up certain bacterial infections, those infections had done a similar 'immune system priming' job to that the vaccine can offer.
> 
> Polio is another one. The theory is that increased public health/hygiene/clean environment in some countries meant polio epidemics could occur, often affecting middle class families at the time, in a way that simply didnt used to happen in the past. Because in the old days the mother passed some immunity to their child, and the child was likely to be exposed to polio in the environment early, while this immunity was still offering them some protection. But when the environment was cleaner, the young were catching it much later on, when the temporary immunity they had gotten from their mother had long since passed, and the risk of complications was greater.




Adding to this, there have been some really fascinating studies that show that people who have had fevers and infections in childhood have a better immune response to all illness in later years, including acute infection and degenerative diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease. These studies came out of the hygeine hypothesis and the studies around fever protecting children from enveloping atopy. There’s a lot of confusion and conflation in those studies and the pop lit that came out of them, but there does seem to be a significant correlation between fever suppression and avoidance in childhood, and a tendency to immunological dysfunction later in life.

One of the questions I’d be looking at, if I could, is historic acute infection management in the individual and response to acute viral respiratory infection:  Does historic suppression of fever and acute infection predispose the individual to cytokine storm?




Also, epigenetics probably plays a significant role in the difference in response.

Blood group seems to be a factor too, although it’s too soon to know why.

But I do think this particular virus is quite tricksy and has a range of effects that currently confound us.

One of the things about a pandemic is that the sample size for any study is necessarily huge, so hopefully we’ll learn a lot about coronaviruses and human immunology on the other side of this.


----------



## Annonymouse1 (Apr 7, 2020)

Why the fuck are we prioritising tests when the majority of the population is left unable to be tested spreading the shit and the deterioration comes around 8-10 days into the infection so we have to isolate then wait until we’re nearly fucking dead before they’ll admit us and test us uk is bullshit


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Took a day off today as woke up with a banging headache, took my temperature which read 36.2°C which is ok.

Still had to go into Amazon depot before I was given clearance to leave for the day but noticed all yard marshall’s in face masks and protective gloves.

Also got a group text last night warning of groups of drivers being noticed off site congregating in groups not adhering to social distancing which needs to stop.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 8, 2020)

Annonymouse1 said:


> Why the fuck are we prioritising tests when the majority of the population is left unable to be tested spreading the shit and the deterioration comes around 8-10 days into the infection so we have to isolate then wait until we’re nearly fucking dead before they’ll admit us and test us uk is bullshit



At the moment there is clearly a limited resource for testing so under these circumstances there clearly needs to be a system of priority.  The one they have chosen is being who are being hospitalised and those who are wealthy and well connected.

The real question is why at this stage of the outbreak we still have such a limited resource.  We can and have speculated on the reasons for this but there has not been even an attempt at an adequate response from the government beyond Gove mumbling something about availability of the appropriate chemicals and Hancock trying a bit of sleight of hand by trying to conflate testing for the virus with antibody tests.


----------



## Tankus (Apr 8, 2020)

The streets around by me  seem noticeably cleaner and rubbish free 

Our seagull/rubbish bag issue  (no wheelie bins in the vale ) seems to have abated too


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 8, 2020)

Someone was doing noisy DIY earlier but thankfully they've stopped - nice and quiet again.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

The gf has just gone out food shopping and sent me this:



Looks like good social distancing in practice but apparently some twat has pushed in front on her


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 8, 2020)

That's the new normal for supermarkets round here.  Not the pushing in.


----------



## Doodler (Apr 8, 2020)

Most of Flat Town's mild-mannered inhabitants are trying to abide by the rules. Just as well since the police are almost never to be seen on the streets. The county lines Young Dealers of the Year have all disappeared from their usual nooks and corners.


----------



## Tankus (Apr 8, 2020)

Lidl in Barry yesterday half an hour before it opened


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Been told we can’t park in this car park before we get the text off Amazon to come into work due to this Facebook complaint.


----------



## Anju (Apr 8, 2020)

Wasn't sure where to post this but didn't want to start a new thread.

I've been thinking about how the financial impact of coronavirus will be handled once we have treatment and / or a vaccine in place. How will it affect the younger generations in particular. Are we headed for super austerity or a more equal world sort of thing.

I've been surprised that there hasn't been loads of discussion here on Urban about taking the opportunity this situation offers to force real change. I was talking to my dad about what comes next for ordinary people last night. He's never been politically active, other than attending a couple of meetings with an anti fascist group some of who's members saved him from a beating when he was photographing an NF march in Stafford in the 70s. He wasn't comfortable with the proactive violence approach, yet last night he was advocating for full on smash things up rioting. I think there may be a lot of people with similarly new found appreciation for direct action.

I have seen a couple of things online  but have no idea if they would be considered acceptable by the urban left or at what point it might be best to start getting people together. Posted the plan c one here before but nobody seemed interested so maybe it's pointless drivel. Unfortunately I can't tell but would like to know. 

Bill Mitchell - Modern Monetary Theory
Self-Isolate, Self-Educate! Political Education in the Pandemic


----------



## lefteri (Apr 8, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Been told we can’t park in this car park before we get the text off Amazon to come into work due to this Facebook complaint.




were you told not to huddle together in groups or just not to go to that car park?


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

lefteri said:


> were you told not to huddle together in groups or just not to go to that car park?



Told not to huddle in groups, which none of the team I’m with were on that video but our boss has decided to keep us away due to bad PR now Amazon have been alerted to this.


----------



## lefteri (Apr 8, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Told not to huddle in groups, which none of the team I’m with were on that video but our boss has decided to keep us away due to bad PR now Amazon have been alerted to this.



bit late for that


----------



## little_legs (Apr 8, 2020)

I shit you not, my neighbors on the opposite side of the road are having a party. Easily 8 people, maybe more. Music blaring, yelling. Just waiting for a full blown fight to erupt.


----------



## not a trot (Apr 8, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> The gf has just gone out food shopping and sent me this:
> 
> View attachment 205495
> 
> Looks like good social distancing in practice but apparently some twat has pushed in front on her



Standing in line outside Sainsburys this morning, the bloke in front of me kept looking round at me. Started to wonder if I'd done or was doing something wrong. Finally he said something. Turns out we were at school together back in the 70s. We weren't best mates or anything but if it wasn't for these shitty restrictions would have gladly gone and had a pint or 3 with him. Exchanged phone numbers though, so maybe a meet up soon. And Sainsburys had sold out of Hovis, cunts.


----------



## Spandex (Apr 8, 2020)

My flat overlooks a main road, which is deserted at the moment. A man just danced along the middle of it singing 'One Night Only' at the top of his voice in a beautiful baritone.


----------



## Epona (Apr 8, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Drivers now issued with this sign to put in front of van window and additional letter as one of our drivers was pulled over by police yesterday and questioned as to why he was driving.
> 
> View attachment 203379



If you are delivering flour, rice, and lentils, you are an essential worker, if you're delivering a widescreen TV and a gaming chair with speakers in the headrest, you aren't.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Epona said:


> If you are delivering flour, rice, and lentils, you are an essential worker, if you're delivering a widescreen TV and a gaming chair with speakers in the headrest, you aren't.



Funnily enough we (drivers) were talking of such the other day - one point was made that non essential items may actually be essential for people’s mental health.


----------



## Epona (Apr 8, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Funnily enough we (drivers) were talking of such the other day - one point was made that non essential items may actually be essential for people’s mental health.



Oh please fuck off

Most of the world manages to get by without non-essential items year in year out, if some overpriviledged fuckwit is going to have a nervous breakdown because they can't get the latest gadget _now_ then they need to go and die in a pit of fire


----------



## killer b (Apr 8, 2020)

Epona said:


> If you are delivering flour, rice, and lentils, you are an essential worker, if you're delivering a widescreen TV and a gaming chair with speakers in the headrest, you aren't.


Good to see the widescreen TV making a reappearance as a symbol of profligate immorality.


----------



## Epona (Apr 8, 2020)

killer b said:


> Good to see the widescreen TV making a reappearance as a symbol of profligate immorality.



It sticks in my mind because my TV has had a cracked screen for months and I haven't been able to replace it yet!
Being able to replace it would be a yardstick of "everything is financially stable"


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Epona said:


> Oh please fuck off
> 
> Most of the world manages to get by without non-essential items year in year out, if some overpriviledged fuckwit is going to have a nervous breakdown because they can't get the latest gadget _now_ then they need to go and die in a pit of fire



We don’t know what we’re delivering tbh as it’s all in plain cardboard packaging 99% of the time.

Haven’t delivered a flat screen tv since Xmas.

Edit:  people’s mental health is also important in these uncertain times.


----------



## Epona (Apr 8, 2020)

I'm a lifelong socialist, and basically until Amazon's distribution and delivery network has been ordered to get food and essential household supplies to the vulnerable, shielding, and needy during this crisis, then I am going to be a little sceptical.  Not of the warehouse workers or drivers, it's not your fault.  Just repurpose the entire operation for now.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Epona said:


> I'm a lifelong socialist, and basically until Amazon's distribution and delivery network has been ordered to get food and essential household supplies to the vulnerable, shielding, and needy during this crisis, then I am going to be a little sceptical.  Not of the warehouse workers or drivers, it's not your fault.  Just repurpose the entire operation for now.



Apparently Amazon are claiming that they are prioritising essentials and not accepting new non essentials into stock.

Of course they are probably talking shit.  My firm of drivers has just set on 10 new drivers to keep up with the increase in parcel volume.  We’re now surpassing Xmas peak levels.

Bezos must be happy.


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Apr 8, 2020)

Epona said:


> I'm a lifelong socialist, and basically until Amazon's distribution and delivery network has been ordered to get food and essential household supplies to the vulnerable, shielding, and needy during this crisis, then I am going to be a little sceptical.  Not of the warehouse workers or drivers, it's not your fault.  Just repurpose the entire operation for now.


Nationalise Amazon UK. it's the only reasonable thing to do.


----------



## Epona (Apr 8, 2020)

littlebabyjesus said:


> Nationalise Amazon UK. it's the only reasonable thing to do.


Well the ideal solution would be if the people who worked there said "enough of this" and organised deliveries of essentials to the vulnerable themselves while their money-hungry bosses sat in open-mouthed horror... _looks at Marty1_...


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 9, 2020)

Epona said:


> I'm a lifelong socialist, and basically until Amazon's distribution and delivery network has been ordered to get food and essential household supplies to the vulnerable, shielding, and needy during this crisis, then I am going to be a little sceptical.  Not of the warehouse workers or drivers, it's not your fault.  Just repurpose the entire operation for now.



Theres been reports in the press that Amazon could be delivering home coronavirus test kits soon.


----------



## bimble (Apr 9, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Theres been reports in the press that Amazon could be delivering home coronavirus test kits soon.


Mate. That was last week they were promising us you'd be delivering these 'within days', but turns out there are no tests at all which work. They don't exist. Keep up.

"The UK will now be trying to get a refund, said Kathy Hall, director of the Covid-19 testing strategy at the Department of Health..We’re now working with companies to cancel the orders and get the money back where possible,” she told the committee."









						UK Covid-19 antibody tests not ready until May at earliest
					

Health secretary’s target of 100,000 tests a day of NHS staff and key workers unlikely to be met, experts say




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 9, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> That's the new normal for supermarkets round here.  Not the pushing in.



What about when you get inside?  Gf said social distancing broke down as people were passing each other in the aisles.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 9, 2020)

Concerning antibody tests :


bimble said:


> *"The UK will now be trying to get a refund"*, said Kathy Hall, director of the Covid-19 testing strategy at the Department of Health..We’re now working with companies to cancel the orders and get the money back where possible,” she told the committee."
> 
> 
> 
> ...



There was talk earlier that contracts for antibody tests would be conditional upon the tests having been verified as working.
"Will now be trying to get a refund" sound thoroughly incompetent compared to that 
(Also that refund line doesn't appear in the article you quoted ...  )


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 9, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> What about when you get inside?  Gf said social distancing broke down as people were passing each other in the aisles.




Yeah, it’s tricky to keep a proper distance inside shops. Not least because some shopworkers kinda bimble about doing their work as normal without keeping their distance. I get it. I’ve been doing some releif work in a small shop and if I’m stacking shelves it’s really tedious to keep stepping back or getting off a ladder every time a customer wants something from that shelf, all day long, especially since plenty of customers don’t keep their own distance.

Have you not been into a supermarket at all during lockdown Marty1


----------



## keybored (Apr 9, 2020)

bimble said:


> "We’re now working with companies to cancel the orders and get the money back where possible,” she told the committee."



Can't they just get eBay to step in for them?


----------



## lefteri (Apr 9, 2020)

keybored said:


> Can't they just get eBay to step in for them?



the committee ordered that she should open a paypal dispute as soon as possible


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 9, 2020)

Since we're in this for the long term to some extent, I'm assembling a hand-washing station just inside the front door.
I should have done it sooner since that room is my bike garage / workshop. And hopefully even once this thing has burned itself out I will continue to wash my hands before and after supermarket trips.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 9, 2020)

What one has to take into account is that the last time the media propagated a scintilla of truth was VE Day 1945 and the only time any British gov. has done anything beneficial for its citizens, albeit unwittingly, was to transport them to Australia circa 200 yrs. ago.

Of course the media are going to run with this mass hysteria propaganda, after all, its the biggest story they've had since the Coronation St. scriptwriters killed off Deidre, not to mention of course that its the perfect detraction from a protracted economic recession. People have far more to worry about the real gov. agenda behind the creation of their media handmaiden's mass hysteria than Coronavirus.

We live in a dumbed down society where the ''Sun,'' a comic strip for retarded under fives is the best selling newspaper(I use the word newspaper in a euphemistic context) hence the reaction  to the current propaganda is of little surprise. If Boris, from his Coronavirus death bed were to announce a Mandatory Euthanasia Programme, there would be a not inconsiderable proportion of the population enquiring where they should report to and if they should  bring a change of clothing.

Meanwhile, I am holed up in a basement closet for the next two years, being fed with sandwiches and wafer biscuits passed under the door with my eyes and ears fixated on Sky News for the latest developments.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 9, 2020)

I hear rumours circulating from the confinement of my basement closet that the BBC are planning a re-run of old 1950's  Sci Fi movies, a la ''On the Beach.'' On a more serious note, I've got to state that I jus' love this ''social distancing'' practice, particularly in the vein that one would prefer most people to stay a couple of continents away, as opposed to a couple of meters.

Normally, people are so engaged with talking puerile detritus on their gov. tracking devices, euphemistically referred to as mobile phones, they don't see a foot in front of them, I'm forever bumping into them. Now they walk in the road if even an apparition appears in the distance, its jus' a shame there aren't more cars around at the moment


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 9, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> What one has to take into account is that the last time the media propagated a scintilla of truth was VE Day 1945 and the only time any British gov. has done anything beneficial for its citizens, albeit unwittingly, was to transport them to Australia circa 200 yrs. ago.



Whatever else happens this is one of the best openings to a post I've seen or urban for a while.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 9, 2020)

I just heard on the radio that Kathryn Jenkins and Vera Lynn are duetting on a new recording of We’ll Meet Again.
When is that asteroid due?


----------



## Lucy Fur (Apr 9, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Yeah, it’s tricky to keep a proper distance inside shops. Not least because some shopworkers kinda bimble about doing their work as normal without keeping their distance. I get it. I’ve been doing some releif work in a small shop and if I’m stacking shelves it’s really tedious to keep stepping back or getting off a ladder every time a customer wants something from that shelf, all day long, especially since plenty of customers don’t keep their own distance.
> 
> Have you not been into a supermarket at all during lockdown Marty1


Here in France the supermarket now closed a couple of hours earlier, and shelf stacking occurs then. Also the car park is semi roped off to control numbers in the store at the same time.


----------



## MrCurry (Apr 9, 2020)

I hadn’t seen this before, but googling further it seems there’s a number of articles citing conjunctivitis as a possible first symptom of covid 19. And I was googling conjunctivitis because I’ve had it for the past couple of days 

That’s the trouble with googling health conditions I suppose!!


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 9, 2020)

Since my inception on this planet, I've had at least a couple of viruses per annum, barring one and that was when I had a year in California.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 9, 2020)

Lucy Fur said:


> Here in France the supermarket now closed a couple of hours earlier, and shelf stacking occurs then.



My local supermercado in sunny Woodford was closed for a couple  of hrs. the other day with a sign outside stating the reason was for restocking shelves. However, when I passed by an hr. later, the shelves were still bare whilst  all the staff were masked up, busily engaged with mops and buckets et al. Heaven forbid how they'll react when Nevil Chamberlain's '' this country is now at war with Germany'' speech filters down to them.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 9, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> My local supermercado in sunny Woodford was closed for a couple  of hrs. the other day with a sign outside stating the reason was for restocking shelves. However, when I passed by an hr. later, the shelves were still bare whilst  all the staff were masked up, busily engaged with mops and buckets et al. Heaven forbid how they'll react when Nevil Chamberlain's '' this country is now at war with Germany'' speech filters down to them.


are you Tobias Funke?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 9, 2020)

I wonder what search terms people are using that gets them onto Urban as a new member right now. 

I don’t know how these things work at all. Why is this place popping up on search engines right now? Is it because of all the links we’re posting?


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I wonder what search terms people are using that gets them onto Urban as a new member right now.



I tried engaging in the noble art of repartee on a couple of other forums, but they transpired to be ''Mutual Admiration Societies'' compiled of humourless, politically correct apparatchiks and Orwellian moderators  who were deleting my ripostes faster than the ''Sun'' changes political allegiances . Then I just happened across this forum and decided to give it a try.

To get back on topic, this so called ''social distancing'' isn't a new phenomenon  designed to counteract Coronavirus, my Belgian Malinois Shepherd has been practising it since he was 3 months old, no-one can get within 20 yards of him.


----------



## Gimigimi (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I tried engaging in the noble art of repartee on a couple of other forums, but they transpired to be ''Mutual Admiration Societies'' compiled of humourless, politically correct apparatchiks and Orwellian moderators  who were deleting my ripostes faster than the ''Sun'' changes political allegiances .
> 
> Then I just happened across this forum and decided to give it a try.



Can't imagine why anyone would ever have a problem with a guy who refers to posting as "the noble art of repartee" and using a phone as "talking puerile detritus on their gov. tracking devices". No matter - forthwith, to enlightenment good sir! Damn the crosseyed protestations of the rabble, there's delectable intercourse afoot presently amidst this fine locale!


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 10, 2020)

‘Zoom bombing’ my becomes a thing for sickos during coronavirus lockdown 









						Coronavirus: Teachers in Singapore stopped from using Zoom after 'very serious incidents'
					

One incident saw hackers hijack the stream of a lesson for teenage girls, forcing pictures of male genitalia to appear on screens.




					news.sky.com


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 10, 2020)

A police car just drove up my street at moderate speed without its siren or lights while my neighbour was reversing ...


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 10, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> are you Tobias Funke?




Who’s the Viz character thst uses too many words?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 10, 2020)

Gimigimi said:


> Can't imagine why anyone would ever have a problem with a guy who refers to posting as "the noble art of repartee" and using a phone as "talking puerile detritus on their gov. tracking devices". No matter - forthwith, to enlightenment good sir! Damn the crosseyed protestations of the rabble, there's delectable intercourse afoot presently amidst this fine locale!




Forsooth, verily ‘tis the exemplification of sesquipedalian loquaciousness!

I hope Diatribe sticks around, might force us to up our game.

Welcome on board Diatribe 

I can’t believe that’s username is still available! Don't fuck up mate, cos each name can only be used once and you’ve got a good one. 

Gorgeous dog you've got there. Jump on the Dog thread to join the pup brigade.









						The dog thread is better than the cat thread, because it features dogs.
					

There are some tunes which Mrs Loom plays on the saxophone to which M.F.M.I. de Robespierre's howled accompaniment is moderately quiet and sedate. Not Baker Street, though. The moment she starts on the Bob Holness classic, the dog drowns her out with impressive harmonies and cunning changes in...




					www.urban75.net


----------



## Tankus (Apr 10, 2020)

> Cambridge Police
> 
> @CambridgeCops
> 
> Officers visited Tesco Barhill this morning as part of their patrols around supermarkets and green spaces this weekend. Good to see everyone was abiding by social distancing measures and the non essential aisles were empty. #1732



non essential policing


----------



## Tankus (Apr 10, 2020)

a like for the dawg ...not too sure about the post

I've been here 10 years  or so ...and I still feel like a newbie ....sometimes


----------



## Tankus (Apr 10, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Since we're in this for the long term to some extent, I'm assembling a hand-washing station just inside the front door.
> I should have done it sooner since that room is my bike garage / workshop. And hopefully even once this thing has burned itself out I will continue to wash my hands before and after supermarket trips.
> 
> View attachment 205673


You should aim to change that water at least  once a month GG


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 10, 2020)

Got a key worker cake off Amazon.


Just ate it - very nice


----------



## treelover (Apr 10, 2020)

hearing reports that some of the food parcels have some 'pretty ripe' perishables in them, mouldy bananas, lettuce with slime on them, great people are getting them, but for those with immune issues, it can be dangerous

that cake looks amazing.


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 10, 2020)

Tankus said:


> You should aim to change that water at least  once a month GG



I may add a bit of nursery chlorine bleach to the 5 litre container ... I also found a small fountain pump so I may fit that ..
It's by the front door / garden, so disposal of dirty water is not a problem...


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I don’t know how these things work at all. Why is this place popping up on search engines right now? Is it because of all the links we’re posting?



Upon reflection, I came across this site after typing Coronavirus in the Google search machine. I was looking for a site that accommodated alternative perspectives on the aforementioned which is sadly lacking on most fora pertaining to this subject.  I'm not in denial that there is some form of virus polluting the atmosphere and one doesn't require the brains of David Lloyd George, or that matter, the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein to comprehend that there will be those falling foul of it. However, as in war, the first casualty is truth and the only matter that even the so called experts can agree upon is that there will be far more casualties from the effect than the cause.

For what its worth, my opinion is that the media are a far greater threat to the British people than the parasites languishing on the benches in the House of Commons. For instance , a headline in a comic strip owned by that tyrannical megalomaniac, Rupert Murdoch, becomes enshrined in the law statute books the following day. I've watched in utter disbelief over the past 30 yrs. as just about every civil liberty our forebears fought and in some cases died for have been eroded by the media driving a misinformation coach and horses through them.

First they came for our animals with the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act, then they came for our guns with the 1998 Firearms Act, then they came for our cash with the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act, then they came for our right to a fair trial with the 2003 Criminal Justice Bill, then they came for our benefits with the 2007 Welfare Reform Act  etc etc. etc.. Now they are coming for our businesses, pensions, homes and any remaining possessions with the Great Coronavirus Scam.

I suppose the only benefit to being a British citizen is that unlike other countries, in the Peoples' Republik of Britain, one doesn't lose any civil rights if criminalised, because there aren't any to lose in the first instance. Its all a tad reminiscent of that old German P.O.W  joke, ''Zer vill be no more complaints about ze Red Cross parcels, because zer vill be no more Red Cross parcels.''


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 10, 2020)

That post has reappeared


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Upon reflection, I came across this site after typing Coronavirus in the Google search machine. I was looking for a site that accommodated alternative perspectives on the aforementioned which is sadly lacking on most fora pertaining to this subject.  I'm not in denial that there is some form of virus polluting the atmosphere and one doesn't require the brains of David Lloyd George, or that matter, the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein to comprehend that there will be those falling foul of it. However, as in war, the first casualty is truth and the only matter that even the so called experts can agree upon is that there will be far more casualties from the effect than the cause.
> 
> For what its worth, my opinion is that the media are a far greater threat to the British people than the parasites languishing on the benches in the House of Commons. For instance , a headline in a comic strip owned by that tyrannical megalomaniac, Rupert Murdoch, becomes enshrined in the law statute books the following day. I've watched in utter disbelief over the past 30 yrs. as just about every civil liberty our forebears fought and in some cases died for have been eroded by the media driving a misinformation coach and horses through them.
> 
> ...


Wouldn't it have been faster to just type "I AM A PRETENTIOUS MORON" and leave it at that?


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Wouldn't it have been faster to just type "I AM A PRETENTIOUS MORON" and leave it at that?



Probably, but that would have deprived you of displaying your superior intellectual prowess whilst expressing your dissatisfaction at the content of my missive.


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Probably, but that would have deprived you of displaying your superior intellectual prowess whilst expressing your dissatisfaction at the content of my missive.


So - although you claim to approve of the social services as well as personal firearms - so let's cut to the chase ... what of Jordan Peterson and "man" stuff ?


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Probably, but that would have deprived you of displaying your superior intellectual prowess whilst expressing your dissatisfaction at the content of my missive.



If you are going to post in this obviously overblown manner, then you really need to pay much closer attention to grammatical detail and to proof reading. Although, by not doing so, there is at least a consistency between the half arsed style and the half arsed content of your half arsed 'missives'.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 10, 2020)

things lockdown does to you..

Went on a food shop , ended up buying a cake tin , gonna bake me a cake, except forgot most of the ingredients, ,l run out of # before i can get back to the shop , oh well minor problems, I can wait or will find a way


----------



## Aladdin (Apr 10, 2020)

__





						French police turn back private jet of holidaymakers from UK
					





					www.irishtimes.com
				





Feckin gobshites 😁


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 10, 2020)

I was idly watching Flightradar24 the other day when someone mentioned the French air force were doing exercises including in-air refuelling and I wondered about some of the light(er) aircraft - 

.. actually I wonder what some of the large aircraft are carrying ... I went to look today when I actually noticed a couple of contrails - I live right under some major flightpaths and the Airbuses taking off and landing at Lulsgate can be fairly noisy at 4,000 feet or so but these were big planes at 12,000 feet ...


----------



## bimble (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Now they are coming for our businesses, pensions, homes and any remaining possessions with the Great Coronavirus Scam.


Come on then. Who benefits, who are They, who is it that is perpetrating the Great Coronavirus Scam on us. Spell it out please.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> So - although you claim to approve of the social services as well as personal firearms - so let's cut to the chase ... what of Jordan Peterson and "man" stuff ?



I can't recall claiming to approve of either social services or firearms, I think you may be confusing me with some one else. I merely indicated that the aforementioned, amongst a number of others, were services/rights that the media had played a major role in persuading successive govs. over the past 30 yrs. in depriving the British people of. You surely don't believe that govs, as opposed to the media hold sway in the UK, do you.

With regards Jordan Peterson and ''man'' stuff,  I'm not familiar with either , therefore couldn't possibly comment upon.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

bimble said:


> Come on then. Who benefits, who are They, who is it that is perpetrating the Great Coronavirus Scam on us. Spell it out please.



Well, for a start, the big business conglomerates will ultimately benefit, if for no other reason, an  awful lot of their small business competitors will be wiped out, or perhaps you believe that  as seen on TV, what is currently transpiring will only last a few wks.  No-one knows how long the current status quo will last, or how the end game will be played out. As with Brexit, where the gov. thought a Remain vote was a done deal, there is no exit plan.

Most of the proletariat are enslaved in debt for the duration of their lives and totally reliant on their wages/salary to maintain these debts, how long do you think the banks et al are going to carry them before foreclosing on their properties, cars, etc.  Even if they were of this persuasion, it would merely increase their debts and in some cases, make them insurmountable  Who is going to take the responsibility of standing up and stating, ''D'accord chaps, its all over, back to work and play'' There's always winners and losers in every situation,  who do you think the smart money will be on, the banks and big business corporations that own 90% of the wealth, or the 90% that own 10% of the wealth.


----------



## bimble (Apr 10, 2020)

Right. So the ‘Great Coronavirus Scam’ is being perpetrated by big business and bankers to emiserate the masses. What is the scam part that is what I’m asking you. Is it that you think all this is being done on purpose under cover of some globally coordinated intentional overreaction to the virus? If not that then what. 
Calling the virus a scam is not clever, is arguably very stupid right now, imo.


----------



## smmudge (Apr 10, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I wonder what search terms people are using that gets them onto Urban as a new member right now.
> 
> I don’t know how these things work at all. Why is this place popping up on search engines right now? Is it because of all the links we’re posting?



I seem to recall lots of long term posters saying they joined right after 9/11. Something about huge news stories makes people seek out places to talk about them? And we are talking about it a lot I suppose.


----------



## treelover (Apr 10, 2020)

Selfless and exhausted - why our NHS heroes deserve medals in coronavirus battle
					

EXCLUSIVE: Doctors, nurses, night porters, carers and paramedics are all fighting incredibly hard to save as many lives as possible as the coronavirus continues to batter the UK




					www.mirror.co.uk
				




incrredible stories here and its over a week ago, so will be worse for the, so yes, commission a medal for them


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

bimble said:


> . Is it that you think all this is being done on purpose under cover of some globally coordinated intentional overreaction to the virus? If not that then what.
> Calling the virus a scam is not clever, is arguably very stupid right now, imo.



I think its possible there's have been an overreaction, Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.  A similar analogy would be AIDS, where prior to the early 1980's it was erroneously diagnosed as Pneumonia et al. Had the likes of Rock Hudson, Liberace  died a few yrs. earlier, their death certificates would have been stamped Pneumonia. What is now occurring is unprecedented and there have been many other fatal diseases/viruses around in the last 100 yrs. since the so called Spanish Flue. Incidentally, it was named the Spanish Flue because Spain was one of the few countries around at the time with an uncensored media that was actually reporting their true death toll.

As previously stated, this is a big story for the media and it is in their interest to create mass hysteria and run it as long as possible. Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers and upgrade their TV ratings. After all, what have they normally got to report on, who's going to win the next Big Brother extravaganza , the Queen has a cold, Prince Harry is unhappy with his marriage, Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al. It also coincides with a deep economic recession, which will become known as the Coronavirus recession, as opposed to yet another capitalist fuck up by the elite few running the economy,, thereby enabling the status quo of the financial system to survive relatively unscathed.

Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 10, 2020)

Maybe twat is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 10, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Maybe twat is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless


Its jus' as well I don't suffer from Coulrophobia.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 10, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Its jus' as well I don't suffer from Coulrophobia.



Sneaky. You deleted the bit I was replying to.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 10, 2020)

Heads up:

Bacterial infection and antibacterial resistant infection is a real concern for COVID-19 patients.









						Antibiotic resistance: the hidden threat lurking behind Covid-19 - STAT
					

Antibiotic resistance will be a problem with Covid-19. When it weakens the body, it's easier for hard-to-treat bacteria to take hold.




					www.statnews.com
				




“In the U.S. alone, we see 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections each year and more than 35,000 deaths, though experts fear that the real number is much higher [.......] The patients at greatest risk from superbugs are the ones who are already more vulnerable to illness from viral lung infections like influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Covid-19. The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, for example, claimed nearly 300,000 lives around the world. Many of those deaths — between 29% and 55% — were actually caused by secondary bacterial pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a one-two punch: A virus can weaken the body, making it easier for complex, hard-to-treat bacteria to take hold. [...] Already, some studies have found that 1 in 7 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has acquired a dangerous secondary bacterial infection, and 50% of patients who have died had such infections [...] As we come together to fight today’s Covid-19 crisis, we must also look ahead to the next one. We cannot be short-sighted, and we cannot be complacent, especially about antibiotic resistance. We must put measures in place to ensure that we have the antibiotics we need — today and in the future. The time to act is now.”


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Sneaky. You deleted the bit I was replying to.




No I didn't,  I quoted you verbatim.




> two sheds said:
> Maybe twat is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless


Its jus' as well I don't suffer from Coulrophobia.


----------



## bimble (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.


I see. Silly old scientists around the world thinking it is a new virus.


Diatribe said:


> What is now occurring is unprecedented and there have been many other fatal diseases/viruses around in the last 100 yrs.


Gosh. Really? say it ain't so. tell me more


Diatribe said:


> since the so called Spanish Flue. Incidentally, it was named the Spanish Flue because Spain was one of the few countries around at the time with an uncensored media that was actually reporting their true death toll.


Yes, thanks for that, we did know.


Diatribe said:


> As previously stated, this is a big story for the media and it is in their interest to create mass hysteria and run it as long as possible. Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers and upgrade their TV ratings. After all, what have they normally got to report on, who's going to win the next Big Brother extravaganza , the Queen has a cold, Prince Harry is unhappy with his marriage, Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al.


This is so absurdly parochial. Is it the "MSM" in China and Iran responsible for the 'hype' in those countries too or do you think maybe possibly something else has been going on, like a new extremely infectious virus to which humans have no immunity for instance.


Diatribe said:


> It also coincides with a deep economic recession, which will become known as the Coronavirus recession, as opposed to yet another capitalist fuck up by the elite few running the economy,, thereby enabling the status quo of the financial system to survive relatively unscathed.


Right, unlike all previous recessions which brought the capitalist system to its knees. I see.


Diatribe said:


> Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless.


So you're basically saying Its just Flu and the MSM is making a big fuss to get ratings. You are, ergo, an Idiot. Being a fool and cloyingly condescending at the same time is not a winning combo.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No I didn't,  I quoted you verbatim.



No I meant your last sentence "Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless."

I checked back but it looked like you'd deleted it. Apologies if you hadn't.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> things lockdown does to you..
> 
> Went on a food shop , ended up buying a cake tin , gonna bake me a cake, except forgot most of the ingredients, ,l run out of # before i can get back to the shop , oh well minor problems, I can wait or will find a way
> [QUOTE/]
> ...


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 11, 2020)

Thanks  . ive got eggs, butter , sugar , jam , .and thats about it for cooking stuff.
Mind you im due my daily exercise and there is a shop about 1/2 a mile away so might go there ( is that allowed ? ) and see if there is any of the other bits I need.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No I didn't,  I quoted you verbatim.
> 
> 
> 
> Its jus' as well I don't suffer from Coulrophobia.




Why are you using this overblown language? 

Instead of inferring that two sheds is a clown, why not just say you think he’s a clown, I don’t get why you’re dressing up your opinion with affectatious sesquipedialism. 

Is it because you’re not confident in your opinions so you try to make them look bigger and better than they are? If that’s it, it’s not working, you’re not fooling anyone.

You’re entitled to your opinions of course but your argument is lazy and inconsistent and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. 

And you’re using some words and terms inaccurately, which undermines your efforts and makes you look foolish.

For example _et al_ is not a more fancy version of _etcetera_.

Please try harder


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> Thanks  . ive got eggs, butter , sugar , jam , .and thats about it for cooking stuff.
> Mind you im due my daily exercise and there is a shop about 1/2 a mile away so might go there ( is that allowed ? ) and see if there is any of the other bits I need.



No flour....

Jam omelette?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> Thanks  . ive got eggs, butter , sugar , jam , .and thats about it for cooking stuff.
> Mind you im due my daily exercise and there is a shop about 1/2 a mile away so might go there ( is that allowed ? ) and see if there is any of the other bits I need.




Do you have polenta/cornflour/cornmeal?


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> No flour....
> 
> Jam omelette?


yeah , it was kinda the most important thing I forgot


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Do you have polenta/cornflour/cornmeal?


crikey no ,  I only know what one of those things is and haven't got it. I'm only just starting out on this sorting the kitchen out marlakey , this is me evolving through the virus and there will be cake.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I think its possible there's have been an overreaction, Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.  A similar analogy would be AIDS, where prior to the early 1980's it was erroneously diagnosed as Pneumonia et al. Had the likes of Rock Hudson, Liberace  died a few yrs. earlier, their death certificates would have been stamped Pneumonia. What is now occurring is unprecedented and there have been many other fatal diseases/viruses around in the last 100 yrs. since the so called Spanish Flue. Incidentally, it was named the Spanish Flue because Spain was one of the few countries around at the time with an uncensored media that was actually reporting their true death toll.
> 
> As previously stated, this is a big story for the media and it is in their interest to create mass hysteria and run it as long as possible. Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers and upgrade their TV ratings. After all, what have they normally got to report on, who's going to win the next Big Brother extravaganza , the Queen has a cold, Prince Harry is unhappy with his marriage, Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al. It also coincides with a deep economic recession, which will become known as the Coronavirus recession, as opposed to yet another capitalist fuck up by the elite few running the economy,, thereby enabling the status quo of the financial system to survive relatively unscathed.
> 
> Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless.



You think think there has been an overeaction to the pandemic. Who is overreacting? In what ways are people overreacting? Do you think we should just be going about our business as normal?


You say that coronavirus may have been around since time immemorial. Coronavirus is a type of virus. So yes, we have been living with coronaviruses since before we had the scientific capacity to identify and name them. The common head cold can be caused by a rhinovirus, an adenovirus, or a coronavirus. This one is named SARS-CoV-2 and was first identified in 2019. The SARS bit stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome, the CoV bit means Coronavirus, and 2 is there because it’s the second SARS coronavirus that has been identified (the first was dealt with and pandemic avoided in 2002 and 2004).

Your suggestion that this current virus has been around for ages is bollocks. It’s what’s called a zoonotic virus, meaning it’s jumped from an animal species to humans (_zoo-_ of animals _-osis_, _-otis_ of disease). Loads of diseases have jumped from other species to humans, including the ‘flu and HIV/AIDS. This one was presumably present in animals for some time before it jumped to humans, but that jump happened very recently and we know that because we’ve never seen it before.

ETA Do you truly believe that this virus has been present in the human population prior to last winter?


Your claim that HIV/AIDS is pneumonia by another name is just stupid. I actually can’t be bothered to respond to the rest of your post but you have to know that it’s as easy to pick apart as the first bit has been.


Seriously Diatribe if you want to be half as clever as you think you are, you could do worse than sticking around and reading this place. You could really learn some stuff.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> crikey no ,  I only know what one of those things is and haven't got it. I'm only just starting out on this sorting the kitchen out marlakey , this is me evolving through the virus and there will be cake.






Lesson 1 : polenta is the same as cornmeal, and cornflour is also the same but ground much finer. It’s maize, or corn, like corn on the cob. It can be used to thicken up gravy or custard (cornflour is used for this). When it’s ground less fine, it’s called cornmeal. You can make a sort of porridge with it : they call that grits in the American Deep South and eat it for breakfast, in Italy they cook that porridge into a kinda rubbery wedge and that’s Polenta. They make cornmeal into cornbread in America too, often served alongside chilli con carne. Yum! And you can also make a really good cake with cornmeal too.


It’s a good store cupboard basic because it has so many different uses.

Sounds like you’ll have to make a detour to the shop for flour though... I can’t  think of a cake that can be made without any carby based at all.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers



Yep, it's all a conspiracy orchestrated by the massive global newspaper industry, they're in it with the Teletext conglomerates and the League of Typewriter Repairmen. All those old and not-so-old people suddenly turning up at hospitals with acute respiratory distress are crisis actors, many of them so committed to the part that they'll obligingly die to maintain the illusion.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Ooh! How about a torte...

I wonder if you can make a jam torte...

How many eggs can you spare?. How much butter?


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> And you’re using some words and terms inaccurately, which undermines your efforts and makes you look foolish.
> 
> For example _et al_ is not a more fancy version of _etcetera_.



No, it isn't , but et al can also be used as an abbreviation for et alia, et alii, or et aliae meaning ''and others''  If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you.

With ref. my mode of writing, do you think I should get in the programme with one of them thar new fangled mobile phones and learn moronspeak


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No, it isn't , but et al can also be used as an abbreviation for et alia, et allii, or et aliae meaning ''and others''  If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you.
> 
> With ref. my mode of writing, do you think I should get in the programme with one of them thar new fangled mobile phones and learn moronspeak



Good, you’ve looked it up, so now you really do know what it means.

As you say, _et al_ is an abbreviation of the Latin for _and others _and is generally reserved to mean _and other people_.


What did you mean when you said:



Diatribe said:


> Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al



... Trump is sporting a new wig and others...



It’s probably worth pointing out that the shortened version of influenza is ‘flu, not flue. A flue is a kind of chimney.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No, it isn't , but et al can also be used as an abbreviation for et alia, et alii, or et aliae meaning ''and others''  If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you.
> 
> With ref. my mode of writing, do you think I should get in the programme with one of them thar new fangled mobile phones and learn moronspeak




No, I don’t want you to speak like a moron.

That's exaclty my point.


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No, it isn't , but et al can also be used as an abbreviation for et alia, et alii, or et aliae meaning ''and others''  If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you.
> 
> With ref. my mode of writing, do you think I should get in the programme with one of them thar new fangled mobile phones and learn moronspeak



Ha, don’t think you quite get this place do you?


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

Yossarian said:


> Yep, it's all a conspiracy orchestrated by the massive global newspaper industry, they're in it with the Teletext conglomerates and the League of Typewriter Repairmen.


Gotcha,  you mean a la Saddam Hussain's non existent weapons of mass destruction ready to be launched on major European cities in less time than it takes for the Sun, Mail et al to print up their next headline. But 'ang on, didn't it subsequently transpire that Iraq's most modern weaponry were WW1 Lee Enfield rifles welded on to open back trucks.


----------



## Anju (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I think its possible there's have been an overreaction, Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.  A similar analogy would be AIDS, where prior to the early 1980's it was erroneously diagnosed as Pneumonia et al. Had the likes of Rock Hudson, Liberace  died a few yrs. earlier, their death certificates would have been stamped Pneumonia. What is now occurring is unprecedented and there have been many other fatal diseases/viruses around in the last 100 yrs. since the so called Spanish Flue. Incidentally, it was named the Spanish Flue because Spain was one of the few countries around at the time with an uncensored media that was actually reporting their true death toll.
> 
> As previously stated, this is a big story for the media and it is in their interest to create mass hysteria and run it as long as possible. Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers and upgrade their TV ratings. After all, what have they normally got to report on, who's going to win the next Big Brother extravaganza , the Queen has a cold, Prince Harry is unhappy with his marriage, Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al. It also coincides with a deep economic recession, which will become known as the Coronavirus recession, as opposed to yet another capitalist fuck up by the elite few running the economy,, thereby enabling the status quo of the financial system to survive relatively unscathed.
> 
> Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless.



This is ridiculous fantasy borderline conspiraloon rubbish. How do reduced ad revenues help the media. How is the costly minefield of reporting on a global pandemic better than being able to cover Trump's hair misadventures. How does people being forced into lockdown poverty, creating the very real prospect of mass civil unrest benefit capitalism. How does turning a situation where parts of the world are suffering borderline recession into a global depression help capitalism. 

Claiming that the virus might have been around for a long time is just reality defying nonsense.


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Gotcha,  you mean a la Saddam Hussain's non existent weapons of mass destruction ready to be launched on major European cities in less time than it takes for the Sun, Mail et al to print up their next headline. But 'ang on, didn't it subsequently transpire that Iraq's most modern weaponry were WW1 Lee Enfield rifles welded on to open back trucks.



If you want to take a shit shower on stuff like this, please go to the other bits of the politics forum.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

Cid said:


> Ha, don’t think you quite get this place do you?


You're right,  I'm in a quandary as to whether its a forum for serious discussion, or an arena for pissing contests


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> You're right,  I'm in a quandary as to whether its a forum for serious discussion, or an arena for pissing contests



I dunno, you’ve yet to try the former.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

Anju said:


> .
> 
> Claiming that the virus might have been around for a long time is just reality defying nonsense.



I presume you're a bacteriologist in which case maybe you can enlighten me as to why when reporting symptoms of this virus which is allegedly threatening the world with Armageddon, people are simply being told to stay home and isolate themselves. That's the sort of advice I'd expect to receive when suffering from a common cold, not a life threatening virus

Apart from the 24/7 media bombardment of death statistics reading akin to Steve Smith's batting average against England, do you actually personally know of anyone who has died from Coronavirus (I'll include in this those on the periphery of your life ).  My business is in the precious metals/antiques field, a consequence of which involves dealing with a wide ranging section of society and I can categorically state that I haven't heard of, never mind known, of one single person suffering from Coronavirus, let alone dying from the aforementioned.  Before I again get misquoted, this doesn't of course mean they're aren't any, of which there undoubtedly are, but merely that I haven't personally heard of, or known any.


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> You're right,  I'm in a quandary as to whether its a forum for serious discussion, or an arena for pissing contests


this _thread_ is a chat thread if you want to get your arse properly handed to you there are other threads available


----------



## Supine (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I presume you're a bacteriologist in which case maybe you can enlighten me as to why when reporting symptoms of this virus which is allegedly threatening the world with Armageddon, people are simply being told to stay home and isolate themselves. That's the sort of advice I'd expect to receive when suffering from a common cold, not a life threatening virus
> 
> Apart from the 24/7 media bombardment of death statistics reading akin to Steve Smith's batting average against England, do you actually personally know of anyone who has died from Coronavirus (I'll include in this those on the periphery of your life ).  My business is in the precious metals/antiques field, a consequence of which involves dealing with a wide ranging section of society and I can categorically state that I haven't heard of, never mind known, of one single person suffering from Coronavirus, let alone dying from the aforementioned.  Before I again get misquoted, this doesn't of course mean they're aren't any, of which there undoubtedly are, but merely that I haven't heard of, or known any.



So you don't know anyone affected. Well fucking done.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 11, 2020)

Great, that's two threads now that have just become the Diatribe show.


----------



## keybored (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Who’s the Viz character thst uses too many words?


Surely related.


----------



## keybored (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I presume you're a bacteriologist



Would a virologist be more useful?


----------



## 2hats (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I presume you're a bacteriologist in which case maybe you can enlighten me as to why when reporting symptoms of this virus which is allegedly threatening the world with Armageddon, people are simply being told to stay home and isolate themselves. That's the sort of advice I'd expect to receive when suffering from a common cold, not a life threatening virus


Bacteria. Virus. You understand the difference?
You realise that a virus isn't living and needs a naive host to propagate? (That _if_ everyone globally were able to isolate individually or by household, stay home inside for three weeks, this shitshow would completely stop).
Next you'll be telling us that you don't understand what soap does to the virion's lipid capsid.


Diatribe said:


> But 'ang on, didn't it subsequently transpire that Iraq's most modern weaponry were WW1 Lee Enfield rifles welded on to open back trucks.


No. Iraq manufactured tabun, sarin and mustard gas. The Iraqi military possessed 9K52 Luna-M, Al-Samoud (SA-2 derived) and Scud B (R17) missiles.


Diatribe said:


> Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.


Coronaviridae (the viral family) have been around for _at least_ tens of thousands of years (molecular clock dating analyses of RNA polymerase indicate a common ancestor at that point in time).

SARS-CoV-2 has been around for maybe a year or two at most in the original chiroptine host species. In humans for under 6 months.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

keybored said:


> Surely related.
> View attachment 206073




That’s the fella.


----------



## Anju (Apr 11, 2020)

[


Diatribe said:


> I presume you're a bacteriologist in which case maybe you can enlighten me as to why when reporting symptoms of this virus which is allegedly threatening the world with Armageddon, people are simply being told to stay home and isolate themselves. That's the sort of advice I'd expect to receive when suffering from a common cold, not a life threatening virus
> 
> Apart from the 24/7 media bombardment of death statistics reading akin to Steve Smith's batting average against England, do you actually personally know of anyone who has died from Coronavirus (I'll include in this those on the periphery of your life ).  My business is in the precious metals/antiques field, a consequence of which involves dealing with a wide ranging section of society and I can categorically state that I haven't heard of, never mind known, of one single person suffering from Coronavirus, let alone dying from the aforementioned.  Before I again get misquoted, this doesn't of course mean they're aren't any, of which there undoubtedly are, but merely that I haven't personally heard of, or known any.



It's a virus not scarlet fever.

Yes, my wife's cousin in Guyana passed away 3 days ago after contracting it while caring for his wife while she recovered from it. That's in a country with just a handful of reported  cases. However that's not relevant to as not knowing anyone with the virus doesn't mean anything as the infection numbers are still low as a percentage of population.

Anyway, you had no reply to my other points so whatever.

Eta. They are telling people to stay home because they can't treat everyone.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

2hats said:


> Coronaviridae (the viral family) have been around for _at least_ tens of thousands of years (molecular clock dating analyses of RNA polymerase indicate a common ancestor at that point in time).




I’m curious to know what the common ancestor was.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> That’s the fella.




Except there’s not much logic involved,


----------



## editor (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Gotcha,  you mean a la Saddam Hussain's non existent weapons of mass destruction ready to be launched on major European cities in less time than it takes for the Sun, Mail et al to print up their next headline. But 'ang on, didn't it subsequently transpire that Iraq's most modern weaponry were WW1 Lee Enfield rifles welded on to open back trucks.


Textbook conspiraloonery.



> *9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims.*
> This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it’s “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.











						Coronavirus, 5G, anti-mask and other conspiracy theories – an essential read for rebutting social media madness
					

With cell towers  serving hospitals being set alight and Facebook feeds overflowing with a relentless stream of unhinged coronavirus conspiracy theories, we thought it would be an appropriate time …



					www.brixtonbuzz.com


----------



## treelover (Apr 11, 2020)

There was always someone like that down the local.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 11, 2020)

editor said:


> Textbook conspiraloonery.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Conspiralunacy, surely?


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 11, 2020)

I suppose I'm basically happy that the sun is shining, but it's also particularly sad ...


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 11, 2020)

Our new debutante has a whiff of troll about him - likes the sound of his own voice.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 11, 2020)

treelover said:


> There was always someone like that down the local.



Yes but back in the days before the internet, nobody would ever listen to him. Now all the unhinged barflies of all the pubs in all the world are connected together, providing an effectively infinite variety of free-associated funhouse mirror 'theories' and an audience of millions at the same time.


----------



## 2hats (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I’m curious to know what the common ancestor was.


An original Coronaviridae. Am going to correct myself - even more recent research (DOI: 10.1128/JVI.03273-12), extrapolating the clock analysis through improving modelling of RNA substitution saturation, suggests that Coronaviridae could go back millions of years. Possibly tens of millions of years, or even as much as 300 million years (back to the origins of the original host avine and chiroptine clades).


----------



## SpookyFrank (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I’m curious to know what the common ancestor was.



Unlike all known cellular life, viruses do not have a single 'family tree' that traces back to a single point of origin. The potential for hybridisation and recombination means that establishing a phylogeny of even a particular group of related viruses is a non-trivial, potentially impossible task.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Y
> 
> 
> ''Your claim that HIV/AIDS is pneumonia by another name is just stupid. I actually can’t be bothered to respond to the rest of your post but you have to know that it’s as easy to pick apart as the first bit has been.''
> ...


----------



## editor (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> <Ed: Emptiness. Like Motorcycle Emptiness but without a tune.


I hope you've learnt somerthing about how not to use the quote function.


----------



## editor (Apr 11, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Our new debutante has a whiff of troll about him - likes the sound of his own voice.


He's certainly coming up very, very short when it comes to facts and providing a coherent, credible argument.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 11, 2020)

Not to mention how to use the Quote function.

Eta: Grrrrrr @ editor


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

treelover said:


> There was always someone like that down the local.




Well, they do say this place is like a pub. Or so I’ve heard.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe

Reading back, you did say that. And no doubt you’re correct inasmuch as prior to HIV/AIDS being recognised as a novel virus people were not diagnosed with it as an underlying predisposing condition. So I stand corrected.

And yes, there is some speculation (on here and elsewhere) that C-19;may have been circulating unnoticed for some time before it was identified. But even if that’s true, it would have been fairly recent and in any case makes no difference to the current situation (a global viral pandemic).

Even if it’s been around for decades (it hasn’t) the situation we’re currently dealing with is a pandemic. The detail (whether it’s swine flu or some other virus altogether) doesn’t make it less of a pandemic.

So your argument (if it’s been round for longer than we realise, then it’s not really as serious as everyone is saying... is that what you’re saying?) makes no sense.

But I may be wrong about what you’re saying. 

May I suggest that if you were to drop the high-falutin’ delivery of your ideas and opinions it would be easier to understand what they are.


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 11, 2020)

so we have not tin foil hat sporting loon on the boards


Hey Diatribe do you know any who died from Aids, Flesh eating bacteria, antibiotic resistant bacteria or Ebola
are these all deep state fake stories?


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 11, 2020)

A strand of RNA in a candy shell - no wonder life got going on earth when it had barely cooled-down and had no spare oxygen...


----------



## two sheds (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> May I suggest that if you were to drop the high-falutin’ delivery of your ideas and opinions it would be easier to understand what they are.



I think that's the general idea


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Just by the way Diatribe 

It’s not your use of language I’m objecting to; it’s your poor use of language that makes it objectionable.


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Diatribe
> 
> Reading back, you did say that. And no doubt you’re correct inasmuch as prior to HIV/AIDS being recognised as a novel virus people were not diagnosed with it as an underlying predisposing condition. So I stand corrected.
> 
> ...



I’m not sure the early spread thing is _that_ credible anymore... In any case it was looking at there possibly being a month or two in it (and more in terms of spread from China than date of origin). Iirc it was mainly in reference to the theories that argued for much wider infection rates, which seem increasingly unlikely as more studies are carried out.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> No, it isn't , but et al can also be used as an abbreviation for et alia, et alii, or et aliae meaning ''and others''  If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you.
> 
> With ref. my mode of writing, do you think I should get in the programme with one of them thar new fangled mobile phones and learn moronspeak



No you've mastered 'moronspeak'; it's more grammar and punctuation that you seem to have some difficulties with. Once you've got to grips with that shortcoming, you could then turn your attention to the actual content of your ramblings; focussing on skills such as researching into and providing sources for your half arsed assertions would be a start.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## treelover (Apr 11, 2020)

moving poster doing the rounds, don't know where you get them from.









						Mark Titchner: PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS | Art Gallery of Ontario
					






					ago.ca
				




Ah, its an old poster, 2013.


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

treelover said:


> View attachment 206136
> 
> moving poster doing the rounds, don't know where you get them from.
> 
> ...



Have you seen any of the independent ones dotted around shef? I guess not since you’re not out much. Will see if I can take a pic on the way home today.


----------



## treelover (Apr 11, 2020)

Tx


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 11, 2020)

Cid said:


> I’m not sure the early spread thing is _that_ credible anymore... In any case it was looking at there possibly being a month or two in it (and more in terms of spread from China than date of origin). Iirc it was mainly in reference to the theories that argued for much wider infection rates, which seem increasingly unlikely as more studies are carried out.




Yeah... I agree, should have said “was...” rather than “is some speculation”.

And of course a great deal of this is going to be confirmation bias but I’m hearing a fair few people (on here and IRL) saying “I think I had it back in _x_” with _x_ being some version _of before it all kicked off_.

Certainly there was some kind of nasty chesty coronavirus going round last winter. (I say certainly because why not. It’s anecdotal but anyway). By which I mean some kind of lingering intermittent respiratory tract infection that made people feel fatigued and feverish, with the significant characteristics being chesty and intermittent.

I’m saying it was a coronavirus because the intermittent nature is a characteristic of (some) coronaviruses. Please don’t ask me to find a source for that cos I can’t  bloomin find it despite looking! I know it’s a real thing thing but the internet search functions are swamped with the current C-19 thing so any search for *coronavirus intermittent * is doomed to be a billion pages long, with the bit I’m looking for somewhere at the far end in amongst the dust and dross. So as before whenever I’ve mentioned this, just apply your own observations & experiences of having that cold that seems to get better , then you get “another cold” really soon after the first one. In most cases, that’s not a second cold it’s the same one bouncing, a coronavirus.

But, I know we have plenty on here who know far more than I do about this etc disclaimers


ION
I found some Christmas diced venison in the freezer, and a slow cooker that I forgot about. So I’m making a venison slow cooked stew. And listening to Tim Buckley.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 11, 2020)

Often hard to know the facts given the government spin, msm bollocks and social media  

918 deaths today 

Given it it bank holiday weekend and likely a reduced are the administration/reporting accurate? 

Are the figures being reported here only from those people who have been tested and have died in hospital? 

Do they include NHS staff?
People who were not tested? 
People who have died at home? 
People who have died in care homes, hospice, respite centers?


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Yeah... I agree, should have said “was...” rather than “is some speculation”.
> 
> And of course a great deal of this is going to be confirmation bias but I’m hearing a fair few people (on here and IRL) saying “I think I had it back in _x_” with _x_ being some version _of before it all kicked off_.
> 
> ...



Yeah, I remember a friend of mine had it around November I think... We share workshop space in the same building, so usually also share diseases - I didn't get it, so thought it might be flu (I get the jab), but equally I had a hellish cough a couple of years back, so could have been similar to that (i.e I might have immunity). Total speculation of course, but yeah... broad point is that every year there are loads of the things knocking about, and the fact someone had a severe cough would be entirely unremarkable except in the context of what's happened since.


----------



## Cid (Apr 11, 2020)

treelover


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 11, 2020)

treelover said:


> View attachment 206136
> 
> moving poster doing the rounds, don't know where you get them from.
> 
> ...


tbf, he was spot on


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 11, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I think its possible there's have been an overreaction, Coronavirus may well have been around since time immemorial and only recently diagnosed as such.  A similar analogy would be AIDS, where prior to the early 1980's it was erroneously diagnosed as Pneumonia et al. Had the likes of Rock Hudson, Liberace  died a few yrs. earlier, their death certificates would have been stamped Pneumonia. What is now occurring is unprecedented and there have been many other fatal diseases/viruses around in the last 100 yrs. since the so called Spanish Flue. Incidentally, it was named the Spanish Flue because Spain was one of the few countries around at the time with an uncensored media that was actually reporting their true death toll.
> 
> As previously stated, this is a big story for the media and it is in their interest to create mass hysteria and run it as long as possible. Creating fear in people definitely helps sell newspapers and upgrade their TV ratings. After all, what have they normally got to report on, who's going to win the next Big Brother extravaganza , the Queen has a cold, Prince Harry is unhappy with his marriage, Donald Trump is sporting a new wig et al. It also coincides with a deep economic recession, which will become known as the Coronavirus recession, as opposed to yet another capitalist fuck up by the elite few running the economy,, thereby enabling the status quo of the financial system to survive relatively unscathed.
> 
> Maybe scam is too harsh a word, but convenient nevertheless.



Hmmm... some interesting points there.

I’ve heard this virus is going to make the Great Depression look like a picnic.

Also, tinfoilers are saying that this virus could usher in UBI as it’s part of global enslavement plans or something.


----------



## treelover (Apr 11, 2020)

Cid said:


> treelover
> 
> View attachment 206169View attachment 206170View attachment 206171



I wonder if that is Space, the ad space company facilitating them, very dubious history.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 11, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Often hard to know the facts given the government spin, msm bollocks and social media
> 
> 918 deaths today
> 
> ...


The Scottish figures include all deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate. English figures are only deaths that have occurred in hospitals after a positive test. Not sure about Wales and NI. The true figure must surely be considerably over a thousand a day already.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 12, 2020)

I cant find anywhere better to post this so , please move it to somewhere more suitable , if deemed necessary.

12pm-6pm today originuk.net  , gonna be good if you like dnb n jungle n ting


----------



## elbows (Apr 12, 2020)

weepiper said:


> The Scottish figures include all deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate. English figures are only deaths that have occurred in hospitals after a positive test. Not sure about Wales and NI. The true figure must surely be considerably over a thousand a day already.



Its a bit of a confusing subject. The April 2nd changes to their daily reporting system were to improve the timing (not having to wait for confirmation that next of kin have been informed). But this system still requires a positive Covid-19 test in order for the death to count.









						New process for reporting COVID-19 deaths
					

New system in place.




					www.gov.scot
				




So unless there has been a further change since then, its still broadly a similar setup to England. In that deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on death certificate but there was no positive test, wont show up in the daily numbers. We will get to see them via the ONS in England, and presumably whatever the Scottish equivalent of that is. With much further lag, eg when I last looked at the England ONS data, it was a largely pointless exercise, and when that changes I'm sure I will talk about it here excessively.

Please do let me know if there has been a subsequent change in Scotland that I missed, cheers.


----------



## elbows (Apr 12, 2020)

OK here is Scotlands ONS equivalent, that will include deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate.





__





						Deaths involving COVID-19 statistics published by National Records of Scotland | National Records of Scotland
					

National Records of Scotland




					www.nrscotland.gov.uk
				




Like the ONS, its a weekly thing, so we have to contrast these figures with the daily figures, but can only do it properly when weeks of lag are allowed for.



By contrast, up to the end of that period the daily figure (which requires a positive test) had only reached 296. But there was lag in that number too, and likely still some unreported cases to be added to the NRS report for that period.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 12, 2020)

Louis MacNeice said:


> No you've mastered 'moronspeak'; it's more grammar and punctuation that you seem to have some difficulties with. Once you've got to grips with that shortcoming, you could then turn your attention to the actual content of your ramblings; focussing on skills such as researching into and providing sources for your half arsed assertions would be a start.
> 
> Louis MacNeice



Well, Mr/Ms, Louis Fuckwit Macneice,  Autumn Journalist, no less, as previously stated to SheilaNaGig, who also cast aspersions on my grammatical skills. ''If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you. '' In your case, I'll amend the aforementioned to include ''grammar and punctuation.''

For the record, there's is no intentional pretentiousness in my mode of writing, I've never altered my style of writing  since school leaving age. If I left a note out for the milkman, it would be written in exactly the same vein.

NB. I won't further contribute to this thread, because as one poster poignantly stated, it is in danger of becoming the ''Diatribe show'', which was never my intention. Maybe I'll contribute to other threads when I have mastered the art of the quote function.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 12, 2020)

"I've never altered my style of writing  since school leaving age."

Yes, that's exactly what your writing 'style' reminds me of.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 12, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> Well, Mr/Ms, Louis Fuckwit Macneice,  Autumn Journalist, no less, as previously stated to SheilaNaGig, who also cast aspersions on my grammatical skills. ''If there are any other words and terms you think I might be using inaccurately, I'd be grateful for your clarification in order to enable me to make the necessary corrections, thank you. '' In your case, I'll amend the aforementioned to include ''grammar and punctuation.''
> 
> For the record, there's is no intentional pretentiousness in my mode of writing, I've never altered my style of writing  since school leaving age. If I left a note out for the milkman, it would be written in exactly the same vein.
> 
> NB. I won't further contribute to this thread, because as one poster poignantly stated, it is in danger of becoming the ''Diatribe show'', which was never my intention. Maybe I'll contribute to other threads when I have mastered the art of the quote function.



More poorly executed circumlocution and still no research; mastering the quote function is the least of your worries.

Cheerio - Louis MacNeice


----------



## killer b (Apr 12, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> I cant find anywhere better to post this so , please move it to somewhere more suitable , if deemed necessary.
> 
> 12pm-6pm today originuk.net  , gonna be good if you like dnb n jungle n ting


you want the Music streaming live right now! thread


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 12, 2020)

Louis MacNeice said:


> More poorly executed circumlocution and still no research; mastering the quote function is the least of your worries.
> 
> Cheerio - Louis MacNeice


I will exercise my right to having the last word on this matter. Your feeling the need to hide behind the cloak of anonymity of a noted and deceased playwright jus' about sums up your inadequate character. I suppose we can be thankful for tender mercies that you didn't deem it necessary to adopt the pseudonym of Clarence Darrow to advance your phoney libertarian credentials.


----------



## keybored (Apr 12, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I will exercise my right to having the last word on this matter. Your feeling the need to hide behind the cloak of anonymity of a noted and deceased playwright jus' about sums up your inadequate character. I suppose we can be thankful for tender mercies that you didn't deem it necessary to adopt the pseudonym of Clarence Darrow to advance your phoney libertarian credentials.


Sorry Mx Diatribe, we'll all start posting under our real names now.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 12, 2020)

I want to see an example of a note to the milkman.

Also, imo the word _poignantly_ was used very oddly.

Also, apologies to Diatribe for the hazing. It's pretty normal for newcomers to get roughed up a bit, especially those who leap in with loud opinionated declarations. Don't  take it personally, it's not you, it's us.

Also, if this really is the way they write naturally and it's not as affected and laboured as it seems, then I guess we'll just have to get used to it. Maybe they're a steampunk. Isn't this the way steampunks talk? All faux-Victorian? So maybe were out of order for attacking a cultural characteristic, or an inadvertent personal foible. I'll back off on the delivery.

I hope the content improves though.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 12, 2020)

.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 12, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I will exercise my right to having the last word on this matter. Your feeling the need to hide behind the cloak of anonymity of a noted and deceased playwright jus' about sums up your inadequate character. I suppose we can be thankful for tender mercies that you didn't deem it necessary to adopt the pseudonym of Clarence Darrow to advance your phoney libertarian credentials.



That's really really funny; not intentionally so but nonetheless really really funny. Still no research going on, just more half arsed assertions. 

As if MacNeice is remembered primarily as a playwright.

As if I have claimed libertarian credentials.

As if you have rights to last words on a bulletin board...you verbose twit.

Cheerio - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 12, 2020)

Louis MacNeice said:


> That's really really funny; not intentionally so but nonetheless really really funny. Still no research going on, just more half arsed assertions.
> 
> As if MacNeice is remembered primarily as a playwright.
> 
> ...



I fully appreciate that I  stated I wouldn't further post on this thread, but I just can't resist this invitation from a fuckwit who has the temerity to question my command of the English language, particularly with ref. to poor punctuation.

''That's really really funny; not intentionally so but nonetheless really really funny..''

Surely you mean,  That's really, really funny, not intentionally so, but nonetheless, really, really funny.

''As if MacNeice is remembered primarily as a playwright.''

I was merely utilising, in your words, circumlocution. Perhaps you would have preferred me to have copied and pasted the full repertoire of the life and times of  Frederick Louis Macneice.

''As if I have claimed libertarian credentials.

There may well be a school of thought that would subscribe to your choosing the pseudonym of a person with libertarian views, you may also be of the same persuasion.

''As if you have rights to last words on a bulletin board...you verbose twit.''

Silly me, of course you would want the opportunity to dig an even larger hole to bury yourself.


----------



## Diatribe (Apr 12, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Also, apologies to Diatribe for the hazing. It's pretty normal for newcomers to get roughed up a bit, especially those who leap in with loud opinionated declarations. Don't  take it personally, it's not you, it's us.
> 
> Also, if this really is the way they write naturally and it's not as affected and laboured as it seems, then I guess we'll just have to get used to it. Maybe they're a steampunk. Isn't this the way steampunks talk? All faux-Victorian? So maybe were out of order for attacking a cultural characteristic, or an inadvertent personal foible. I'll back off on the delivery.
> 
> I hope the content improves though.



Thanks, don't worry about it, I understand the ground rules.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 12, 2020)

Diatribe said:


> I fully appreciate that I  stated I wouldn't further post on this thread, but I just can't resist this invitation from a fuckwit who has the temerity to question my command of the English language, particularly with ref. to poor punctuation.
> 
> ''That's really really funny; not intentionally so but nonetheless really really funny..''
> 
> ...



Nope.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Apr 12, 2020)

Let's all be nice shall we?


----------



## bimble (Apr 12, 2020)

Does anyone else have coronavirus-themed nightmares ? Last night I dreamt i was lost in some city (that bit's normal) and the streets were full of crowds of people doing completely normal stuff like walking about having a good time in big groups. So I woke myself up in terror from trying not to be bumped into and infected by them. Grim. Probably an after effect of being hyper vigilant about the 2m thing.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 12, 2020)

killer b said:


> you want the Music streaming live right now! thread


Thanks buddy !


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 12, 2020)

I thought I was being smart when I ordered some liquid laundry soap from Amazon.  It arrived wrapped in two layers of plastic bags in a plastic container.  Opened it up to find a crushed cardboard package and laundry soap everywhere.  It had all melted into one giant sticky lump.  I was surprised when I asked for and got a refund in like 10 minutes.


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 12, 2020)

i had my first ever panic dream located on a cruise ship the other night  the content of the dreams generally follow a predictable pattern, but this was a completely new location...


----------



## MickiQ (Apr 12, 2020)

Been out for my permitted daily walk, there are two houses along my regular route that have motorhomes and one with a caravan, none of these have budged this weekend which is good other I would feel morally obliged to go and slash their tyres under cover of darkness.
Social distancing is holding up really well here, a new convention seems to have grown up that people cross the road or shelter up a driveway and if all else fails then the one going against the flow of traffic goes out into the road.


----------



## Sprocket. (Apr 12, 2020)

Just heard of the death, due to Covid-19 of a lad I knew.
Doncaster guitarist Paul Piercy, 52.
Lovely bloke, excellent guitarist.
Played with lots of bands over the years. He spent many years touring Europe with the Rush tribute band Bravado.
Very sad, thoughts to his family, friends and fellow band members.
RIP.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 12, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> I thought I was being smart when I ordered some liquid laundry soap from Amazon.  It arrived wrapped in two layers of plastic bags in a plastic container.  Opened it up to find a crushed cardboard package and laundry soap everywhere.  It had all melted into one giant sticky lump.  I was surprised when I asked for and got a refund in like 10 minutes.



And quite right that you got a refund.



Spoiler: Me bleating on about Amazon again



What happens after you ask for a refund is - the driver is awarded a concession against him (a black dot against his name) - the reason for the concession will then be appealed by drivers boss to Amazon on grounds that this wasn’t his fault which get reviewed by Amazon who then decide whether to remove it or not.  Concessions affect drivers possibility of achieving pay bonus each week.

Sorry for this yarn but it’s cathartic for me


----------



## treelover (Apr 12, 2020)

finding some of the posts on the main thread alarming and dispiriting, even if they are probably right, being already very ill and isolated, then being informed that many more weeks of this, is very hard indeed.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 12, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> And quite right that you got a refund.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I'm fine with the idea that stuff gets broken in transit.  I was surprised that it was delivered in that shape.  Someone had obviously noticed it was leaking and wrapped in several layers of plastic bags.  They should have stopped delivery right there and replaced it.  In any case, I'm happy with the refund without argument.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Apr 12, 2020)

So know a couple more cases. one is a fireman who lost 2 stone in 10 days. hes returning to work next week and has volunteered for extra duties- its the handling and transport of the dead.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 13, 2020)

bimble said:


> Does anyone else have coronavirus-themed nightmares ? Last night I dreamt i was lost in some city (that bit's normal) and the streets were full of crowds of people doing completely normal stuff like walking about having a good time in big groups. So I woke myself up in terror from trying not to be bumped into and infected by them. Grim. Probably an after effect of being hyper vigilant about the 2m thing.


Same - dreamed my wife had decided we had to go out, and the streets were crowded. I was very angry with her for putting us all at risk.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 14, 2020)

General question: lets say a vaccine is ready by arbitrary date of February 2021. What happens then? Who gets vaccinated and when? If you are already ill does a vaccine work at that point?Is there precedent?


----------



## robsean (Apr 14, 2020)

An efficacious, safe vaccine mass produced for billions anytime soon is surely a very long shot so we've time to think about how it'd be rationed.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 14, 2020)

robsean said:


> An efficacious, safe vaccine mass produced for billions anytime soon is surely a very long shot so we've time to think about how it'd be rationed.


absolutely 
I'm less thinking about the rationing, more the practicalities - which in turn adds to the length of crisis. If you fall ill and can get an injection to cure it that's a big difference - means it can be administered as necessary. If it needs rolling out in advance, that's a whole other timescale and practical problem


----------



## magneze (Apr 14, 2020)

I'd be concerned about the safety of a vaccine that's been rushed through safety checks. If you're going to vaccine the world, be sure about the safety.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 14, 2020)

magneze said:


> I'd be concerned about the safety of a vaccine that's been rushed through safety checks. If you're going to vaccine the world, be sure about the safety.


definitely
its going to be a field day for the conspiraloons when that time comes


----------



## LDC (Apr 14, 2020)

ska invita said:


> General question: lets say a vaccine is ready by arbitrary date of February 2021. What happens then? Who gets vaccinated and when? If you are already ill does a vaccine work at that point?Is there precedent?



No, if it worked when you had it it'd be a cure not a vaccine. AFAIK having a vaccines once you have the disease they protect against make no difference to the outcome although happy to be shown otherwise.

It's not hard to think of a priority list of people to get a vaccine if it's limited though.

Key workers, then vulnerable groups, then the rest of population by age category maybe? Something like that. Can imagine some possibly nasty scenes at vaccination points though when this gets announced.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 14, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> No, if it worked when you had it it'd be a cure not a vaccine. AFAIK having a vaccines once you have the disease they protect against make no difference to the outcome although happy to be shown otherwise.


Thanks, thats what I thought, wanted to be certain


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2020)

Heard of several more people who have died of it now, one of them was former the caretaker of the synagogue I went to in oxford.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 14, 2020)

Sorry to hear that, Frogwoman.


ska invita said:


> General question: lets say a vaccine is ready by arbitrary date of February 2021. What happens then? Who gets vaccinated and when? If you are already ill does a vaccine work at that point?Is there precedent?



In the movie Contagion they doled out the vaccine by birth date, kinda like how the US called people up for the Vietnam draft. It's one feasible way of doing it after vaccinating medical staff and other keyworkers.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 14, 2020)

scifisam said:


> after vaccinating medical staff and other keyworkers.



this


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 14, 2020)

I'm no optimist (at all) about a reliable vaccine being produced any time soon 
But I have read (in more than one source too) that there's a great deal of current work going on.
That doesn't mean a vaccine will be available ahead of next year, but I do think this constantly repeated talk of "12 to 18 months" as if that's set in stone, just _*MIGHT*_ end up being contradicted and _just possibly_ shortened a tad, given the amount of reaearch that's going on in several different nations.
And you can bet your life (IMO) that once a good and safe vaccine *is* ready/approved/tested, the pressure to make it as widely available as possible will be immense.

That's not the same as me hoping corners are cut, I should emphasise.


----------



## Azrael (Apr 14, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> No, if it worked when you had it it'd be a cure not a vaccine. AFAIK having a vaccines once you have the disease they protect against make no difference to the outcome although happy to be shown otherwise.
> 
> It's not hard to think of a priority list of people to get a vaccine if it's limited though.
> 
> Key workers, then vulnerable groups, then the rest of population by age category maybe? Something like that. Can imagine some possibly nasty scenes at vaccination points though when this gets announced.


Or employ the strategy used to eliminate Smallpox after years of untargeted mass vaccination failed: after key workers and the most vulnerable are given their jabs, don't try and vaccinate everyone, but use the vaccine in a targeted way to bolster test-trace-isolate methods, say by vaccinating people in areas of outbreaks. If a proper suppression and surveillance system were already in place, it could be slotted right in.

This is portrayed excellently in the "Living Longer" episode of the '90s series _People's Century_, which also, in its record of a string of public health triumphs, serves as a powerful antidote to the toxic wave of defeatism and therapeutic nihilism that's swept through government and its medical advisors. It doesn't have to be like this.


----------



## Azrael (Apr 14, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> I'm no optimist (at all) about a reliable vaccine being produced any time soon
> But I have read (in more than one source too) that there's a great deal of current work going on.
> That doesn't mean a vaccine will be available ahead of next year, but I do think this constantly repeated talk of "12 to 18 months" as if that's set in stone, just _*MIGHT*_ end up being contradicted and _just possibly_ shortened a tad, given the amount of reaearch that's going on in several different nations.
> And you can bet your life (IMO) that once a good and safe vaccine *is* ready/approved/tested, the pressure to make it as widely available as possible will be immense.
> ...


I'm optimistic about a vaccine arriving before 18 months are up: the resources being poured into this are immense, and there's already a coronavirus vaccine used in animals, so there's proof-of-concept.

But regardless, we're not hostages to its development: we can begin an aggressive viral elimination campaign immediately via contact tracing and quarantine; and if it succeeded domestically in several countries, who's to say we couldn't at least consider allowing international travel between them without rigid 14-day quarantine on entry.

Its success ought to ensure our leaders never again surrender to a disease without even trying to fight. But then, who'd have thought our chief medical advisors would flush over a century of accumulated public health wisdom and regress us to sub-Medieval passivity? Eternal vigilance isn't just needed to fight novel diseases.


----------



## 2hats (Apr 15, 2020)

Azrael said:


> I'm optimistic about a vaccine arriving before 18 months are up: the resources being poured into this are immense, and there's already a coronavirus vaccine used in animals, so there's proof-of-concept.


Just a point and word of caution.

That vaccine is for an alphacoronavirus (other pig coronaviridae hail from the deltacoronavirus genus).

SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus. There has never been a human vaccine successfully created for a betacoronavirus before.


----------



## Azrael (Apr 15, 2020)

2hats said:


> Just a point and word of caution.
> 
> That vaccine is for an alphacoronavirus (other pig coronaviridae hail from the deltacoronavirus genus).
> 
> SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus. There has never been a human vaccine successfully created for a betacoronavirus before.


Indeed, which is why I'm only cautiously optimistic, and don't believe we can rely on a vaccine to get us out of this. We need to move now, throw all we have into containing and if possible eliminating the virus with tried and trusted public health methods, and hope the vaccine's available as soon as possible.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2020)

What makes coronaviruses like sars cov 2 so difficult to vaccinate for then?


----------



## Azrael (Apr 15, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> What makes coronaviruses like sars cov 2 so difficult to vaccinate for then?


This is a good interview on the background.

In short, the challenges weren't all technical: there simply wasn't sufficient financial incentive to produce a vaccine for the coronaviruses already circulating in humans, given the symptoms. MERS is terrifying, but hasn't spread widely enough; and SARS was eliminated by old school public health methods.

Now we have of course have all the incentives we need to throw resources and expertise at the problem.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 15, 2020)

Azrael : To summarise that piece in brief then :

"We should have funded (and done) much more vaccine research much earlier!"

I'd suggest that might not be a mistake that'll be repeated after all this?


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 15, 2020)

I'm spotting a bit of stretching the boundaries going on where I live - elderly parents showing up and more than meeting at 2 metres distance - obviously intelligent people  so I'm guessing they've reasoned it out...

... so many people seem to have taken up regular cycling and running.

I braved the local shared path and most people were being sensible - not much change for me as I always wait until I can pass at the maximum distance - it wasn't very relaxing though ... constantly worrying about how far after passing a pedestrian to start breathing and rationalising that people who exercise are likely to be generally careful ... clusters of children are somewhat worrying - I passed some sort of play event at a local primary school playground with adult supervision - not sure how that works.

When I go shopping I quarantine things for days and then still sometimes wash cartons down with alcohol ...


----------



## treelover (Apr 15, 2020)

just been out with carer for weekly mini exercise, huge amount of walkers and cyclists, this is just on the edge of suburban sheffield


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 15, 2020)

i'm just cycling on the road - keeping the footpaths clear for pedestrians and mobile chairs


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2020)

treelover said:


> just been out with carer for weekly mini exercise, huge amount of walkers and cyclists, this is just on the edge of suburban sheffield


Walking, running or cycling in the neighbourhood they live in is now the only exercise people are allowed, so you will see a lot more than perhaps you'd expect. There was loads out when I went to the park this afternoon too. I was one of them. So were you.


----------



## treelover (Apr 15, 2020)

i agree, but it all may have consequences.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2020)

treelover said:


> i agree, but it all may have consequences.


It may - but currently, guidance is that people can take daily exercise outside their houses - as long as they maintain 6ft between them and other people (I know this is sometimes a bit tricky, but mostly people do their best) then it's pretty low risk.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 15, 2020)

been meaning to ask, can people pass each other outside or is the distance to be maintained at all times?


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> been meaning to ask, can people pass each other outside or is the distance to be maintained at all times?


you should try, yeah.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 15, 2020)

killer b said:


> you should try, yeah.


i didn't know wtf to do last week - I went for a walk on a path i thought would be deserted but a couple came round the corner and there was nowhere to go so i turned my back to them and let them pass. must have looked well strange


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> i didn't know wtf to do last week - I went for a walk on a path i thought would be deserted but a couple came round the corner and there was nowhere to go so i turned my back to them and let them pass. must have looked well strange


I've been doing that when people suddenly appear and there's not enough time / space to give them a wide berth. I don't think you should worry too much about what they thought tbh.

Mostly I've been finding the atmosphere on walks quite nice - everyone aknowledges each other in a way they never used to - there's a nod or a smile from 90% of the people I pass.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 15, 2020)

killer b said:


> I've been doing that when people suddenly appear and there's not enough time / space to give them a wide berth. I don't think you should worry too much about what they thought tbh.
> 
> Mostly I've been finding the atmosphere on walks quite nice - everyone aknowledges each other in a way they never used to - there's a nod or a smile from 90% of the people I pass.


it's like being on a walking route in the countryside - people always say hello (in the Dales and Peaks anyhow)


----------



## two sheds (Apr 15, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> i didn't know wtf to do last week - I went for a walk on a path i thought would be deserted but a couple came round the corner and there was nowhere to go so i turned my back to them and let them pass. must have looked well strange



Nah I think people will understand. For the first 5-6 years of having my (then aggressive) dog if I saw other dog walkers appearing on the path I'd give them a wave and put the dog on a lead and turn round go the other way. Mostly got a wave back.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 16, 2020)

EasyJet to leave middle plane seats empty
					

The airline plans to introduce social distancing on flights after the Covid-19 lockdown is lifted.




					www.bbc.co.uk
				




this is bullshit surely. I remember being on a plane once and being told no one was allowed to eat peanuts because someone had a peanut allergy on the plane. Peanut dust could get into the recirculated air system and kill them. Sitting a few cms further away from someone is not going to make any difference.

Similarly im not happy about some of the easing of lockdown plans that are scheduled and happening in other countries. They want work to start again, but at what cost to the workers + wider population. Small shops cannot keep an effective hygiene regime.

Lots more half arsed measures are coming our way. I think they need resisting.


----------



## ruffneck23 (Apr 16, 2020)

Got my letter from the govt telling us to stay at home today , it didnt even say Dear Ruffneck , wankers


----------



## Cid (Apr 16, 2020)

ska invita said:


> EasyJet to leave middle plane seats empty
> 
> 
> The airline plans to introduce social distancing on flights after the Covid-19 lockdown is lifted.
> ...



I think the peanut thing is probably more related to possible contact by sitting nearby, stewards handling multiple things etc. Commercial aircraft have pretty comprehensive hepa filtration for recirculating air afaik.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 16, 2020)

Cid said:


> I think the peanut thing is probably more related to possible contact by sitting nearby, stewards handling multiple things etc. Commercial aircraft have pretty comprehensive hepa filtration for recirculating air afaik.


ah okay...still, I dont feel like one aircraft chair space in a sealed aircraft is a realistic health measure


----------



## 2hats (Apr 16, 2020)

ska invita said:


> ah okay...still, I dont feel like one aircraft chair space in a sealed aircraft is a realistic health measure


See previous post on this here (essentially highest risk is adjacent rows and two seats either side).


----------



## treelover (Apr 16, 2020)

https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/OH-011.20-Coronavirus-and-fatigue-v2.pdf
		


Oxford Health NHS are proposing the same sort of treatment/programme of post c19 patients, many who had severe 19 will have post viral fatigue, as M.E patients, indeed they are saying that a number will go on to have M.E/Fibro, this happened post Swine Flu, etc

but their prescription is disasterous,, telling people to not sleep much(done nothing else hardly since C19), not to rest much, and the perenials CBT, graded exercise


----------



## treelover (Apr 16, 2020)

even the dogs are joining in the 8pm clap!
I hope its not faked.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 16, 2020)

I have various benefits under an employee trust scheme.  A long standing one of which is funeral assistance, which is a small lump sum paid to members next of kin to assist with funeral costs.  This has been a benefit for years now but I've received a letter today explaining the policy and how it works.

Its quite brutal in a way but it's clearly the right thing for them to be doing.  Sometimes in these strange days of horribly high numbers of deaths being on the news and suffering everywhere you look it can become almost commonplace and then just a tiny thing brings back the reality of it all.


----------



## treelover (Apr 16, 2020)

whatever you think of the 8pm clap, this is stunning and moving artwork.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 16, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> Got my letter from the govt telling us to stay at home today , it didnt even say Dear Ruffneck , wankers



  Blimey! I thought ours was late -- but we received it the day before Good Friday ....


----------



## killer b (Apr 16, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Blimey! I thought ours was late -- but we received it the day before Good Friday ....


There was an initial list the government put together, then each GPs surgery have been adding to it and sending out further letters, so I'd imagine it'll depend on how efficiently this is being done at each surgery.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 16, 2020)

A little bit of stuff for those who are following the chloroquine story (posted on 29 March so it's not current).






__





						More on Hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycin. And On Dr. Raoult.
					

Dr. Didier Raoult of Marseilles and his co-workers have published another preprint on clinical results with the chloroquine/azithromycin combination that their earlier work has made famous. And I still don't know what to think of it.  This is going to be a long post on the whole issue, so if you d




					blogs.sciencemag.org
				





ETA The top and the tail of that article:


"Dr. Didier Raoult of Marseilles and his co-workers have published another preprint on clinical results with the chloroquine/azithromycin combination that their earlier work has made famous. And I still don’t know what to think of it.

This is going to be a long post on the whole issue, so if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, here’s the summary: these new results are still not from randomized patients and still do not have any sort of control group for comparison. The sample is larger, but it’s still not possible to judge what’s going on. And on further reading, I have doubts about Dr. Raoult’s general approach to science and doubts about Dr. Raoult himself. Despite this second publication, I am actually less hopeful than I was before. Now the details.......
......All in all, I am pretty sure that I don’t care for Didier Raoult very much. And I don’t care for his style of research nor for his ways of expressing himself. Now, it would be a more simple world if assholes were always wrong about things, and I am not yet prepared to say that Dr. Raoult is wrong about hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. But neither does he seem to be the sort of person who is always a reliable source, either. I do not take pleasure in this. But I am less hopeful about this work than I was when I first read about it, and I can only wonder what direction those hopes will take in the weeks to come.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 16, 2020)

Watching the update... 

My hands are dry and cracked but I would happily smash them into Raabs feckless face until they break and bleed


----------



## prunus (Apr 16, 2020)

Random unimportant in the grand scheme of things rant, but it’s really pissing me off that he’s saying “we can’t end the lockdown because we can’t be sure that the epidemic has peaked”. This contains the implication that if we _did_ know it had peaked we could end the lockdown, which is bullshit - the peak of the epidemic is precisely the worst time to end the lockdown, as it’s by definition the point at which there are the most infectious people about.  We can’t end the lockdown until the peak is long passed and the number of cases in the community are massively down on the peak, perhaps down as low as 10% or 20%. Presumably he knows this? He’s not that thick is he?  Rant over.


----------



## magneze (Apr 16, 2020)

prunus said:


> Random unimportant in the grand scheme of things rant, but it’s really pissing me off that he’s saying “we can’t end the lockdown because we can’t be sure that the epidemic has peaked”. This contains the implication that if we _did_ know it had peaked we could end the lockdown, which is bullshit - the peak of the epidemic is precisely the worst time to end the lockdown, as it’s by definition the point at which there are the most infectious people about.  We can’t end the lockdown until the peak is long passed and the number of cases in the community are massively down on the peak, perhaps down as low as 10% or 20%. Presumably he knows this? He’s not that thick is he?  Rant over.


The only way to know that it has peaked is to go past the peak. I don't believe that the plan is to lift the lockdown during it.


----------



## HalloweenJack (Apr 16, 2020)

prunus said:


> Random unimportant in the grand scheme of things rant, but it’s really pissing me off that he’s saying “we can’t end the lockdown because we can’t be sure that the epidemic has peaked”. This contains the implication that if we _did_ know it had peaked we could end the lockdown, which is bullshit - the peak of the epidemic is precisely the worst time to end the lockdown, as it’s by definition the point at which there are the most infectious people about.  We can’t end the lockdown until the peak is long passed and the number of cases in the community are massively down on the peak, perhaps down as low as 10% or 20%. Presumably he knows this? He’s not that thick is he?  Rant over.


Seems less of a rant, more of a reasonable expectation.

The only problem is that it presupposes a Government with a clear plan.


----------



## prunus (Apr 16, 2020)

magneze said:


> The only way to know that it has peaked is to go past the peak. I don't believe that the plan is to lift the lockdown during it.



Well yes I would hope so, my beef is with the way it’s being described, which could be fairly interpreted as that being the plan.

We can’t do A because we don’t know if B has happened.  Reasonable assumption (if not actually a logical consequence) is that we can do A when we do know B has happened. I worry there are going to be a lot of pissed off people in about a week (maybe) saying “we know B has happened now, why can’t we do A now?”  The dishonesty and treating people like idiots piss me off.


----------



## Mation (Apr 16, 2020)

I don't know why* but this really tickled me:

*How's the virus affecting British armed forces?*
Jonathan Beale
BBC defence correspondent
The BBC has learned that around 13,000 military personnel - 9% of the regular British armed forces - are now working from home, or self-isolating as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.


The idea that all the world's military might end up working from home  😂

* Apart from being generally skewy, right now.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 17, 2020)

Delivery drivers snap hilarious pictures of people with their parcels
					

A new socially-distanced method of delivery which sees drivers take pictures of their customers has prompted people to share the awkward snaps online. Hermes introduced the new photo evidence process as a way of avoiding people having to confirm deliveries by signing a scanner during the...




					www.standard.co.uk
				




Nice story


----------



## fishfinger (Apr 17, 2020)

Mation said:


> ...The idea that all the world's military might end up working from home  😂
> 
> ...


A prototype version:


----------



## Supine (Apr 17, 2020)

prunus said:


> Random unimportant in the grand scheme of things rant, but it’s really pissing me off that he’s saying “we can’t end the lockdown because we can’t be sure that the epidemic has peaked”. This contains the implication that if we _did_ know it had peaked we could end the lockdown, which is bullshit - the peak of the epidemic is precisely the worst time to end the lockdown, as it’s by definition the point at which there are the most infectious people about.  We can’t end the lockdown until the peak is long passed and the number of cases in the community are massively down on the peak, perhaps down as low as 10% or 20%. Presumably he knows this? He’s not that thick is he?  Rant over.



The gov also announced a set of tests that would need to be passed regarding easing the lockdown.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 17, 2020)

Is it me or have the government boxed themselves into a corner here?  Of the bullet points above they have shown themselves totally incapable of achieving points 3 and 4 up to this point.  There doesn't appear to be any prospect of them being any less useless in the near future.  So we're either going to enter some never ending lockdown world or they're going to have to break those conditions.

Thinking about it, they'll just lie and pretend those conditions have been met.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 17, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Of the bullet points above they have shown themselves totally incapable of achieving points 3 and 4 up to this point.


Well, point 4 is achievable depending on how they define "future demand". If the data shows infection rates have plummeted and hardly anyone is getting sick any more, then they can claim they now have enough PPE.


----------



## Petcha (Apr 17, 2020)

Merkel manages to explain all this in the space of a couple of minutes better than 4 weeks of useless tory ministers and hopeless UK medical experts. She seems to have a grasp of it and hey, surprise, they're far ahead of where we're at in dealing with it. We're rudderless.


----------



## Supine (Apr 17, 2020)

Petcha said:


> Merkel manages to explain all this in the space of a couple of minutes better than 4 weeks of useless tory ministers and hopeless UK medical experts. She seems to have a grasp of it and hey, surprise, they're far ahead of where we're at in dealing with it. We're rudderless.




Refreshing to see a politician talking to her people like they are adults. Shame we can't have the same here.


----------



## campanula (Apr 17, 2020)

So my city council is demanding access to my house fore an annual gas inspection. Have already said I will not be allowing a random worker in the house yet they are now demanding to know what underlying health conditions I have. Not inclined to tell a  shirty council worker (who, I note) are working in offices which are closed to the public. Is this a bit outrageous, when I cannot even have family members visiting?


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 17, 2020)

campanula said:


> So my city council is demanding access to my house fore an annual gas inspection. Have already said I will not be allowing a random worker in the house yet they are now demanding to know what underlying health conditions I have. Not inclined to tell a  shirty council worker (who, I note) are working in offices which are closed to the public. Is this a bit outrageous, when I cannot even have family members visiting?



Your medical history is absolutely private business and they have no right to know that.  A persistent 'no' followed by threat to elevate the matter to your local ward councilor and maybe MP as to inquire why the council is hassling those in 12 week isolation.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 17, 2020)

campanula said:


> So my city council is demanding access to my house fore an annual gas inspection. Have already said I will not be allowing a random worker in the house yet they are now demanding to know what underlying health conditions I have. Not inclined to tell a  shirty council worker (who, I note) are working in offices which are closed to the public. Is this a bit outrageous, when I cannot even have family members visiting?



And what underlying health conditions does _he _have? I think you should be told. Will they deep clean your house after he's left just in case he's asymptotic or just coming down with it?


----------



## Mogden (Apr 17, 2020)

The amount of men doing large shops seems to have gone up. The majority of those I saw today also didn't have much concept of how much room to leave and were swaying about all over the shop, literally. Women slightly better but one parked her trolley up behind me, carefully observing the 2m floor markings, then came round her trolley to have a nose at the shelf beside me   

Plain flour available in Aldi! No self raising or strong flour though. Everything else seemed to be well stocked. That's me good for another 2 weeks I hope.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 17, 2020)

Mogden said:


> The amount of men doing large shops seems to have gone up.



Well, they're not at work at the moment.  Plus it gets you out of the house and away from the kids.  I'm not a father myself but I understand that is a very important part of being a father.


----------



## campanula (Apr 17, 2020)

The council have told me that I can isolate fir 2 weeks only - it is a legal requirement that gas inspectors enter  because although I do have underlying health issues, I am not in the 12 week shielded group, I have no say whatsoever. They also claim their gas workers will be changing their PPE BETWEEN EACH HOUSE  (mystified where they are getting these numerous changes of PPE. when care workers have to manage with 1 pershift. The council has implied they can get bailiffs to enter the property if I do not let random twats into the house...when I cannot even allow my grand-daughter and offspring to visit.  They have also tried to bully me into stating my health conditions (I won't) but am really unhappy at allowing some stranger into my house after they have already been in numerous others.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 17, 2020)

Bang off an email to local ward Councillor and MP.  Bullying scumbags.


----------



## spitfire (Apr 17, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Bang off an email to local ward Councillor and MP.  Bullying scumbags.



I get stuff looked at pretty quick on twitter if you use that campanula , tag in the councillors, MP and the council.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

Mrs B just sent me this image of Matt Hancock giving evidence to the health select committee, marvelling at the kitsch piece of shit portrait of the queen - presumably purchased from Range - that he has on his wall. 



Hang on a minute, I thought - that looks like one of those shit Damien Hirst splatter paintings.

sure enough...









						Damien Hirst’s Secret Portrait of the Queen - artnet News
					

Damien Hirst, the former "enfant terrible" of British Art, painted a secret portrait of the Queen in 2014 and gifted it to the UK government last year.




					news.artnet.com


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 17, 2020)

killer b said:


> Mrs B just sent me this image of Matt Hancock giving evidence to the health select committee, marvelling at the kitsch piece of shit portrait of the queen - presumably purchased from Range - that he has on his wall.
> 
> View attachment 207249
> 
> ...


is he at work or does he have that at home?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 17, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> is he at work or does he have that at home?


Looks like a proper office, so maybe it is from the government art collection.


----------



## elbows (Apr 17, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> is he at work or does he have that at home?



He was grilled about whether he was really practicing proper social distancing at work recently, and since then I think he has made a point of doing numerous interviews from his house. But I might be completely wrong about the location, I havent looked into it properly at all.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> is he at work or does he have that at home?


I can't imagine a cabinet minister would have that shitty veneered office furniture in his house, I'm assuming he's in the office.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 17, 2020)

if he has that at his house, he's a very naughty boy


----------



## elbows (Apr 17, 2020)

OK I have started studying his surroundings in interviews a little.


----------



## LDC (Apr 17, 2020)

campanula said:


> So my city council is demanding access to my house fore an annual gas inspection. Have already said I will not be allowing a random worker in the house yet they are now demanding to know what underlying health conditions I have. Not inclined to tell a  shirty council worker (who, I note) are working in offices which are closed to the public. Is this a bit outrageous, when I cannot even have family members visiting?



I think that's reasonable they have access tbh, it's a legal responsibility for them to ensure safety of their property for tenants. If they didn't do it they'd be in a right sticky legal situation if someone died in a fire caused by a gas fault. We had to have a worker in to our to fix something recently. Just make them wash hands, wear a mask, and minimize any close contact. It's not ideal, and they definitely shouldn't be asking about health conditions, but it would be essential safety work they're doing.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

elbows said:


> OK I have started studying his surroundings in interviews a little.
> 
> View attachment 207253


what's that in the top right corner? A newcastle shirt?


----------



## ska invita (Apr 17, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Looks like a proper office, so maybe it is from the government art collection.


From what I cant tell of the personality of Hancock that could be his bedroom


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 17, 2020)

i'm only watching these 5 o'clock things to be there when the cat does it. that time can't be that far off now?


----------



## campanula (Apr 17, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I think that's reasonable they have access tbh, it's a legal responsibility for them to ensure safety of their property for tenants. If they didn't do it they'd be in a right sticky legal situation if someone died in a fire caused by a gas fault. We had to have a worker in to our to fix something recently. Just make them wash hands, wear a mask, and minimize any close contact. It's not ideal, and they definitely shouldn't be asking about health conditions, but it would be essential safety work they're doing.



I have looked at various guidelines and while it is a legal requirement to provide inspections,  councils and inspection companies are legally covered if they can be seen to have attempted to comply with the law. This is a service for tenant's safety but nowhere does the guidance insist councils can force entrance.  I guess there might be different issues in HMOs, but afaiac, checking my boiler can easily wait until lock-down is officially lifted.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

I’ve got an awful feeling that this thing has barely begun.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I’ve got an awful feeling that this thing has barely begun.



The UK lockdown?
If you're saying it will be extended beyond three weeks (= Thursday 7th May, given that they announced the extra three weeks yesterday) then I absolutely agree with you.

A senior and experienced nurse I know well here, reckons full lockdown until the first weekend of June *at least*. -- and she emphasised 'at least', too.

But details of what happens (beyond June/July *etc.*) is still not known yet??
Given that any relaxation of the lockdown regime will be gradual and in slow stages, most likely.

In other words, I think 'barely begun' could well be _slightly_ overdoing it. Possibly, like.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> The UK lockdown?
> If you're saying it will be extended beyond three weeks (= Thursday 7th May, given that they announced the extra three weeks yesterday) then I absolutely agree with you.
> 
> A senior and experienced nurse I know well here, reckons full lockdown until the first weekend of June *at least*. -- and she emphasised 'at least', too.
> ...




The global pandemic, William of Walworth . The full horror of it has barely begun.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> The global pandemic, @williamofwalworth



Patronising? That's a big word!!  

Sorry .
I know what you mean of course, and I'd be the very last to suggest the pandemic generally will all be over in a few weeks or even months or whatever.
But the details of how it's dealt with, how long full-on lock-downs last, what particular types of relaxations get allowed, whether and how more extensive testing is done, vaccine development later on, and all that related stuff, are much more up for discussion though.
And legitimate disagreement too, given that we're all predicting in the dark at the moment.
My own view is that the risk of being over-optimistic (to which I've sometimes been prone myself  ) is dangerous. No dispute from me there, I've had my fingers burnt already.
But to me, the risk of being over-pessimistic can also be a thing.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Patronising? That's a big word!!
> 
> Sorry .
> I know what you mean of course, and I'd be the very last to suggest the pandemic generally will all be over in a few weeks or even months or whatever.
> ...





How am I being patronising?   




I've been hanging on to hope and trying hard to stay on the upside of this but today's news from around the world has knocked me sideways. The virus seems able to infect the nervous tissue, the kidneys, the guts, the liver... we're seeing significant numbers of people with renal failure and hepatitis that seems to be associated with C-19. This is on top of any long term future issues people might have with their lungs after recovering from C-19. People are getting sick in ways that are hard to predict, unexpected, and almost impossible to get ahead of.


We're seeing people testing positive soon after recovering from the virus. If that's really happening, getting it once is no protection, for the person or for the community. The virus will continue to rage so long as people are in contact with each other, forever.

Vaccination: well, hopefully, maybe. But we still don't have a vaccination for HIV after all these years, nor for any other coronavirus despite decades of trying. And if, as seems to be the case, C-19 mutates as swiftly as other bat coronaviruses, then even if we do have a vaccination, will it protect against the next version?

The underlying presence of the virus is now unassailable. America is insisting on gathering in stupid crowds to protest the lockdown, thus inevitably increasing infection rates. Slums, refugee camps and shanty towns are already carrying the virus, bodies literally piling up in the streets in some countries.

As bad as things are here in the UK I reckon this is a walk in the park compared to what will happen elsewhere in the year ahead, and a necessary steep learning curve for dealing with whatever happens next.

I really hope I'm wrong. But I've got a bad feeling about this.


ETA
Plus, the global depression that is now inevitable, the economic harm and misery with attendant hurt and injury to life and quality of life; the inevitable selfishness that will follow. It's all miserable.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

william, can you stop misinterpreting every other post as someone saying 'there will definitely be no festivals in august' please? It's getting really dull now.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

(there will, incidentally, definitely be no festivals in August)


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

SheilaNaGig : I only mentioned vaccines in passing -- and I know it will take plenty of time before there are any, especially reliable ones.
On the other hand, there's a very large quantity of research being done.

I'll have to focus on the rest of your post when I'm not about to retire to bed, but I do get a lot of your points, and I totally understand why bad news leads to bad thoughts.
I'll try to get back to the particulars though.
============================================
Oh yes : 'patronisng' was my joke really , but you saying 'The global pandemic, William of Walworth' as if I'd never bloody heard of it, did look a little bit like that!
*NOT IMPORTANT* though, and I apologise for my annoying thowaway


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

killer b said:


> william, can you stop misinterpreting every other post as someone saying 'there will definitely be no festivals in august' please? It's getting really dull now.



I didn't fucking mention them!  -- get off my back please.
My point above was much more general, and I think I'm right that for now, the timing of things generally (eventual/gradual relaxations of lock-down etc.) is still up for discussion.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

it's what you're thinking though. whenever someone says anything about maybe this might go on for a while, there you are talking up the need to be optimistic about an early end to the lockdown with your underlines and your multiple smilies. And then you have the gall to call someone else patronising.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

Fact remains that I never mentioned festivals above -- it was you who did that.

Your patent and obvious dislike for me is unnecessary, also unpleasant -- I do have _some _legitimate contributions to make to discussions, yet you just chose to have a sneery (and in this thread, irrelevant) pop at me for attempting to do so above.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> I only mentioned vaccines in passing -- and I know it will take plenty of time before there are any, especially reliable ones.
> On the other hand, there's a very large quantity of research being done.
> 
> I'll have to focus on the rest of your post when I'm not about to retire to bed, but I do get a lot of your points, and I totally understand why bad news leads to bad thoughts.
> ...




I said that because you seemed to think I was talking about the UK lockdown rather than the whole global pandemic. I was just answering your post.

Not sure what I should have said instead tbh.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I said that because you seemed to think I was talking about the UK lockdown rather than the whole global pandemic. I was just answering your post.
> 
> Not sure what I should have said instead tbh.



Fair dos -- that was probably my fault for over-emphasising the UK aspects. Apologies.
Generally though, there seems to be quite a bit of UK talk in this thread, as well as in the actual UK one.

Anyway, I really am off to bed know -- I hope you're able to sleep well!


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Fact remains that I never mentioned festivals above -- it was you who did that.
> 
> Your patent and obvious dislike for me is unnecessary, also unpleasant -- I do have _some _legitimate contributions to make to discussions, yet you just chose to have a sneery (and in this thread, irrelevant) pop at me for attempting to do so above.


You don't need to mention them anymore, it's like they're embossed on every post you make.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Fair dos -- that was probably my fault for over-emphasising the UK aspects. Apologies.
> Generally though, there seems to be quite a bit of UK talk in this thread, as well as in the actual UK one.




I just dumped my gloomy little post here because it's "chat" rather than any facts or links to sources. It's a strong feeling I have, one that has crept up on me today despite my efforts to stay hopeful. I've been posting in both the UK thread and the Worldwide thread, but my feelings don't come under those headings. So I came here and sidled up to the bar to see if I could find some companionship. 

We're all pretty blinkered in some respects, I reckon. Its just so huge, it's too much to think about, so we're mostly paying attention to the stuff that's most relevant to us personally, whether that's the festival season or the stats or the PPE or the physiology and pathology or ...


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 17, 2020)

killer b said:


> You don't need to mention them anymore, it's like they're embossed on every post you make.




Leave off, eh.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 17, 2020)

killer b said:


> You don't need to mention them anymore, it's like they're embossed on every post you make.



You exaggerate just a little bit, and you know that perfectly well. 
I make plenty of purely political or general posts.

"Can't we just try and get along?"


----------



## Raheem (Apr 18, 2020)

elbows said:


> OK I have started studying his surroundings in interviews a little.
> 
> View attachment 207253


"Lockdown extension expected" 

Well, it is quite a small room, and if he can get a quote for ten grand on the nose...


----------



## Petcha (Apr 18, 2020)

So. My flatmate said she doesn't mind if my girlfriend comes over tonight for what amounts to a booty call. We're both going nuts. Is it really irresponsible?

Or are other people secretly doing this? We've been really disciplined about it all so far but it's been weeks now. I see loads of couples walking around together and they can't all be living in the same household surely.


----------



## LDC (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> So. My flatmate said she doesn't mind if my girlfriend comes over tonight for what amounts to a booty call. We're both going nuts. Is it really irresponsible?
> 
> Or are other people secretly doing this? We've been really disciplined about it all so far but it's been weeks now. I see loads of couples walking around together and they can't all be living in the same household surely.



It's not allowed in the guidelines that are designed to reduce the death rate. So yes, it's irresponsible and you shouldn't do it. Yes, it's really hard. And yes, some other people are breaking the rules and doing it anyway.


----------



## Petcha (Apr 18, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> It's not allowed in the guidelines that are designed to reduce the death rate. So yes, it's irresponsible and you shouldn't do it. Yes, it's really hard. And yes, some other people are breaking the rules and doing it anyway.



Yes, I agree. I'm usually the irresponsible one in any relationship so this is new territory for me. Following 'guidelines' doesn't exactly run in my DNA but I'm the one suggesting it's not a great idea.


----------



## danny la rouge (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> I see loads of couples walking around together and they can't all be living in the same household surely.


Why not? It’s quite common for people to live together.


----------



## existentialist (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> Yes, I agree. I'm usually the irresponsible one in any relationship so this is new territory for me. Following 'guidelines' doesn't exactly run in my DNA but I'm the one suggesting it's not a great idea.


I'm sure loads of people are doing it, and it's quite likely that you'll end up doing it - in the same situation, I'd be sorely tempted, and I cannot put my hand on my heart and say I wouldn't. 

But it wouldn't be the Right Thing To Do.


----------



## Cid (Apr 18, 2020)

Raheem said:


> "Lockdown extension expected"
> 
> Well, it is quite a small room, and if he can get a quote for ten grand on the nose...



I'm now convinced he's doing all these interviews from his shitter. Gradually squeezing one out to the dulcet tones of Piers Morgan.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> Yes, I agree. I'm usually the irresponsible one in any relationship so this is new territory for me. Following 'guidelines' doesn't exactly run in my DNA but I'm the one suggesting it's not a great idea.



A friend moved in with her boyfriend a couple of weeks ago for the duration which struck me as a good idea.


----------



## Petcha (Apr 18, 2020)

two sheds said:


> A friend moved in with her boyfriend a couple of weeks ago for the duration which struck me as a good idea.



Good idea. Well for anyone who was slightly interested, I've overruled her and we're gonna try to stick it out for three more weeks. 9 months from then there's gonna be a massive baby boom in this country.

Edit: Flatmate has just told me she's got her boyfriend coming over anyway, she can't take it anymore either


----------



## campanula (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> Good idea. Well for anyone who was slightly interested, I've overruled her and we're gonna try to stick it out for three more weeks. 9 months from then there's gonna be a massive baby boom in this country.
> 
> Edit: Flatmate has just told me she's got her boyfriend coming over anyway, she can't take it anymore either


 Yep, my eldest moved in with his gf and kids...and to my utter shame, we ALL met up on my allotment, one glorious afternoon 3 weeks ago. Naturally, I worried continuously afterwards, even though we were scrupulous to stay on our plots, keep our distance, bring our own cups, snacks etc.. I missed them so bloody much and I felt I was going mad without watching children gathering up 'pet snails' and picking bunches of flowers.

It's a tricky thing though - we have all been on board with self isolating and taking precautions since way back in early March. My daughter took Gdd out of school a full 2 weeks before the official closure on the 26th. A couple of my family members are very high risk so I pretty much have not been taking any chances, plus compliance, at least in my circles, has been total (almost). So, I dunno. It is the knock-on effects - not being able to control who goes where, sees who, has whatever connections and responsibilities. In shared households, this is even more pronounced (and the main reason my eldest moved out of his housing co-op to be with his partner and family.
We all went back into purdah pretty much.. ..and 3 weeks on, we are still all OK. So, I dunno. Long distance relationships, with deferred pleasures, have a charm and excitement all their own but...we are human and fallible. I wouldn't. couldn't condemn someone who feels they are sinking without human engagement...


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 18, 2020)

That human contact is so valuable. I have a tendency to self-isolate in times of crisis anyway, but the moment you’re sanctioned not to do something, it just makes you want to go do it doublefold, so I now want to go to a sweaty gig with loads of stage diving, hug strangers and lick hand railings (ok not the last bit)


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 18, 2020)

It’s really sharpening my thoughts about those who are obliged or compelled to go without physical contact. Prisoners, the lonesome alone, armed forces (do they hug much? At all?).

Being without physical contact is really bad for us. Touch hunger, skin hunger, touch starvation/deprivation is recognised as a real thing that increases risk for all sorts of health issues, psychological and physiological too.


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 18, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It’s really sharpening my thoughts about those who are obliged or compelled to go without physical contact. Prisoners, the lonesome alone, armed forces (do they hug much? At all?).
> 
> Being without physical contact is really bad for us. Touch hunger, skin hunger, touch starvation/deprivation is recognised as a real thing that increases risk for all sorts of health issues, psychological and physiological too.



I wonder how all the incel manbabies are taking it?


----------



## Numbers (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> Good idea. Well for anyone who was slightly interested, I've overruled her and we're gonna try to stick it out for three more weeks. 9 months from then there's gonna be a massive baby boom in this country.
> 
> Edit: Flatmate has just told me she's got her boyfriend coming over anyway, she can't take it anymore either


Simple solution here, but it does involve unfaithfulness...


----------



## Petcha (Apr 18, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Simple solution here, but it does involve unfaithfulness...



She's 52. The flatmate that is. I'm not quite at that level yet.


----------



## Numbers (Apr 18, 2020)

Which means?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 18, 2020)

Dogsauce said:


> I wonder how all the incel manbabies are taking it?




Can you not guess? Go on, it’s  pretty obvious really.










































						Incels are celebrating lockdown because attractive people can’t have casual sex
					

During the last few days, as lockdowns started to look inevitable, the general public began to prepare for a potentially grim few months. They worried about loneliness among those isolated from others, the ability to get food safely, and what it might mean to spend the entire spring indoors...




					www.newstatesman.com


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 18, 2020)

.


----------



## scifisam (Apr 18, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It’s really sharpening my thoughts about those who are obliged or compelled to go without physical contact. Prisoners, the lonesome alone, armed forces (do they hug much? At all?).
> 
> Being without physical contact is really bad for us. Touch hunger, skin hunger, touch starvation/deprivation is recognised as a real thing that increases risk for all sorts of health issues, psychological and physiological too.



You do get used to it, though.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 18, 2020)

scifisam said:


> You do get used to it, though.




I know. I’ve been without physical contact myself for a fair old while now.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 18, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I know. I’ve been without physical contact myself for a fair old while now.



Me too. It's overrated


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 18, 2020)

I really miss it.


----------



## campanula (Apr 18, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I really miss it.


 I don't miss physical contact (cos I don't fucking like it) but I do miss the verbal sparring,   the shared in jokes and memories, the actual sight of my small family (cos that's all I have). And, in fairness, whilst I would flee from an intrusive hug or social kiss (blech), I really don't mind the reassuring pat on the arm.  But it's mainly being able to see people, unmediated by machines. I thought I was fully on board with being an isolate...but it turns out I was kidding myself.


----------



## Supine (Apr 18, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Simple solution here, but it does involve unfaithfulness...



Yeah, the responsible thing to do is bone your flatmate...


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 18, 2020)

Petcha said:


> She's 52. The flatmate that is. I'm not quite at that level yet.



No, you're probably not. My standards are certainly much higher at nearly 50 than they were in my youth.


----------



## Petcha (Apr 18, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Which means?



I didn't mean offence. Just that I'm significantly younger than that. That post does come across as quite awful though, sorry. I'm not to her taste either I wouldn't have thought. She's certainly not lacking for male company but it's always men of her own age. We enjoy each other's company but that's it!


----------



## editor (Apr 18, 2020)

At last. Some good news to come out of all this tragedy

'The Influencer Economy Hurtles Toward Its First Recession'

The Influencer Economy Hurtles Toward Its First Recession





__





						Outline - Read & annotate without distractions
					

Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles. We remove the clutter so you can analyze and comment on the content.




					outline.com


----------



## hash tag (Apr 18, 2020)

Little word of warning people. I broke the frame on a pair of glasses this morning. Fortunately, I have a spare pair to get me through. If I hadn't got the spares I could have been in difficulties. I checked Boots. They have about 15 opticians still open in the UK, Just 2 in London.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 18, 2020)

When I wore glasses ..... 

(see my posts on cataracts and how they give you new lenses - proper lenses - so you don't need glasses again) 

I got a couple of pairs off the web. You send them your prescription plus the distance between your eyes and they send you proper glasses. I were impressed


----------



## two sheds (Apr 18, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I really miss it.


I know, I was lying


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 18, 2020)

This is genius and lovely at the same time:


----------



## treelover (Apr 18, 2020)

two sheds said:


> When I wore glasses .....
> 
> (see my posts on cataracts and how they give you new lenses - proper lenses - so you don't need glasses again)
> 
> I got a couple of pairs off the web. You send them your prescription plus the distance between your eyes and they send you proper glasses. I were impressed



try getting your prescription if you regularly use spec savers.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> try geeting your prescription if you regularly use spec savers.



I did - they do have a conveyor belt type organization where you come out of the sight testing stage and they say "ok next you go down this way and choose your frames" for £100 a throw. You just need to say "ok yes I will think about that but I have to go now - could you give me my written prescription and I'll come back  "

then fuck off.

I actually last went to a small private optician which a friend recommended me to but I was reluctant because I hate the idea of private but they were superb. Really friendly, and when I asked explained how Specsavers push the small companies out of the market with the below-market-price testing so they make their money from the frames.

... if that's what you meant


----------



## Cid (Apr 18, 2020)

treelover said:


> try getting your prescription if you regularly use spec savers.



Should have gone to not-specsavers.


----------



## Mrs Miggins (Apr 19, 2020)

That C-19 symptom tracker app is asking a question about how much you leave the house this morning. None of the options were quite right for me but I picked the best fit.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 19, 2020)

Petcha said:


> I didn't mean offence. Just that I'm significantly younger than that. *That post does come across as quite awful *though, sorry. I'm not to her taste either I wouldn't have thought. She's certainly not lacking for male company but it's always men of her own age. We enjoy each other's company but that's it!




It really really did.

I wasn’t offended though. It just made me think the less of you. So I’m glad you made this apology, it means I don’t have to judge you quite so harshly.


----------



## Supine (Apr 19, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> So I’m glad you made this apology, it means I don’t have to judge you quite so harshly.



Very reasonable. That's not how urban works!


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 19, 2020)

Supine said:


> Very reasonable. That's not how urban works!




We are living in strange times...


----------



## Mation (Apr 20, 2020)

I've been awake for about an hour, as is often the case around this time of the morning.

Two cars have gone by. That's it, for sound, bar me fidgeting and birdsong. No planes (that's standard now); no helicopter; no motorbikes.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a much reduced but still steady flow of traffic at all hours. But now, nothing. Even the foxes have shut up 

This is zone 2 London. Never ever in my life has it been this quiet!


----------



## Mation (Apr 20, 2020)

Why have the foxes shut up?


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 20, 2020)

they've prolly been shamed on foxbook for not joining the thursday clap and are just quietly distancing from their foxy neighbours


----------



## Mation (Apr 20, 2020)

wayward bob said:


> they've prolly been shamed on foxbook for not joining the thursday clap and are just quietly distancing from their foxy neighbours


Foxbook


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 20, 2020)

Maybe they're busy making dens and having cubs? No need for all that hoo ha and malarkey.


----------



## Doodler (Apr 20, 2020)

I don't miss social hugging.


----------



## Mogden (Apr 20, 2020)

It's 420 day so I'm wondering if I should mark it later  

In amongst that I've been wondering about all those little events happening as a result this. The housemates who have been will-they-won't-they for ages and now plucked up the courage to tell each other and are now spending lockdown as a new couple. The people who have time for that big talk and decide to separate, and those that have the talk and reconnect and are in the throes of those first heady days of their relationship again. The workaholic who has had a massive wake up call and now realises they want to work to live not live to work. The person who was spreading themselves so thin they were ill and now the chest pains have subsided, the headaches have stopped, their appetite has returned, and they're remembering how to smile again.

I think it's stemmed from my Thai sister-in-law who is in England for her first ever spring season, as is my niece. She, my sis-in-law, is quite obsessed with all the new growth, especially the masses of bluebells, and it makes me see the season through new eyes. If it had not been for this she wouldn't have had as much opportunity to drink in the spring.


----------



## Numbers (Apr 20, 2020)

420 day


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (Apr 20, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> i didn't know wtf to do last week - I went for a walk on a path i thought would be deserted but a couple came round the corner and there was nowhere to go so i turned my back to them and let them pass. must have looked well strange



I've had similar experiences.  I turned a corner and a lady was there.  She backed away from me slooooowly, as if I were a rabid dog.  To make her feel better I went off trail and around, giving her a good 10-15 yards.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 20, 2020)

You could have growled at her too.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 20, 2020)

as long as you didn't sniff her arse


----------



## Lancman (Apr 20, 2020)

I received a curious SMS message yesterday (Greek Easter) that showed a surprising knowledge of my day to day life including the fact that John and Constantia from upstairs had brought me down an enormous hot lunch of lamb, rice and salad, the message was signed “Christos”. Who could it be? It was only today when I  looked at the message more carefully that I saw that the signature was in fact “Christos Anasti”, Greek for “Christ is Risen”, a traditional Cypriot greeting. The message had indeed been sent by a friend in the village. How lovely.
The Cypriots seem to have coped with the corona virus problem surprisingly well, with a reassuring downwards trend to the number of daily infections reported. See page 2 of Πύλη Πληροφόρησης Πανεπιστημίου Κύπρου για το COVID-19


----------



## GarveyLives (Apr 20, 2020)




----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (Apr 20, 2020)

My dad's results have just come back positive. 

He's in a nursing home. 

A letter went out on Friday. The interesting thing is that most residents show none of the classic symptoms. They just feel tired and loss their appetite. 

There have been 4 deaths in the home of suspected COVID-19, they tested 10 people of whice 5 returned positive. 

The reason they tested my dad was that he's more mobile than most, and more likely to come in contact with the virus, but also I suspect because he was sat next to a ladt6who sadly passed away. 

My dad was complaining of feeling tired last week, he says he feels OK now apart from dihorrea. 

Either way, we are all quite worried.


----------



## wayward bob (Apr 20, 2020)

oh flb i'm not surprised you're worried xx
<internet woo to your da>

it's impossible to find your way around here these days but there's support threads in k&s if you want to talk/type more.


----------



## Mation (Apr 21, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Maybe they're busy making dens and having cubs? No need for all that hoo ha and malarkey.


Well, it's earlier in the night, but they are back. As are the helicopter and frequent cars.

And, as an added bonus, I can also hear housemates shagging. Yay.


----------



## two sheds (Apr 21, 2020)

Knock on the wall and call "Where's your social distancing???"


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 21, 2020)

Mation said:


> Well, it's earlier in the night, but they are back. As are the helicopter and frequent cars.
> 
> And, as an added bonus, I can also hear housemates shagging. Yay.


I’m getting this every day at about 2.30 - can almost set your clock by it


----------



## two sheds (Apr 21, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> I’m getting this every day at about 2.30 - can almost set your clock by it



You're next door to Mation??


----------



## Humberto (Apr 21, 2020)

its funny how even slight peripheral changes were beyond all reason, but now the Lord toasts their toes they are all crying.


----------



## Mation (Apr 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Knock on the wall and call "Where's your social distancing???"


I can also present them with marks out of 10 in various categories:

Yowling: 5
Sustained bed creaking: 7
Unsettling pauses: 9.6
Puzzling scraping: 5.2
Final throaty grunt: perfect 10


----------



## two sheds (Apr 21, 2020)

One of the problems of living in a shared house. I heard a housemate in obvious pain one time when I lived in the Netherlands and I was stood at her door with my hand raised to knock and thought ..... ah no


----------



## Mation (Apr 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> One of the problems of living in a shared house. I heard a housemate in obvious pain one time when I lived in the Netherlands and I was stood at her door with my hand raised to knock and thought ..... ah no


I quite like it, tbh. Not in a prevert way , but it's nice knowing that people are around somewhere doing people things (even if I'm not).


----------



## two sheds (Apr 21, 2020)

Yes quite, something that's been happening in one form or another for a million years or more with people next door giving them marks out of 10 for the various activities.


----------



## Raheem (Apr 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Knock on the wall and call "Where's your social distancing???"


I don't wish to boast, but two metres isn't a problem for everyone.


----------



## Numbers (Apr 21, 2020)

Did anyone watch the Good Morning Britain interview this morning with 93 year old veteran Ken Bembow and his 17 year old Carer Kia Tobin?


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 21, 2020)

My senses are heightened by anxiety, but I just went for my prescribed 1 hour's exercise on the Bristol to Bath shared path and things are feeling a teeny bit edgy out there - not just the usual macho males passing almost as close as usual and others glowering when you give pedestrians too wide a berth and cramp their style ...
I'll try to go in the morning tomorrow - it's just that I feel I should at least _appear _to be available for helpdesk queries and I don't trust my PC enough to leave it switched on...


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 21, 2020)

Don’t know if this has been posted yet but - young people are rioting in Paris over the coronavirus lockdown.









						Paris suburbs hit by second night of riots over lockdown curbs
					

Riots erupted on the outskirts of Paris for a second night as young people fought with police and unleashed fireworks amid growing unrest over the impact of lockdown restrictions.




					www.standard.co.uk


----------



## Sue (Apr 21, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Don’t know if this has been posted yet but - young people are rioting in Paris over the coronavirus lockdown.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


No, it looks like a result of heavy handed/racist policing in the banlieues.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 21, 2020)

Sue said:


> No, it looks like a result of heavy handed/racist policing in the banlieues.



And higher death rates from c-19.



> The banlieues have long been flashpoints of anger over social and economic grievances and have suffered higher death rates than central Paris since the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in France.


----------



## Sue (Apr 21, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> And higher death rates from c-19.


Things kicking off with the police in the  banlieues is not a new phenomenon.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 21, 2020)

Sue said:


> Things kicking off with the police in the  banlieues is not a new phenomenon.



C-19 is.


----------



## agricola (Apr 21, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> C-19 is.



yes but I don't think it knocked that kid off his moped


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 21, 2020)

Random link to thing kicking off in Paris

you think it was attempting to link it to the situation in america or something

sure i've overthinking it


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 21, 2020)

Loads more people on the bus today; so much so that social distancing was tricky. Then had someone stand within two feet of me as we waited to get off; they then proceeded to cough loudly and repeatedly right behind me. I gave them daggers and said 'I'm waiting to get off' (just in case they were confused as to why I was standing in the aisle) but they didn't seem to register that anything was up.

Feeling a bit tired - Louis MacNeice


----------



## editor (Apr 21, 2020)

It's not all bad news 








						Paparazzi Industry 'Decimated' as Celebrities Self-Isolate
					

Much of the photo industry has been crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, but the subset of photographers receiving the least pity for their woes might be




					petapixel.com


----------



## two sheds (Apr 21, 2020)

You'd imagine they'd be good at self isolating with all those zoom lenses and things. Good shots through bedroom windows from a mile off.


----------



## Doodler (Apr 22, 2020)

In Robert Heinlein's 1951 Red Scare scifi novel 'The Puppet Masters', alien parasites are taking over people's minds on Earth (set in 2007). Someone has to convince the President that it's really happening:





> At the beginning of a forest fire or an epidemic there is a short time when a minimum of correct action will contain and destroy. The B. W. boys express it in exponential equations, but you don't need math to understand it; it depends on early diagnosis and prompt action before the thing gets out of hand. What the President needed to do the Old Man had already figured out - declare a national emergency, fence off the Des Moines area, and shoot anybody who tried to slip out, be it a cocker spaniel or grandma with her cookie jar. Then let them out one at a time, stripping them and searching them for parasites.
> 
> The Old Man had cracked the case, analyzed it, and come up with the right answer in a little more than twenty-four hours. His unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily as with the commonplace. Not much, eh? I have never met anyone else who could do it wholeheartedly. *Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; "I-just-can't-believe-it" is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.*



Not sure about shooting grandma or dogs (Heinlein's authoritarian streak coming out), the bold bit seems relevant today.


----------



## treelover (Apr 22, 2020)

> At last we have an Opposition: New Labour leader Keir Starmer tears into Dominic Raab over coronavirus testing and PPE failures in first virtual PMQs - as Foreign Secretary blames 'logistical' issues



this is from the DM, obvious has an agenda, but still


----------



## bimble (Apr 22, 2020)

bimble said:


> Friend holed up in a hotel in Benares (india). Says all restaurants ordered to shut today, shops shut. I think he’s mad to stay there but he’s got no home to come to back here .


Well. Repatriation flights are go, some 5 weeks later , he is on one Saturday, British airways chartered by the gov. Quite impressed really. Charging him under £600 including bus to Delhi chartered as well as there’s no public transport .


----------



## BassJunkie (Apr 22, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Did anyone watch the Good Morning Britain interview this morning with 93 year old veteran Ken Bembow and his 17 year old Carer Kia Tobin?



Yes! I haven't watched broadcast news for a long, long time, but due to the strange times I did see that. It turned me into a blubbering mess and filled me with hope for humanity. It made me feel profoundly happy.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 22, 2020)

At least we now know what kebabking looks like, now he's been in the No 10 press conference.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 23, 2020)




----------



## Marty1 (Apr 23, 2020)

Amazon’s daily provided PPE to workers is very good now.


----------



## Doodler (Apr 23, 2020)

Meat substitutes gain ground in China and elsewhere, according to the BBC:









						'Fake' meat on the menu as China reopens restaurants
					

Starbucks, Beyond Meat and KFC hope to tap into a rising demand for healthier lifestyles in China.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Another instance of the pandemic speeding up some existing trends.


----------



## lefteri (Apr 23, 2020)

have we had this yet? Coronavirus: Nicotine patches to be tested on patients after study suggests smokers less likely to catch COVID-19


----------



## existentialist (Apr 23, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> At least we now know what kebabking looks like, now he's been in the No 10 press conference.


Uh, no. kebabking would the one in slightly-unorthodox fatigues, with collar-length greasy hair and a porn star moustache and a special pair of glasses which would support a large black oblong across his eyes, like on the covers of those "He Who Dares, WIns, Rodney" books.... Would probably have rappelled out of a helicopter and come in through the ceiling with flash-bangs.


----------



## treelover (Apr 23, 2020)

Badgers said:


>




Sikora is a Tory, teaches at private University, Buckingham, and supports NHS privatisation, but on this he is surely right.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 23, 2020)

lefteri said:


> have we had this yet? Coronavirus: Nicotine patches to be tested on patients after study suggests smokers less likely to catch COVID-19



Yes, the smokers are getting very excited about it on the world news thread.  Some proper smokers logic going on there...


----------



## kebabking (Apr 23, 2020)

existentialist said:


> Uh, no. kebabking would the one in slightly-unorthodox fatigues, with collar-length greasy hair and a porn star moustache and a special pair of glasses which would support a large black oblong across his eyes, like on the covers of those "He Who Dares, WIns, Rodney" books.... Would probably have rappelled out of a helicopter and come in through the ceiling with flash-bangs.



I fear you massively overestimate my athleticism. And hair...


----------



## existentialist (Apr 23, 2020)

kebabking said:


> I fear you massively overestimate my athleticism. And hair...


Yebbut, what about the special glasses? I always wondered how they got those black bars to stay on...


----------



## kebabking (Apr 23, 2020)

existentialist said:


> Yebbut, what about the special glasses? I always wondered how they got those black bars to stay on...



Gone out of fashion, they use pixelation these days. No bad thing, coz the strips of black and nasty used to rip off your eyebrows - and skin, eyelashes, eyelids....


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 23, 2020)

kebabking said:


> I fear you massively overestimate my athleticism. And hair...


Bet you've got a mullet really.


----------



## kebabking (Apr 23, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Bet you've got a mullet really.



Like a Sheffield United player from 86. Business up front, party behind....


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 23, 2020)

lefteri said:


> have we had this yet? Coronavirus: Nicotine patches to be tested on patients after study suggests smokers less likely to catch COVID-19



Median age of people in the study was 65, might just be people with a decent constitution/resistance to illness that have managed to survive smoking that long without succumbing to smoking-related diseases.

_(nips out to buy some Philip Morris shares)_


----------



## MickiQ (Apr 23, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Yes, the smokers are getting very excited about it on the world news thread.  Some proper smokers logic going on there...


tbh this sounds like another of "Sod it we've no better ideas, what have we got to lose" kind of thing, on the same line as Darth Orange and his obsession with the anti-malaria drug.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 23, 2020)

my local Co Op is too cramped for passing in aisles so it has a one way system and blocked off ends to enforce it, except it doesn’t work that way and you end up having to step round a barrier or over beer cases cos when you’re trapped at the end of an aisle and some cunt doesn’t wait but comes blundering down the aisle towards you and you have no choice but to make a break for it and climb over the barrier to avoid getting breathed on. So you have to break the rules to stay alive ffs


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 23, 2020)

Also, does anyone else find the constant drip of information boring as fuck? Never been into science, so not enjoying the geekery, even though I should probably be keeping abreast of developments for my own and for my my loved ones’ safety, but I just cannot get into it


----------



## crossthebreeze (Apr 23, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> my local Co Op is too cramped for passing in aisles so it has a one way system and blocked off ends to enforce it, except it doesn’t work that way and you end up having to step round a barrier or over beer barrel cases cos when you’re trapped at the end of an aisle and some cunt doesn’t wait but comes blundering down the aisle towards you and you have no choice but to make a break for it and climb over the barrier to avoid getting breathed on. So you have to break the rules to stay alive ffs


I didn't even understand the one-way sustem in my local coo-op - there seems to be a dead end no reversing by the dairy


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 23, 2020)

crossthebreeze said:


> I didn't even understand the one-way sustem in my local coo-op - there seems to be a dead end no reversing by the dairy


same with mine, except the cul de sac is the booze section and EVERYONE is buying booze for some reason lol


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 23, 2020)

We normally use Sainsbury's or Lidls -- the two nearest.

We used a little Tescos once though, and that was much more clearly marked with one way system arrows, and distancing lines throughout the shop, than either of the other two.

The staff were generally enforcing stuff more carefully too. Is that other Urbans' experience with Tescos in other places?

Sainsbury's was by far the best of the three for providing plenty of antiseptic handwash as you went both in *and* out, mind you.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 24, 2020)

May already be posted here but an interesting read on the lockdown lift. 









						Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
					

The first epicenter is coming back to life, but not as anyone knew it.




					www.bloomberg.com


----------



## Badgers (Apr 24, 2020)

Interesting read regarding SAGE 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/...ecret.html#click=[URL]https://t.co/LUl5R5GJie


----------



## Badgers (Apr 24, 2020)

UK’s coronavirus science advice won’t be published until pandemic ends
					

The UK government says its coronavirus strategies are based on science, but the scientific advice it has received won’t be made public until after the pandemic




					www.newscientist.com


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 24, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Also, does anyone else find the constant drip of information boring as fuck? Never been into science, so not enjoying the geekery, even though I should probably be keeping abreast of developments for my own and for my my loved ones’ safety, but I just cannot get into it


I love science stuff so find it fascinating.  There should be ways of finding out the key facts without wading into lots of detail I guess.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 24, 2020)

This is interesting - the ground is vibrating less due to lockdown.  I bet the moles and earthworms will be happier.  



> Staying at home has led to a notable reduction in the hum of ground vibrations in the UK generated by human activities such as air and road traffic and industrial work, geoscientists have said.
> 
> Experts said that compared to noise levels before lockdown, signals from seismometers across the country show ambient noise caused by people going about their daily lives has dropped between 20% and 50% in the last five weeks.
> 
> ...


----------



## two sheds (Apr 24, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> This is interesting - the ground is vibrating less due to lockdown.  I bet the moles and earthworms will be happier.



Interesting - and I'd not noticed just how lovely and quiet it is now  There's not often traffic noise where I am but it's totally fucking silent. 

Having said that a van has just gone past


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 24, 2020)

Any DJ’s on here?

If so you may fancy giving a go doing a live stream mix on YouTube - I’ve been listening to a few who are doing it out of their homes (bedroom/kitchen etc) and they are making a small fortune during this lockdown with super chat donations - guy on at the moment (DJ Slavine) has made approx £500 in his first hour of his 24hr non stop stream!

Think a lot of donations are off pissed people partying at home


----------



## elbows (Apr 24, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Also, does anyone else find the constant drip of information boring as fuck? Never been into science, so not enjoying the geekery, even though I should probably be keeping abreast of developments for my own and for my my loved ones’ safety, but I just cannot get into it



It might not be the drip drip nature of its thats doing your head in as much as the relative lack of new information on offer at all. There isnt much new to get our teeth into. I'm a nerd and from a scientific pandemic information point of view, January and February were where the interesting stuff came out, March onwards are more the story of the human consequences, the politics, the lockdowns etc. And a big horrible chunk of the story was already pretty much set in stone by what we learnt and observed in February, with March and April featuring the inevitable deadly consequences unfolding at dramatic yet somehow still tedious pace. Now we've got all the political BS and the tedium of lockdown and situations that feel like they take forever to evolve when you are sitting around waiting for times to change.

I've had to rely on the shitty politics and throwing myself into historical data in recent weeks in order to keep myself interested in talking about this pandemic, and I'm still finding myself  running out of steam now. And I say that as a nerd who can fixate on topics for months at a time. Perhaps if I try to take a partial break for the next week, something that demands more of my attention will turn up.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 24, 2020)

Mayor of New York’s snitch line backfires:









						De Blasio’s social distancing tip line flooded with penis photos, Hitler memes
					

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s critics let him know how they really felt about him ordering New Yorkers to snitch on each other for violating social-distancing rules — by flooding his new tip l…




					nypost.com


----------



## smmudge (Apr 24, 2020)

I'm just about getting sick of seeing fuzzy up-the-nose angle pictures of people with bookcases in the background.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 24, 2020)

Notable improvement in the air quality in and around Edinburgh due to the decrease in traffic/industry/flights. Visibility is great and you can taste the difference. There's also been large birds of prey coming right into the city which I don't remember ever happening before - today on our cycle less than a mile from my flat there was a sparrowhawk hunting and the other day we saw a buzzard being mobbed by some crows.


----------



## killer b (Apr 24, 2020)

there's an Osprey nesting in Preston for the first time in 200 years!


----------



## kropotkin (Apr 24, 2020)

Supine said:


> The gov also announced a set of tests that would need to be passed regarding easing the lockdown.
> 
> View attachment 207210




Literally any easing of restrictions will increase cases, leading to a "second peak". The only thing that is modifiable is how high that peak is, and the length of time from easing restrictions to the peak.


----------



## Supine (Apr 24, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> Literally any easing of restrictions will increase cases, leading to a "second peak". The only thing that is modifiable is how high that peak is, and the length of time from easing restrictions to the peak.



Totally. I'm sure there will be multiple peaks however much any release measures are moderated. Fingers crossed we can resource them and also give you heros a pay rise asap.


----------



## Sue (Apr 24, 2020)

I've been working from home since a week before lockdown (we got sent home after a confirmed case -- someone whose desk was about 10 feet from mine) and only been out for a walk a couple of times since. It's really strange but the idea of going out now feels kind of surreal/wrong.  

(I'm not shielding but at increased risk. Not sure if not really going out at all is overkill and I'm being completely ridiculous . All just feels a bit weird.)


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> This is interesting - the ground is vibrating less due to lockdown.  I bet the moles and earthworms will be happier.




Where’s that from please farmerbarleymow


----------



## 2hats (Apr 25, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Where’s that from please farmerbarleymow











						UK seismic noise 'down by 20 to 50 per cent' during lockdown
					

Noise levels across the country caused by human activity have dropped in the last five weeks since lockdown began in mid-March.




					www.sciencefocus.com


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 25, 2020)

weepiper said:


> There's also been large birds of prey coming right into the city which I don't remember ever happening before - today on our cycle less than a mile from my flat there was a sparrowhawk hunting and the other day we saw a buzzard being mobbed by some crows.


It's brilliant to see how quickly wildlife starts to take over.  Nature is incredibly resilient if we give it the space to do so.


----------



## LDC (Apr 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> May already be posted here but an interesting read on the lockdown lift.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Fucking hell, that is grim.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Fucking hell, that is grim.




It really is. I couldn’t read it properly, had to skim it. Really brought me low.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 25, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It really is. I couldn’t read it properly, had to skim it. Really brought me low.


Sorry x

Hit me pretty hard to. Just concerned about how the fallout and blame is going to hurt us all.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Sorry x
> 
> Hit me pretty hard to. Just concerned about how the fallout and blame is going to hurt us all.




Yep. A lot.

I don’t think we’ll have those draconian measures. Instead we’ll have an ongoing problem with the virus and the inevitable stress and anger that will be caused by that.

I was working in the shop yesterday for the first time in two weeks. Almost no one seemed in the least bit bothered with proper distancing. when I asked a bloke to go back out because we had too many people in the shop he had a proper go at me. I retreated downstairs and when I came back there he was bold as brass chatting away to another customer. Wanker. Walking on the pavement, every person who came towards me didnt bother stepping to the side even when I did, even when I had to back up to find space, even when I turn d my face to the wall or had to walk into the street, not one person swerved to the side.

I think people are resigned to getting the virus, don’t believe they’ll get it, or just fed up with the whole thing. Meanwhile I’m stressed to fuck with the worry of being solely responsible for my own safety in the face of this attitude. I’ve had cancer chemo etc so theoretically vulnerable. Live alone, no benefits, no income, no recent record of self-employment income so ineligible for any scheme, financially fucked with no financial support so I have to take the work when I can get it. And face the viral consequences.

I’d rather not live under the system outlined in that Bloomberg essay, but this system is problematic.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 25, 2020)

I really hope SheilaNaGig 's experience isn't universal in all shops 

Mostly, when I go to a shop here in Swansea, most people seem to be distancing pretty well.
And moving aside on pavements too.
Different experiences in different places hopefully , but yes that does sound grm Sheila -- sympathies.


----------



## kropotkin (Apr 25, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Fucking hell, that is grim.


The worst aspect are the popups


----------



## Boudicca (Apr 25, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Yep. A lot.
> 
> I don’t think we’ll have those draconian measures. Instead we’ll have an ongoing problem with the virus and the inevitable stress and anger that will be caused by that.
> 
> ...


Several of the small shops around here (the bakers. the greengrocers and the 'no packaging') shop have put a table across the front door and are serving people from a queue on the pavement.  Obviously there is extra work as you have to pick stuff for them, but it would at least put you back in control of your own safety.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

Boudicca said:


> Several of the small shops around here (the bakers. the greengrocers and the 'no packaging') shop have put a table across the front door and are serving people from a queue on the pavement.  Obviously there is extra work as you have to pick stuff for them, but it would at least put you back in control of your own safety.



I’ve suggested similar but I’m only a part time relief worker so I don’t have much clout there.

One of the important intangible benefits about Brixton Wholefoods is that it’s always been a place where people meet and greet and share. It’s a social hub for sure and before the virus yiud see people come in for a tin of beans and then be there all afternoon as friends and acquaintances would come for their own shopping. So with the best will in the world to clamp down on that, we’re working against decades of tradition. Also people love to browse the shelves, some people even now will queue up, wander about with their basket for a while and only buy one thing.

But one of the regular workers is at home now with suspected C-19 and one of the owners is saying it might be time to think about different measures, so I’ll make this suggestion about a table at the door to her again. I reckon it would actually speed things up for customers tbh.


----------



## editor (Apr 25, 2020)

From a friend's FB:


----------



## HAL9000 (Apr 25, 2020)

From 2008

*Commuters’ hands contaminated with faecal bacteria*



> They found that 28 per cent contained faecal bacteria, mostly Enterococcus and E-Coli. Female contamination rates were similar at different sites, but males tended to be more contaminated the further north they lived.





> Higher contamination rates were associated with bus rather than train travel. Surprisingly, manual workers were less likely to have faecal contamination than professionals, students, retired or unemployed people.



when commuting picks up again, be interesting see the percentage if this experiment is run again.





__





						Commuters' hands contaminated with faecal bacteria | Nursing Times
					

A team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine swabbed the hands of 409 commuters at bus stops next to train stations in London,




					www.nursingtimes.net


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 25, 2020)

Is it just me, or are there a lot more ambulances driving at speed with sirens going on empty roads ? 
(though I suppose there will be more pedestrians walking in the road at the moment and not expecting traffic ...)
I suppose I'm near a main road, but they've been coming down my street more frequently than before ... perhaps its because I'm here all the time so I notice it more...
I wonder what the average frequency is ...
Here in the West Country we've had it pretty easy so far...


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Is it just me, or are there a lot more ambulances driving at speed with sirens going on empty roads ?
> (though I suppose there will be more pedestrians walking in the road at the moment and not expecting traffic ...)
> I suppose I'm near a main road, but they've been coming down my street more frequently than before ... perhaps its because I'm here all the time so I notice it more...
> I wonder what the average frequency is ...
> Here in the West Country we've had it pretty easy so far...




Not sure what you’re asking about . The sirens or the frequency of the ambulances?

Obviously are going to be more ambulances out and about during a viral pandemic. There are loads more here in Brixton although noticeably fewer this week than in previous weeks. I’ve seen ambulances with Kent livery in local streets, presumably recruited in to cover the need. We’re near-ish to two hospitals (St Thomas’ and Kings College) and while there are far fewer police cars howling about, I’ve seen significantly more ambulances going up and down Brixton Hill and side streets too. Several times there have been ambulances stopping in my street and in the surrounding estates.


----------



## magneze (Apr 25, 2020)

Not noticed more ambulances. Seen a few hearses this week though.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 25, 2020)

magneze said:


> Not noticed more ambulances. Seen a few hearses this week though.




Last week i was waiting in the queue for the post office and two horsedrawn hearses went by. Two coffins, one funeral. And only one mourners car behind. So sad. Made me cry.


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 25, 2020)

Hard to tell for me live in around the areas of St peters, ashford hospital and west mid

appears to be more of them around

but maybe i'm just noticing them more on my commute to work as less other people are around


----------



## gentlegreen (Apr 25, 2020)

I suppose I'm conscious of it because the neighbour opposite has COPD and I'm sort of seeing this thing through her eyes...


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2020)

Sky news just showed crowds of people milling around the shops in part of East london, not sure where, and other media showing shopping areas full of people, not much social distancing either

it just seems to be breaking down, no police around here either.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2020)

Btw, just watch the SkY News special on C19 in the U.S, its on now, its truly heartbreaking, one family in new orleans have lost 4 members of their family.


----------



## Dogsauce (Apr 25, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Is it just me, or are there a lot more ambulances driving at speed with sirens going on empty roads ?
> (though I suppose there will be more pedestrians walking in the road at the moment and not expecting traffic ...)
> I suppose I'm near a main road, but they've been coming down my street more frequently than before ... perhaps its because I'm here all the time so I notice it more...
> I wonder what the average frequency is ...
> Here in the West Country we've had it pretty easy so far...



I’m noticing ambulances more on the few occasions I get out, but I think that’s because there’s less other traffic about.

i reckon we’ve had it easy in the West Country because public transport is so shit so isn’t used by as many people. Only one commuter train line in Bristol and buses are overpriced and mostly crap. Might have saved lives.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2020)

I really want LD to end, but if it does, and it seems to be crumbling anyway, police don't seem to be enforcing it xcept maybe rural areas, it will come back, probably much more virulent.


----------



## weltweit (Apr 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> I really want LD to end, but if it does, and it seems to be crumbling anyway, police don't seem to be enforcing it xcept maybe rural areas, it will come back, probably much more virulent.


800 plus deaths reported yesterday, it hasn't really gone yet ..


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 26, 2020)

weltweit said:


> 800 plus deaths reported yesterday, it hasn't really gone yet ..




We seem to have become resigned to 800 deaths a day against a background of a potentially deadly contagious viral disease that is causing havoc around the world incredibly fast. 

Normalising leads to minimising. As we all know.

That’s both amazing and unbelievable, and also totally banal in it’s inevitability.  The resilience and adaptability of the human spirit, the frog in hot water, the swimming rat learning helplessness in the high sided lab tank, and also this:







(Very possibly the only time I’ll ever reference a Hirst to make a point)


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> Btw, just watch the SkY News special on C19 in the U.S, its on now, its truly heartbreaking, one family in new orleans have lost 4 members of their family.




The storm is coming in America. South America is on the verge of appalling. And as spring-peeper pointed out, the Canadian border is going to become a huge issue too. I can see US Covid refugees heading for the northern border under cover of darkness.


----------



## teqniq (Apr 26, 2020)

Fair play









						Coronavirus Hero OUTLAW Is Posting Out Weed for 4/20
					

The music producer has been driving around Manchester, delivering free weed, toilet paper and hand sanitiser to those who need it.




					www.vice.com


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> Sky news just showed crowds of people milling around the shops in part of East london, not sure where, and other media showing shopping areas full of people, not much social distancing either
> 
> it just seems to be breaking down, no police around here either.




It’s definitely breaking down.


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> We seem to have become resigned to 800 deaths a day against a background of a potentially deadly contagious viral disease that is causing havoc around the world incredibly fast.
> 
> Normalising leads to minimising. As we all know.
> 
> ...



Wonder where he sourced that shark from?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> Wonder where he sourced that shark from?




Bound to be some kind of ugly exploitation somewhere along the line.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Apr 26, 2020)

treelover said:


> Wonder where he sourced that shark from?


The ocean?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 26, 2020)

The work was funded by Charles Saatchi, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create. The shark itself cost Hirst £6,000[4] and the total cost of the work was £50,000.[5] The shark was caught off Hervey Bayin Queensland, Australia, by a fisherman commissioned to do so.[4][5] Hirst wanted something "big enough to eat you".[6]


Because the shark was initially preserved poorly, it began to deteriorate, and the surrounding liquid grew murky. Hirst attributed some of the decay to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery had added bleach to the fluid.[7] In 1993, the gallery gutted the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglassmould. Hirst commented, "It didn't look as frightening ... You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight."[7]


When Hirst learned of Saatchi's impending sale of the work to Cohen, he offered to replace the shark, an operation which Cohen funded, calling the expense "inconsequential" (the formaldehydeprocess alone cost around $100,000).[7] Another shark (a female aged about 25–30 years, equivalent to middle age) was caught off the Queensland coast and shipped to Hirst in a 2-month journey.[7] In 2006, Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at London's Natural History Museum, assisted with the preservation of the new specimen.[7] This involved injecting formaldehyde into the body, as well as soaking it for two weeks in a bath of 7% formalin solution.[7]The original 1991 vitrine was then used to house it.[7]










						The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - Wikipedia
					






					en.m.wikipedia.org


----------



## two sheds (Apr 26, 2020)

I'd prefer a nice landscape in oils tbh.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2020)

Just had a walk around the village, bit upsetting really as I walked past the care home where children's drawings had been hung telling them to stay safe etc. Made me well up


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 26, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It’s definitely breaking down.


I feel so lucky to be living in a tiny rural village that also happens to be covered by several supermarket home delivery services. Aside from the village pub there isn't anywhere to gather anyway, and we'll be able to carry on in relative isolation regardless of what the rest of humanity chooses to do.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 27, 2020)

> Birmingham's Nightingale hospital is "not being used at all" 10 days after it was opened by the Duke of Cambridge. Set up inside the National Exhibition Centre (NEC), the site is intended to take up to 500 coronavirus patients at a time from 23 Midlands hospitals.











						Coronavirus: Birmingham's Nightingale hospital 'has no patients'
					

Birmingham's NHS Nightingale hospital was opened by Prince William on 16 April.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Speaking to the events people this morning I understand that the 'contract/agreement' for the London ExCel will end on the 30th of June. However the initial plan for Birmingham's (NEC) Nightingale hospital is for 12-18 months


----------



## Badgers (Apr 27, 2020)

Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson:



> In the speech on Monday morning, Mr Johnson said he understood concerns from business-owners who were impatient to end the lockdown, but warned a second peak of the outbreak could lead to "economic disaster".
> 
> "I ask you to contain your impatience," he added.
> 
> He said there were "real signs now that we are passing through the peak" - including with fewer hospital admissions and fewer Covid-19 patients in intensive care.











						Coronavirus: Boris Johnson says this is moment of maximum risk
					

The PM returns as ministers pledge £60,000 for the families of NHS and care staff who die with Covid-19.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## treelover (Apr 27, 2020)

> Disabled people left off coronavirus vulnerable list tell of struggles
> 
> 
> Guardian readers share their experiences as calls grow for food scheme to be expanded
> ...



Nothing new, struggles, and neglect, all the time.


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 27, 2020)

House party during lockdown - what could go wrong? 









						1,000 People Attend Chicago House Party During Coronavirus Pandemic — TMZ
					

If you had any doubt cases of coronavirus are about to explode because of reckless conduct, check out this video and all doubts will be swiftly erased.




					apple.news


----------



## Numbers (Apr 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> Sky news just showed crowds of people milling around the shops in part of East london, not sure where, and other media showing shopping areas full of people, not much social distancing either
> 
> it just seems to be breaking down, no police around here either.


I’m in East London and where I am social distancing doesn’t exist. 

I went out as needed to get a prescription but thought I’d get some eggs whilst out.  Neither the CoOp or Morrison’s had any door management, a guy standing there but not managing any form of entry system.  I only went in to Morrison’s but left without buying anything cos it was pretty full with zero SD, shocking really.

Outside the Post Office there was about 20 people queuing and at most were 2 or 3 feet from each other. 

Observed a few buses with a dozen+ people on the bottom deck.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 28, 2020)

Had a Covidiot taxi driver tell me he wasn’t ‘a conspiracy terrorist’ before a load of bullshit fell out of his mouth.


----------



## Jay Park (Apr 28, 2020)

mod said:


> View attachment 201226



what that chart seems to say is that the common cold is worse than this shit we’re all terrified of.

Ive seen shortness of breath, headaches, and aches and pains cited as common.

Though I also understand that the symptoms vary greatly from person to person.


----------



## platinumsage (Apr 28, 2020)

The UK plans to launch all its Trident missiles on Thursday, and shell the inner cities, to cheer up those clapping for the NHS:


----------



## elbows (Apr 28, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> The UK plans to launch all its Trident missiles on Thursday, and shell the inner cities, to cheer up those clapping for the NHS:



"Each one of the warheads had the equivalent impact of 10,000 Covid-19 tests, thus I am pleased to announce that we have reached our target for testing. This is the basis of our previously unannounced 6th pillar. It is also the equivalent of over 100 million pieces of PPE. We also hope that if the warheads can motivate superman to make the world spin backwards again, we can mess with time to the extent that we end up actually being 4 weeks behind Italy rather than 2."


----------



## treelover (Apr 28, 2020)

Newnight had whistle blowers on tonight, while Panorama took the Govt to task, getting its 80's mojo back?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 29, 2020)

On which are we talking about home made masks? Maybe there needs to be a dedicated thread?

These guys seem to be doing some decent basic testing of materials and open sourcing the results.









						Are Paper Towel Masks Effective at Blocking Viruses? - Smart Air
					

Test data of DIY mask materials finds paper towel masks capture fewer particles than other household materials yet better than nothing.



					smartairfilters.com
				












						Best Materials for Making DIY Face Masks - Smart Air
					

As a last resort, DIY masks provide more protection than nothing. Researchers tested household materials. These two materials captured the most particles.



					smartairfilters.com
				












						The Ultimate Guide to Homemade Face Masks for Coronavirus
					

We tested 30 common household materials for homemade masks. Using breathability and virus-size particle capture, we identified the top 5 DIY mask materials.



					smartairfilters.com


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Apr 29, 2020)

More info here









						Here's exactly how well 20 materials for homemade masks — from folded bandanas to blue shop towels — can filter tiny, potentially-dangerous particles, according to an N95 testing company
					

A company that tests N95 masks has tested 20 common materials that people use to make homemade masks. Here's the results, ranked.




					www.businessinsider.com
				












						DIY MASK FAQ
					

Information about DIY mask materials to help everyone make the best choices they can when making their own homemade masks.




					maskfaq.com


----------



## Marty1 (Apr 29, 2020)

Early signs of a return to normal life where I live - noticed my local Chinese restaurant re-opened yesterday for takeaways - queues out the door with good social distancing being applied.

Also read that McDonalds are going to be opening their drive-thru’s at select sites.


----------



## Boudicca (Apr 29, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> On which are we talking about home made masks? Maybe there needs to be a dedicated thread?
> 
> These guys seem to be doing some decent basic testing of materials and open sourcing the results.
> 
> ...











						Mask Making - Covid Crafty Corner
					

So 'the science has changed' and we should be wearing masks.  There are no masks.  If there are masks other people need them before us Jo and Jessica Bloggses. So there is a exponential growth in mask making instructional videos, but whose is best?   I don't know.  Do you?   Here is one I saw...




					www.urban75.net
				




I was initially against homemade masks but the tide is turning and I have been sucked in.  Let me know if you want a couple.


----------



## treelover (Apr 29, 2020)

Contrary to media reports, am hearing DWP is still making decisions on benefits, so disabled people going through DLA to PIP process are being failed and losing money at this time

As an aside, I have waited three months now for my ATOS decision.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 29, 2020)

Up to (and over) 26k deaths now


----------



## Badgers (Apr 29, 2020)

Wetherspoon's planning reopening of its pubs and hotels "in or around June"
					

Pub chain Wetherspoon's said it plans to reopen its bars and hotels in June, as founder Tim Martin revealed the extent of the carnage caused to the business due to the coronavirus lockdown.




					www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk
				




Good times ahead William of Walworth


----------



## Badgers (Apr 29, 2020)




----------



## Lorca (Apr 29, 2020)

Not long got back from a C19 testing centre at Worcester RFC, was a quite surreal experience, like being in an apocalyptic movie set. You drive in and a load of what look like festival security in full ppe hold up signs saying 'keep windows shut' and 'park here' etc and then you call their mobile and they give you strict instructions over the phone and hand you the testing kit in a biohazard bag thru a small gap in the car window.
You then have to pull over and do the test on yourself by coughing and sneezing onto a tissue then putting a swab up your nostril and on your tonsils, which is a little unpleasant and placing it into a tube.
You then drive round a circuit and phone a different mobile to get instructions on how to hand in the biohazard bag with the swab. Very strange experience, quite unsettling tbh.
Now have to wait 48 hrs to 5 days for the result!


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Wetherspoon's planning reopening of its pubs and hotels "in or around June"
> 
> 
> Pub chain Wetherspoon's said it plans to reopen its bars and hotels in June, as founder Tim Martin revealed the extent of the carnage caused to the business due to the coronavirus lockdown.
> ...



One of my neighbours is a pub manager.  The company who own the pub have also said a similar thing regarding June.

Nothing more than wishful thinking.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 29, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> One of my neighbours is a pub manager.  The company who own the pub have also said a similar thing regarding June.
> 
> Nothing more than wishful thinking.


As mentioned on this (or another similar) thread my local brewery pubs are not opening till August at the earliest regardless of government advice. 

Alcohol + indoors + Covid-19 + public toilets = a fucking mess in most places, let alone Wetherspoons


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 29, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> One of my neighbours is a pub manager.  The company who own the pub have also said a similar thing regarding June.
> 
> Nothing more than wishful thinking.


it won't be for ages yet. the indications at work are they're not expecting us back until july at the earliest: and they're making plans for closure til at least september.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Up to (and over) 26k deaths now


and yet cliff richard still stalks the earth


----------



## Badgers (Apr 29, 2020)

Pickman's model said:


> and yet cliff richard still stalks the earth


More like a shadowy figure that crawls through tunnels beneath the earth


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> More like a shadowy figure that crawls through tunnels beneath the earth




cliff richard _sans_ make-up


----------



## NoXion (Apr 29, 2020)

Judging from the exasperation with which my flatmate relays his tales of trips to the local Tesco, social distancing is going to fucking pot. One idiot even said to him something along the lines that said idiot's violation of social distancing was OK because "everyone else is doing it". Good fucking grief.

We are _definitely_ due a second wave.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 29, 2020)

I found this very interesting 








						Do you speak corona? A guide to covid-19 slang
					

Around the world, coronavirus is changing how we speak. Don’t be a “covidiot” – make sure your pandemic parlance is up to scratch




					www.1843magazine.com


----------



## two sheds (Apr 29, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> I found this very interesting
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I've always liked _hamsteren_


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 29, 2020)

This is probably the worst thing I've ever seen and heard and I've witnessed a murder:


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Up to (and over) 26k deaths now



but Boris has had a baby


----------



## campanula (Apr 29, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> More info here


 3 layers of cotton with a Numatic (Henry) vacuum cleaner filter inside. A little warm but bloody effective.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2020)

What's all this stuff from right wing pundits about how 'the media (which I guess they aren't part of?) have misjudged the public mood' by reporting critical stories? That's not the job of the media? Seems a bit of a weird criticism to make tbh.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 30, 2020)

NoXion said:


> Judging from the exasperation with which my flatmate relays his tales of trips to the local Tesco, social distancing is going to fucking pot. One idiot even said to him something along the lines that said idiot's violation of social distancing was OK because "everyone else is doing it". Good fucking grief.
> 
> We are _definitely_ due a second wave.




Woah there, a bit of patience.  To get a second wave we'd need to be out of the first wave.  Anything that happens at the moment will still be first wave.  Plenty of time for a second one.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 30, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> What's all this stuff from right wing pundits about how 'the media (which I guess they aren't part of?) have misjudged the public mood' by reporting critical stories? That's not the job of the media? Seems a bit of a weird criticism to make tbh.



Need one or two examples to point accusing fingers at, please


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2020)

This sort of stuff.


----------



## elbows (Apr 30, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> What's all this stuff from right wing pundits about how 'the media (which I guess they aren't part of?) have misjudged the public mood' by reporting critical stories? That's not the job of the media? Seems a bit of a weird criticism to make tbh.



Its a modified pandemic version of the shit that was going on before - basically the Johnson government copying aspects of Trumps approach to the media. Same shit that meant before the first pandemic wave got going, they were still doing things like boycotting the Today programme on radio 4, threatening the BBC and Channel 4, etc etc.

So its their previous agenda combined with the fact they dont actually have a proper defence against the criticisms, combined with some polling that showed them doing OK from the pandemic at some stage (I'm out of date with that now) and the fact more members of the public have been watching press conferences (the daily Covid-19 one) and some wont have been impressed with a chunk of the questions from the media.

Hell we even saw the 'lets rally round and support the government on this one' from a few on these forums at some stages of this pandemic, there is some kind of instinct on that front that inflicts some people at times of great woe and uncertainty.


----------



## elbows (Apr 30, 2020)

My brother, for example, was asking me the other day why the media are talking as though this country is one of the worst in the world at handling the pandemic, when he thinks the government have done quite a good job. And the reason for that is simple, it has nothing to do with the pandemic, the preparations and the response, its all to do with his pre-existing worldview and politics which are shit.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 30, 2020)

elbows said:


> My brother, for example, was asking me the other day why the media are talking as though this country is one of the worst in the world at handling the pandemic, when he thinks the government have done quite a good job. And the reason for that is simple, it has nothing to do with the pandemic, the preparations and the response, its all to do with his pre-existing worldview and politics which are shit.



Yeah.  Just shitty political tribalism.  If this was a Corbyn government doing exactly the same things... well lets just say you there would be many that would hold a different opinion to the one they currently hold.


----------



## LDC (Apr 30, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> This is probably the worst thing I've ever seen and heard and I've witnessed a murder:




Huge rise in deaths announced yesterday, and I thought things couldn't get much worse. Then I saw this. The end of days are truly here.


----------



## HAL9000 (May 1, 2020)

I thought this was interesting



More details here...









						PeRSo - Innovation Action
					






					www.innovationaction.org
				






> University of Southampton researchers have performed the standard aerosol testing used for face fit testing, and the PeRSo passed even when the spray was fired recurrently into the HEPA filter. Similarly, we have performed a smoke test, with smoke blown at the head, and no penetration occurred.  The manufacturing partners will undertake their own product validation and testing before making products available.
> 
> The prototype has NOT been fully tested to BS EN 12941:1998+A2:2008.  UK manufacturers are working to ensure their product conforms with the relevant standards (for the UK market this is BS EN 12941:1998+A2:2008).



The filter used suggests this will be at least as good as FFP3 masks..



> The PeRSo is a reusable battery-powered system that HEPA filters the air, removing 99.95% of particulate matter.


----------



## iona (May 1, 2020)

treelover said:


> Contrary to media reports, am hearing DWP is still making decisions on benefits, so disabled people going through DLA to PIP process are being failed and losing money at this time
> 
> As an aside, I have waited three months now for my ATOS decision.


Aiui they're continuing to (re)assess anyone who'd already started that process, but people who were due a review but hadn't yet started the reassessment process get an automatic extension to their claim (initially for three months iirc)
E2a Coronavirus update - benefit reviews and reassessments suspended


----------



## Marty1 (May 1, 2020)

Amazon handing out 4 day supply PPE packages to drivers this morning.



Wipes for cleaning down frequently touched surfaces on van, hand sanitiser and face masks.



Pretty good - maybe the strike action happening in America has prompted them to up their game?


----------



## phillm (May 1, 2020)

Don't know if this has been posted elsewhere but looks like some interesting results on prophylactic treatments.

_URGENT! Please circulate as widely as possible. It is crucial that every pulmonologist, every critical care doctor
and nurse, every hospital administrator, every public health official receive this information immediately.
This is our recommended approach to COVID-19 based on the best (and most recent) literature. We
should not re-invent the wheel but learn from the experience of others. This is a very dynamic situation;
therefore, we will be updating the guideline as new information emerges. Please check on the EVMS
website for updated versions of this protocol. _



			https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf


----------



## phillm (May 1, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Huge rise in deaths announced yesterday, and I thought things couldn't get much worse. Then I saw this. The end of days are truly here.


That has got to be parody has it not or else isolation has got to these guys in a bad way...(calling Charlie Brooker...)


----------



## gentlegreen (May 2, 2020)

Well I just risked it all for a computer chair my neighbour just chucked out - though I will quarantine it and wipe it down before using it...
I's rough and ready, but better than my small deck chair that's held together with wood and wire ... and it means I may be motivated to sit somewhere else occasionally ...


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 2, 2020)

Fucking state of this lot!


----------



## gentlegreen (May 2, 2020)

Jesus wept....


----------



## platinumsage (May 2, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fucking state of this lot!




They needed this cop to show up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GGc7KcvqtE


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fucking state of this lot!



Look like Freeman on the land/anti vax/conspiraloon types


----------



## two sheds (May 2, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> They needed this cop to show up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GGc7KcvqtE



"I liked the part when he told him to get in the back of van"


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 2, 2020)

What a bunch of fucking idiots.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

I was working in the wholefood shop yesterday and for the first time since the lockdown started people were saying that the government has lied about how many people have died. One woman told me I needed to fix up my attitude and that she wasn’t going to respect my desire for distancing and if I had a problem with it I should just go home. It pissed me off so much, I’m there working alongside my colleagues (I’m actually covering for people who are home sick or isolating) so that she can come and buy food and she has absolutely zero respect or gratitude for that. And then I felt really upset and had to take a few minutes and burst into tears in the loo.

On the other hand there were several people who expressed sincere gratitude and said thank you to us for for keeping the shop open and coming into work.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

It’s  almost as if the (relative) success of the lockdown means that there are plenty of people even here in Lambeth who haven’t lost anyone who haven’t got any firsthand experience of it, and this makes them believe that a pandemic isn’t happening at all.

Or is it because the reality is so shocking and appalling that they just can’t wrap their heads around it, some kind of denial?


----------



## nogojones (May 2, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fucking state of this lot!



It's not often I feel sorry for the police


----------



## nogojones (May 2, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I was working in the wholefood shop yesterday and for the first time since the lockdown started people were saying that the government has lied about how many people have died. One woman told me I needed to fix up my attitude and that she wasn’t going to respect my desire for distancing and if I had a problem with it I should just go home. It pissed me off so much, I’m there working alongside my colleagues (I’m actually covering for people who are home sick or isolating) so that she can come and buy food and she has absolutely zero respect or gratitude for that. And then I felt really upset and had to take a few minutes and burst into tears in the loo.
> 
> On the other hand there were several people who expressed sincere gratitude and said thank you to us for for keeping the shop open and coming into work.


I'd refuse to serve her. Fuck off and get yer tofu somewhere else


----------



## two sheds (May 2, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> I was working in the wholefood shop yesterday and for the first time since the lockdown started people were saying that the government has lied about how many people have died. One woman told me I needed to fix up my attitude and that she wasn’t going to respect my desire for distancing and if I had a problem with it I should just go home. It pissed me off so much, I’m there working alongside my colleagues (I’m actually covering for people who are home sick or isolating) so that she can come and buy food and she has absolutely zero respect or gratitude for that. And then I felt really upset and had to take a few minutes and burst into tears in the loo.
> 
> On the other hand there were several people who expressed sincere gratitude and said thank you to us for for keeping the shop open and coming into work.



That actually deserves a  and  Where are the multiple-value likes when you need them?


----------



## LDC (May 2, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> It’s  almost as if the (relative) success of the lockdown means that there are plenty of people even here in Lambeth who haven’t lost anyone who haven’t got any firsthand experience of it, and this makes them believe that a pandemic isn’t happening at all.
> 
> Or is it because the reality is so shocking and appalling that they just can’t wrap their heads around it, some kind of denial?



Yeah, I think bit of both, but definitely the first. I likened the early days of the lockdown to the Phoney War for most people, and  think the relative 'success' of it has meant exactly what you say, most people haven't known someone die, so it's all been a bit unreal and distant for them. Last few days I've seen even more of my friends slacken off on the lockdown by meeting up with a few people outside, and justify it with saying they're staying 2m apart and it's not increasing any risk anyway.


----------



## gentlegreen (May 2, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Look like Freeman on the land/anti vax/conspiraloon types


looking at the hashtag on twitter also produced lots of brexiters - and Nick Griffin ...


----------



## FabricLiveBaby! (May 2, 2020)

FabricLiveBaby! said:


> My dad's results have just come back positive.
> 
> He's in a nursing home.
> 
> ...



Dad's doing OK. He's bored. No symptoms apart from, a runny bum before the test. They are still isolating him. 

This virus is bizarre


----------



## LDC (May 2, 2020)

nogojones said:


> It's not often I feel sorry for the police



Is it that _really _that wrong to wish they'd just taser the lot of them?


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

nogojones said:


> I'd refuse to serve her. Fuck off and get yer tofu somewhere else




THe interaction happened while she was paying. The guv’nor - who is a miserable old arsehole truth be told - came right up into my personal space and I took a huge step back and he said “oh for fuck’s sake” under his breath and I said to him “it’s not for fuck’s sake it’s a legitimate concern, you came right into my personal space” and he said “it’s not your space it’s the shops space” and I didn’t know what to say and then this woman used the opportunity to lay into me. Her young daughter was with her and I didn’t want to speak my mind with the young girl present so I just stood there and listened. She seemed to need some kind of response from me I said “thank you for the feedback” and she looked at me and said “you’re welcome” and swanned off. Even just talking about it now makes me feel a degree of anger that makes me feel uncomfortable.

As for the guv’nor, everyone who works there knows he’s a miserable old scrote and we’ve all got each other’s back and we pretty much ignore him. The other manager is the one who handles most of the admin stuff, so I don’t really interact with him at all. Apparently when he gets home in the evening, he is barred from interacting with anyone else, because he simply won’t respect the need to make sure he is clean after a day outside the house.  He’s just a miserable git and I mostly dismiss what he says anyway, but this woman really upset me.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, I think bit of both, but definitely the first. I likened the early days of the lockdown to the Phoney War for most people, and  think the relative 'success' of it has meant exactly what you say, most people haven't known someone die, so it's all been a bit unreal and distant for them. Last few days I've seen even more of my friends slacken off on the lockdown by meeting up with a few people outside, and justify it with saying they're staying 2m apart and it's not increasing any risk anyway.



I admit that I have found myself thinking “well if the lockdown has worked, maybe I don’t have to be quite so careful myself, maybe the risk is diminished to some degree”. I quickly correct my attitude, but I’ve certainly noticed myself thinking that.  But I can’t be the only one thinking that way.


----------



## nogojones (May 2, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> THe interaction happened while she was paying. The guv’nor - who is a miserable old arsehole truth be told - came right up into my personal space and I took a huge step back and he said “oh for fuck’s sake” under his breath and I said to him “it’s not for fuck’s sake it’s a legitimate concern, you came right into my personal space” and he said “it’s not your space it’s the shops space” and I didn’t know what to say and then this woman used the opportunity to lay into me. Her young daughter was with her and I didn’t want to speak my mind with the young girl present so I just stood there and listened. She seemed to need some kind of response from me I said “thank you for the feedback” and she looked at me and said “you’re welcome” and swanned off. Even just talking about it now makes me feel a degree of anger that makes me feel uncomfortable.
> 
> As for the guv’nor, everyone who works there knows he’s a miserable old scrote and we’ve all got each other’s back and we pretty much ignore him. The other manager is the one who handles most of the admin stuff, so I don’t really interact with him at all. Apparently when he gets home in the evening, he is barred from interacting with anyone else, because he simply won’t respect the need to make sure he is clean after a day outside the house.  He’s just a miserable git and I mostly dismiss what he says anyway, but this woman really upset me.


Do you need the money? I'd look for something else. Even Asda have better regard for their staff.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2020)

Shit, just looked out the window and saw an ambulance in the road. Hopefully everything is ok


----------



## Orang Utan (May 2, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Shit, just looked out the window and saw an ambulance in the road. Hopefully everything is ok


pretty common sight pre-corona though


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 2, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Shit, just looked out the window and saw an ambulance in the road. Hopefully everything is ok



Sat out in our garden, Brighton is a noise of emergency service sirens. It’s non stop. Mrs B had to pop out early doors this morning for supplies, & wondered if the lockdown had been lifted. Really busy with people, & no social distancing whatsoever.


----------



## weepiper (May 2, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> THe interaction happened while she was paying. The guv’nor - who is a miserable old arsehole truth be told - came right up into my personal space and I took a huge step back and he said “oh for fuck’s sake” under his breath and I said to him “it’s not for fuck’s sake it’s a legitimate concern, you came right into my personal space” and he said “it’s not your space it’s the shops space” and I didn’t know what to say and then this woman used the opportunity to lay into me. Her young daughter was with her and I didn’t want to speak my mind with the young girl present so I just stood there and listened. She seemed to need some kind of response from me I said “thank you for the feedback” and she looked at me and said “you’re welcome” and swanned off. Even just talking about it now makes me feel a degree of anger that makes me feel uncomfortable.
> 
> As for the guv’nor, everyone who works there knows he’s a miserable old scrote and we’ve all got each other’s back and we pretty much ignore him. The other manager is the one who handles most of the admin stuff, so I don’t really interact with him at all. Apparently when he gets home in the evening, he is barred from interacting with anyone else, because he simply won’t respect the need to make sure he is clean after a day outside the house.  He’s just a miserable git and I mostly dismiss what he says anyway, but this woman really upset me.


Fuck that for a game of sodjers Sheila. I would tell him to stick his job up his arse - plenty other places willing to employ you atm that won't insist on risking your health.


----------



## Badgers (May 2, 2020)




----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

nogojones said:


> Do you need the money? I'd look for something else. Even Asda have better regard for their staff.




Yes, I need the money. But I can’t get a proper job because I’m unreliable  (ongoing health issues following cancer treatment, and PTSD following long term DV). And the DWP won’t give me any money. And I’m trying to build back my own business after the cancer and DV.  But I’m not eligible for any of the current money schemes. I’m working on my PIP application 

In most ways this job suits me perfectly, it’s ticks a lot of boxes for me, including but not limited to: I don’t have to go in if I’m not feeling up to it, I’m only there part time. I get a really good discount on buying from there, which makes a significant difference to my grocery bill.

The boss man is an arse, but everyone knows it and anyway he’s pretty much a busted flush these days. I have very little interaction with him. The other boss is considerate, constantly trying to find ways to make things easier for us in the shop, although she can’t come in herself cos she’s shielding at home. And everyone else who works there is kind.

But yeah, he was a shit on Friday. And so was that customer.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 2, 2020)

weepiper said:


> Fuck that for a game of sodjers Sheila. I would tell him to stick his job up his arse - plenty other places willing to employ you atm that won't insist on risking your health.




I have worked there on and off for a long time, and I’ve told him to stick his job on several occasions. I’m helping out now, covering the odd shift when others are off, because the other boss asks me. He mostly stays off the shop floor, and I just get out of his way when I see him coming. On Friday I was halfway through the cash bit of the transaction so couldn’t just walk away with the woman’s money in my hand.

But yeah, he’s out of order. At least everyone else knows it too!


----------



## Orang Utan (May 2, 2020)

I think I can guess where you work - i've never liked going in there because of that person and one other.


----------



## Marty1 (May 2, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fucking state of this lot!




What on Earth is going on in London?  Scenes resembling the anti-lockdown protests in America and one lady seemed to be holding a placard with something about 5G on it.  Is Trump to blame for this too?  If not then who can we apportion blame on?


----------



## Orang Utan (May 2, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> What on Earth is going on in London?  Scenes resembling the anti-lockdown protests in America and one lady seemed to be holding a placard with something about 5G on it.  Is Trump to blame for this too?  If not then who can we apportion blame on?


You, and your unicorn assaulting ways


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 3, 2020)

Some twats had a party last night round here.  And when I went to Coop yesterday afternoon there seemed to be quite a few people about - although to be fair they might just have been going on a daily walk.  But at least there was no queue at the shop which is unusual.


----------



## Mogden (May 3, 2020)

There seems to be a lot of people not understanding that if it all goes quiet during a tornado you don't step outside to see if it has passed. It's usually the eye of the storm and there's more yet to come 

If all these conspiracy theorists are so adamant it's all a hoax of some kind why aren't they in hospitals offering volunteer services? Rather than being arrested or fined I'd be more inclined to make them do that and see how quickly they change their mind about having premature freedom or "not believing" in Covid.


----------



## ice-is-forming (May 3, 2020)

In Aus we've had less than 100 deaths. We're still on restrictions, although they changed on May 1st and we can now drive 50k from home and shop for non-essentials, and have picnics with our household. 

And no ones really complaining about this at all. I think it's because we can see what's happening elsewhere in the world, and are so bloody grateful to have been impacted so lightly.

People don't seem to be in a hurry to change back to new normal, and there's a lot of talk about being cautious because of a second wave etc..


----------



## Petcha (May 3, 2020)




----------



## existentialist (May 3, 2020)

nogojones said:


> I'd refuse to serve her. Fuck off and get yer tofu somewhere else


And don't come back.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 3, 2020)

Introverts of the world unite.  A nice article about people like me.









						For introverts, lockdown is a chance to play to our strengths
					

Time to think and be creative, and without too much socialising, is an introvert’s ideal environment. We talk to some of the people thriving under lockdown




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Supine (May 3, 2020)

Here is a very well written and balanced article on Covid for your perusal









						Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
					

A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend




					www.theatlantic.com


----------



## Numbers (May 3, 2020)

We’ve, well... I’ve reached peak WTFisgoingon  with Lock-down/up/in.

A short while ago I was clearing up cat shit from the garden after a bifta, after a cpl of hours of gardening, I then had a shower and when I came out Mrs Numbers was sitting on the loo (not dropping the kids off, just chillin) scrolling through her phone, I jokingly suggested let’s see if I could scroll through her contacts using little numbers, so I did, I actually scrolled through her contact list on her iPhone using my knob, sadly couldn’t actually make a call (maybe thankfully). Now I’m making a Shepherds Pie listening to the Cocteau Twins.

Help!


----------



## Numbers (May 3, 2020)

Sorry Urbs.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 3, 2020)

Dick dialing by Numbers


----------



## gentlegreen (May 3, 2020)

French woman falls ill in Mulhouse near the German border, wakes up in Brittany after being flown with others 1,000km to Brest in a military aircraft because the local hospitals couldn't cope.









						TÉMOIGNAGE. Coronavirus : « Sans mon transfert à Brest, j’y serais passée »
					

Transférée de Mulhouse, dans un coma artificiel, Malika Fisli s’est réveillée à 1 000 km de chez elle. Désormais guérie, cette aide-soignante de 58 ans « rescapée » du Covid-19 goûte le plaisir de sa « seconde vie ». Son témoignage à la première personne.




					www.ouest-france.fr


----------



## treelover (May 4, 2020)

ME Awareness Press Release: Brits with devastating illness speak out about years lost in lockdown | 01 May 2020 | ME Association
					

For ME Awareness, the ME Association will be featuring stories from people with M.E. every day throughout May.




					www.meassociation.org.uk
				




may be some insights, for many PWME 'lockdown' is the norm.


----------



## Yossarian (May 4, 2020)

I was a little surprised to see a 'Sports' section in the weekend paper - turned out to be two pages mostly about COVID-19's effects on sports, and seven or eight pages of general obituaries. But I can understand why they didn't want to call it the 'Death' section.


----------



## Aladdin (May 5, 2020)

Numbers said:


> We’ve, well... I’ve reached peak WTFisgoingon  with Lock-down/up/in.
> 
> A short while ago I was clearing up cat shit from the garden after a bifta, after a cpl of hours of gardening, I then had a shower and when I came out Mrs Numbers was sitting on the loo (not dropping the kids off, just chillin) scrolling through her phone, I jokingly suggested let’s see if I could scroll through her contacts using little numbers, so I did, I actually scrolled through her contact list on her iPhone using my knob, sadly couldn’t actually make a call (maybe thankfully). Now I’m making a Shepherds Pie listening to the Cocteau Twins.
> 
> Help!




🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣


----------



## Aladdin (May 5, 2020)

Coronavirus: 173 years on, Irish repay favour to Native American tribes hit by COVID-19









						Coronavirus: 173 years on, Irish repay favour to Native American tribes hit by COVID-19
					

In 1847, a Native American tribe provided relief aid to Irish people. Now, the favour is being returned.




					news.sky.com


----------



## iona (May 5, 2020)

Am I just being a grumpy, antisocial cunt or does this seem like a fucking stupid idea to other people too?


----------



## Marty1 (May 5, 2020)

I’m noticing a lot more cars on the roads on my travels.


----------



## Sunray (May 5, 2020)

Don't go to Lidl if you want to observe social distancing rules.
Just went to get cheaper food compared to Tesco and Sainsbury's locals. Its difficult to do in the shop as the isles are too narrow even with the best will in the world.

I also got the feeling people in there are giving less of a shit too, which doesn't help.


----------



## treelover (May 5, 2020)

Coronavirus: Hate crimes against Chinese people soar in UK during COVID-19 crisis
					

More than 260 offences against Chinese people are recorded in the first three months of 2020.




					news.sky.com
				




not good, on the package i caught a bit about two groups confronting each other, at Southhampton university, will watch next hour report.

people need to rally round, especially foer the students who arer lost and stranded, havent heard much from stand Up to Racism, etc.


----------



## LDC (May 5, 2020)

iona said:


> Am I just being a grumpy, antisocial cunt or does this seem like a fucking stupid idea to other people too?



What's the context though? Who have they sent it too, reads like people living in the same building or institution?


----------



## prunus (May 5, 2020)

iona said:


> Am I just being a grumpy, antisocial cunt or does this seem like a fucking stupid idea to other people too?



A vote for fucking stupid from me.

There seems to be a misunderstanding around the 2 meter rule, which I think (though I could be wrong) should be read as ‘stay as far away as possible from other people, and absolutely no nearer than 2 meters if you have to be in their proximity’ - it feels like people read it as ‘hang about with as many other people as you like as long as you’re 2 meters apart’.

Not to mention the fact that people seem very bad at estimating 2m - about 1.7m is what people seem to think it is. I speculate the thought process is 2m is about 6 foot, 6 foot is about one person height, so about one person height will be fine; unfortunately less than 10% of people are actually 2 meters (or more).

Not that I’ve spent much time seething about this and why the message is propagated so badly.


----------



## 8ball (May 5, 2020)

The 2 metres thing is a guess anyway.
People are social animals, though, and need each other.


----------



## 8ball (May 5, 2020)

Petcha said:


>




Most of us here will die of equally nasty things.


----------



## Sunray (May 5, 2020)

I am curious about that 2m rule.  I looked up how far a cough goes and its 6m and can leave moisture droplets for up to 10min. Didn't say but I assume in a still room, not outside on a windy day.  A sneeze is 8m.

I suppose as far away as possible but if you have to min 2m makes more sense.  I went shopping today and 2m in Lidl is impossible as the isles are barely 2m apart.  So its 2m or in reality pretend there is no pandemic.


----------



## Tankus (May 5, 2020)

Went a day or two back.to lidls... They need to reduce the isles by one , widen them out, and stops you going up, then down the booze and freezer isle because its a deliberate odd number, they could then set up a one way system.. Improving separation... Very few people with masks


----------



## iona (May 5, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> What's the context though? Who have they sent it too, reads like people living in the same building or institution?


Yeah sorry, it's where I live. Supported accommodation, ie one step on from a homeless hostel, but it's set up as individual flats. They've banned visitors, stopped groups and face-to-face keywork sessions and I had the impression they were getting us to keep our distance and not visit other flats too. Some people are already carrying on pretty much as usual and this just seem to be encouraging that...


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 6, 2020)

8ball said:


> People are social animals, though, and need each other.


I'm not, I'd be perfectly happy if it was 2 miles.


----------



## crossthebreeze (May 6, 2020)

iona said:


> Yeah sorry, it's where I live. Supported accommodation, ie one step on from a homeless hostel, but it's set up as individual flats. They've banned visitors, stopped groups and face-to-face keywork sessions and I had the impression they were getting us to keep our distance and not visit other flats too. Some people are already carrying on pretty much as usual and this just seem to be encouraging that...


Yeah if its self-contained flats then its definitely bad idea.  If it was a hostel where people were sharing kitchen/canteen or washing facilities anyway or lockdowned in a tiny single bedroom it would be different.  They'll be concerned about loneliness and depression but still...


----------



## LDC (May 6, 2020)

iona said:


> Yeah sorry, it's where I live. Supported accommodation, ie one step on from a homeless hostel, but it's set up as individual flats. They've banned visitors, stopped groups and face-to-face keywork sessions and I had the impression they were getting us to keep our distance and not visit other flats too. Some people are already carrying on pretty much as usual and this just seem to be encouraging that...



Yeah, you're not being grumpy, I think it's a stupid idea then!


----------



## LDC (May 6, 2020)

Sunray said:


> I am curious about that 2m rule.  I looked up how far a cough goes and its 6m and can leave moisture droplets for up to 10min. Didn't say but I assume in a still room, not outside on a windy day.  A sneeze is 8m.
> 
> I suppose as far away as possible but if you have to min 2m makes more sense.  I went shopping today and 2m in Lidl is impossible as the isles are barely 2m apart.  So its 2m or in reality pretend there is no pandemic.



Yeah the 2m away is a bit like the 5 fruit and veg a day. Not ideal, but balanced against what people will think is possible. And balanced against some functioning of society that say 5-10m wouldn't allow. I think it's based on the flu pandemic models and advice.


----------



## Supine (May 6, 2020)

I thought the 2m was originally max time you could spend with somebody for 15 minutes. Just passing somebody closer is very low risk as far as I know. 

A relaxation from 2m to 1m would certainly make shopping easier if the risk was acceptable.


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2020)

Further, to my post above, the Sky News package was repeated, it was indeed outside Southhampton Uni, there were some disturbances as a group of what looked liked mostly women protesters(not sure about what, lock down?)  started shouting abuse at a group of chinese students, blaming them for covis, etc, ridiculous really, but worrying and frightening for the youngsters, though they seem to have given as good as they were getting.


----------



## Badgers (May 6, 2020)

649 more 'reported/estimated' deaths in the UK (over 30k 'official' figure) for the last 24 hours then. 

Lower than last week but talk of lifting or easing lockdown as soon as Monday seems premature at best.


----------



## crossthebreeze (May 6, 2020)

I'm pretty terrified about any lifting of lockdown.  I can just see a second wave, but with much more concentrated effect on poorer communities and people in certain jobs, as office workers continue to work from home while other industries go back.  From a personal point of view I can imagine not being up to full working schedule for some time, but the self employed support ending before then.

Unions have seen some of the proposals and are not happy: Unions warn of mass walkouts over government return-to-work guidelines


----------



## Orang Utan (May 6, 2020)

If they ease lockdown, I wouldn't be able to work. I can only manage now cos the office is deserted


----------



## Mogden (May 6, 2020)

There's not enough physical space at work for me to go back and maintain social distancing. The only way it could be done would be shift swaps I saw mentioned in a news article earlier where I would work for 4 days then be off for 10 I think it is. That seems a bit obtuse so I'm hoping they just leave me on furlough.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 6, 2020)

Agreeing with peoples' opposition above to premature relaxations of lock-down 

But on a milder note, our (lovely) retired neighbours said something today (over the fence  ) that I'm very sceptical about. 
Like us, they have a campervan (it's much newer and twice as big as ours, and much more high-spec!). 
This vehicle is currently inaccessible in their local lock-up compound, a secure space which they pay for -- they're actually banned by the owners of the compound from going to the van. 
But the neighbours claim to have heard that as from the end of June, official campsites** will be reopened and staying in them will be OK again 

**for instance those run by the UK Camping and Caravanning Club (the more friendly/less snooty lot, btw) -- but there's nothing on that website .........


----------



## 2hats (May 6, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> But the neighbours claim to have heard that as from the end of June, official campsites** will be reopened and staying in them will be OK again


Probably tipped off by Tim Martin.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 6, 2020)

2hats said:


> Probably tipped off by Tim Martin.



That well-known campsite magnate?  

I'm going to ask our neighbours where they got the above 'information' from, when I get a chance ....


----------



## Badgers (May 6, 2020)

Dirty rag


Spoiler: Daily Wail


----------



## mx wcfc (May 6, 2020)

Mogden said:


> There's not enough physical space at work for me to go back and maintain social distancing. The only way it could be done would be shift swaps I saw mentioned in a news article earlier where I would work for 4 days then be off for 10 I think it is. That seems a bit obtuse so I'm hoping they just leave me on furlough.


We could do alternate days at my office, but it's a tall building with one or two companies per floor - the lifts are rammed at peak hours. Even 2 people per lift (in masks) would result in a mile long queue outside the building at 9am.  No way could we go back.

But then, we are managing to work from home perfectly well, so why bother?  It'll be factories, retail etc where people get forced back and exposed.


----------



## Mogden (May 7, 2020)

mx wcfc said:


> We could do alternate days at my office, but it's a tall building with one or two companies per floor - the lifts are rammed at peak hours. Even 2 people per lift (in masks) would result in a mile long queue outside the building at 9am.  No way could we go back.
> 
> But then, we are managing to work from home perfectly well, so why bother?  It'll be factories, retail etc where people get forced back and exposed.


I'm quality control so have to be physically present. I'm hoping this means it'll be a while yet as I'm almost at my year anniversary of having started there and other people in the same role have oodles more experience than me


----------



## Numbers (May 7, 2020)

With my role I’ll be one of the last back as I can do everything remotely.  I’m prob’ looking at 6 months or so.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 7, 2020)

mx wcfc said:


> Even 2 people per lift (in masks) would result in a mile long queue outside the building at 9am.


Don't all start at 9am then, duh.


----------



## treelover (May 7, 2020)

'I might have died if they hadn't rescued me': life inside the new hotels for the homeless
					

Coronavirus prompted an emergency operation to house rough sleepers in Travelodges and Holiday Inns. In many ways it has been a success – but what happens next?




					www.theguardian.com
				




The rough sleeper emergency moves seem to have some other positive effects.

to a degree though


----------



## Sprocket. (May 7, 2020)

I appreciate all the clapping, even though some not 100 yards away is being done by hypocritical Tory and UKIP voters. What I don’t get is the three minutes of fireworks.
Yes I’m miserable.


----------



## frogwoman (May 7, 2020)

Found the clapping from my neighbours a bit much this evening when I know for a fact most of them voted tory.


----------



## Orang Utan (May 7, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Found the clapping from my neighbours a bit much this evening when I know for a fact most of them voted tory.


i didn't clap, instead I shouted FUCK YOU BORIS FUCK YOU HANCOCK PAY US MORE INSTEAD


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 8, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> i didn't clap, instead I shouted FUCK YOU BORIS FUCK YOU HANCOCK PAY US MORE INSTEAD


Better would be 'anyone who votes tory is a selfish fucking cunt'


----------



## Raheem (May 9, 2020)

Random thing: I have athlete's foot.

Not normally something I would post about, but it shouldn't be possible, I would have thought, given that my socks have not been off outside the house for seven weeks and I've had no visitors.

Makes me wonder how effective locking yourself away actually is.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 9, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Random thing: I have athlete's foot.


You can get that wherever, regardless of setting foot outside.  At least it's easy to sort out with over the counter creams -  hope your manky toes are fixed soon.  Weirdly I've not had it for many years - went through a period of getting it fairly regularly - might have been the type of shoes I was wearing at the time.


----------



## Raheem (May 9, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> You can get that wherever, regardless of setting foot outside.  At least it's easy to sort out with over the counter creams -  hope your manky toes are fixed soon.  Weirdly I've not had it for many years - went through a period of getting it fairly regularly - might have been the type of shoes I was wearing at the time.


Do you not need to get it from someone?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 9, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Do you not need to get it from someone?


Not sure, but Wikipedia suggests you can get it in a number of ways.









						Athlete's foot - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				












						Athlete's foot
					

Read about athlete's foot, a common fungal infection of the foot. Find out about the symptoms, what causes it, and how it's treated.




					www.nhs.uk
				




I must have caught it from the environment, as I've not been in a swimming pool or gym for decades.


----------



## yield (May 9, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Better would be 'anyone who votes tory is a selfish fucking cunt'


From the meme thread


Buddy Bradley said:


>


----------



## HAL9000 (May 9, 2020)




----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 9, 2020)

Sounds like lots of people are outside this evening - I can see groups of young people wandering about.  Noticeably more traffic noise too.


----------



## treelover (May 10, 2020)

Wonder what he is saying to Johnson? body language indicates something, Guardian says member of the public 'talking' to him, oh yeah?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 10, 2020)

treelover said:


> View attachment 211847
> 
> Wonder what he is saying to Johnson, body language indicates something, , Guardian says member of the public 'talking' to him, oh yeah?


Probably 'you are a useless fucking cunt who is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people' - if not it should be that.


----------



## Badgers (May 10, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Probably 'you are a useless fucking cunt who is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people' - if not it should be that.


You will burn in the fire's of hell


----------



## Mogden (May 10, 2020)

Well that's me fucked then.


----------



## Mogden (May 10, 2020)

Assuming work confirm they want me back tomorrow, I've got to get there and back on foot or by bike while avoiding all the covidiots. But my sympathies rest with parents, single and partnered, who suddenly have to find childcare for first thing tomorrow morning, but maintain social distancing and getting them to that place without using public transport. Completely and utterly ridiculous way of going about things.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 10, 2020)

treelover said:


> View attachment 211847
> 
> Wonder what he is saying to Johnson? body language indicates something, Guardian says member of the public 'talking' to him, oh yeah?


"Fuck off, and keep fucking off until you've fucked off so far you meet yourself fucking off in the other direction. And then fuck off some more."


----------



## LDC (May 10, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Assuming work confirm they want me back tomorrow, I've got to get there and back on foot or by bike while avoiding all the covidiots. But my sympathies rest with parents, single and partnered, who suddenly have to find childcare for first thing tomorrow morning, but maintain social distancing and getting them to that place without using public transport. Completely and utterly ridiculous way of going about things.



It's not going to happen that suddenly. Work need to risk assess places and put measures in place. There won't be expectations that suddenly people are going to be back tomorrow morning.


----------



## Mogden (May 10, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> It's not going to happen that suddenly. Work need to risk assess places and put measures in place. There won't be expectations that suddenly people are going to be back tomorrow morning.


But none of that was conveyed. I imagine there are companies who just expect people to turn up and will penalize you if you don't by either sacking you or docking your wages. Sunday night is no time to be trying to work out if you've got to go back, even a Friday afternoon would be ill advised for that sort of speech. I believe he said there would be clarification tomorrow but if he knows that, why not clarify it tonight.

People will hear what they want to hear and a good amount will hear go straight back to work and the rest of you go and play in the parks and have a few drinks and a chat and ignore that that doesn't come into being until Wednesday.


----------



## Raheem (May 11, 2020)

treelover said:


> View attachment 211847
> 
> Wonder what he is saying to Johnson? body language indicates something, Guardian says member of the public 'talking' to him, oh yeah?


He's applying pressure to Johnson's Adam's apple, but while maintaining social distancing.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 11, 2020)

Just looked at the traffic cams round here - inner ring road and other main roads seem pretty quiet - mainly commercial vehicles/buses rather than private cars.  Be interesting to see how many people actually go to work today.


----------



## Badgers (May 11, 2020)

If your workplace isn’t safe, you don’t have to work there. Section 44 of the 1996 Employment Rights Act is clear on this.


----------



## Badgers (May 11, 2020)

We are on our own


----------



## bimble (May 11, 2020)

Dropped my phone and screen is totally smashed, sharp edges & everything is stripy and orangeAnyone know if this can be repaired somehow during lockdown? All the shops i Can think of will be shut because not essential.


----------



## Badgers (May 11, 2020)

Seems sensible 









						French passengers to be exempt from UK quarantine rules
					

Britain and France say there will be reciprocal arrangement




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 11, 2020)

bimble said:


> Dropped my phone and screen is totally smashed, sharp edges & everything is stripy and orangeAnyone know if this can be repaired somehow during lockdown? All the shops i Can think of will be shut because not essential.


You can do it yourself pretty cheaply, but it obviously does void your warranty and risk fucking it up completely if you make a mistake.


----------



## 2hats (May 11, 2020)

bimble said:


> Dropped my phone and screen is totally smashed, sharp edges & everything is stripy and orangeAnyone know if this can be repaired somehow during lockdown? All the shops i Can think of will be shut because not essential.


Any phone repair shop will do it for you. You'll just have to prove your COVID status via the NHSX app first.


----------



## bimble (May 11, 2020)

Found someone and they fixed it, handed it back at the door , happy customer .


----------



## Marty1 (May 11, 2020)

Looking forward to work tomorrow with no doubt a load of people not at home (now you can go out and travel for exercise) - especially as we can’t leave parcels with neighbours and a lot of people don’t choose a safe space option to leave parcels 😒


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (May 11, 2020)

They're opening everything up today.  You can get your hair cut or eat out with some minor restrictions (limited numbers entering a business and 50% capacity in the seating area).  I think its a bad idea, especially considering that we still haven't seen the peak here.  The Ricketts family needs those billions of dollars coming in, so get out there and shop til you drop!


----------



## Marty1 (May 11, 2020)

Yuwipi Woman said:


> They're opening everything up today.  You can get your hair cut or eat out with some minor restrictions (limited numbers entering a business and 50% capacity in the seating area).  I think its a bad idea, especially considering that we still haven't seen the peak here.  The Ricketts family needs those billions of dollars coming in, so get out there and shop til you drop!


 
Where are you based?


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (May 11, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Where are you based?



Nebraska, USA

Our governor is Pete Ricketts of the Ameritrade family fortune.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 11, 2020)

I haven't heard anything about this anywhere else, apologies if pearoast - projecting movies on building walls for Berlin apartment dwellers under lockdown:











						Berlin's Windowflicks film projections – in pictures
					

The Windowflicks project is hosting film screenings in Berlin’s courtyards, as cinemas are closed




					www.theguardian.com
				




Reno?


----------



## Aladdin (May 11, 2020)

My aunt went into hospital last Thursday and she was disgnosed today with Covid 19. She is 85 with heart problems.
She lived alone. Her husband died 5 years ago. She had a carer coming in every day for an hour. Which may well be how she got it.😟


----------



## clicker (May 11, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> My aunt went into hospital last Thursday and she was disgnosed today with Covid 19. She is 85 with heart problems.
> She lived alone. Her husband died 5 years ago. She had a carer coming in every day for an hour. Which may well be how she got it.😟


So sorry Sugar Kane are visitors allowed into hospitals over there?


----------



## Reno (May 11, 2020)

DaveCinzano said:


> I haven't heard anything about this anywhere else, apologies if pearoast - projecting movies on building walls for Berlin apartment dwellers under lockdown:
> 
> View attachment 212022
> 
> ...


I've read about it but it's not happening in my part of Berlin. Makes it sound like Berlin is this hive of cultural activity despite the lockdown, but 99 % is dead like everywhere else.


----------



## Aladdin (May 11, 2020)

clicker said:


> So sorry Sugar Kane are visitors allowed into hospitals over there?



No. Nobody is going near hospitals.
My brother works in the same hospital. He heard from a colleague and phoned my dad.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 11, 2020)

Reno said:


> I've read about it but it's not happening in my part of Berlin. Makes it sound like Berlin is this hive of cultural activity despite the lockdown, but 99 % is dead like everywhere else.


TBF your projector's probably not much smaller anyway


----------



## Badgers (May 12, 2020)

Thread by @globalhlthtwit: Tomorrow we launch our Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies Report. We make 18 recommendations to the government to help th…
					

Thread by @globalhlthtwit: Tomorrow we launch our Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies Report. We make 18 recommendations tont to help the UK suppress the virus, save lives and get the economy moving again. (1) The UK Government's COVID-…




					threadreaderapp.com


----------



## SpookyFrank (May 12, 2020)

Badgers said:


> We are on our own




Presumably they'll not be claiming any wages from now on then.


----------



## Mogden (May 12, 2020)

Workplace have confirmed furlough is continuing, and they may need to furlough more people, as the need for what we supply is taking a downturn. There are also quite heavy suggestions this might be the end of the business. This does not surprise me in the least, my clearing out of my locker before I left for furlough suggested that.

Last place I worked at have just announced they've called in the administrators. At this time I'm still very grateful I am a frugal person. Don't drive, don't need life insurance to cover dependents, have very little in the way of outgoings. Some people living monthly pay check to pay check and being coerced into the champagne lifestyle must be shitting bricks right about now and realising having a flash car, a second home and luxury holidays isn't all that in the grand scheme of things.


----------



## Mation (May 12, 2020)

I've got used to seeing a few people (~teenagers) every day climb up and over a ~10 foot fence, to get into a locked sports ground in the park. Had my heart in my mouth with the last two  

The first one got close to the top, then clearly had second thoughts but wouldn't go back down. Took a loooong time to gather himself (just having a nice sit down, straddled over this thin wire fence ) and then, oh so cautiously (good!) came down the other side. 

His mate followed. Decided at the top that he definitely wasn't afeared, oh no, and stood up, hands-free, with just his (shod) tootsies hooked into the mesh, keeping him in place. Nonchalantly adjusted his hoodie, wobbled  then (very, very carefully) climbed down.

They're going to have to do it all again, soon.


----------



## Sunray (May 12, 2020)

Its 7 weeks and numbers aren't going down in the UK like I was expecting.   I'm puzzled,  where are all these people getting infected? Is it because we are pretty high density to other countries?

Is there any reason not to start tracking and tracing now?  Clearly, there are too many cases for that to be effective in reducing numbers, but it might get a handle on where people are catching the virus.  Knowing this may give us something that would be effective in lowering the numbers catching c-19, getting us to a point where decent track and trace would become effective.


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

Tories announce public sector pay freeze for two years, freezing the pay of nurses for two years and announce it on international nurses day.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 13, 2020)

Wasn't sure where to ask this... we've been contacted to say an electrical safety check needs to be carried out on our home (private rented), and are implying it's to comply with mandatory legislation. They said they'll have to go into every room, presumably to PAT test electrical sockets? And will be wearing PPE.

I can't find anything that says this check is mandatory. It is for gas checks, but not electrical. Legislation is being brought in in July to make them the same I think.

Should I refuse? What would anyone else do? I'm not keen on this, we can keep out of the way, but they'll be touching things in every room in the house, including kids' bedrooms. And presumably any furniture they have to move out the way. 2 people are coming. I feel almost sure this is something they're doing that benefits them (estate agent can charge the L/L?) and me not so much rn (well, except safety checks are obv important, but right now I'm more concerned about virus transmission).

Edit: is there anywhere better I could ask this on here? Could check with Shelter I guess.


----------



## LDC (May 13, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> Wasn't sure where to ask this... we've been contacted to say an electrical safety check needs to be carried out on our home (private rented), and are implying it's to comply with mandatory legislation. They said they'll have to go into every room, presumably to PAT test electrical sockets? And will be wearing PPE.
> 
> I can't find anything that says this check is mandatory. It is for gas checks, but not electrical. Legislation is being brought in in July to make them the same I think.
> 
> ...



Something similar came up already with the council doing a gas check iirc. I think it is mandatory (at least it is for gas as you say) but if you really don't feel comfortable just tell them to postpone it, or say you're self isolating? I'm very careful generally but if you stay 2m away and give things a wipe down afterwards this would come under an acceptable level of risk for me.


----------



## Teaboy (May 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Something similar came up already with the council doing a gas check iirc. I think it is mandatory (at least it is for gas as you say) but if you really don't feel comfortable just tell them to postpone it, or say you're self isolating? I'm very careful generally but if you stay 2m away and give things a wipe down afterwards this would come under an acceptable level of risk for me.



Yes, I think it was campanula


----------



## Supine (May 13, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> Wasn't sure where to ask this... we've been contacted to say an electrical safety check needs to be carried out on our home (private rented), and are implying it's to comply with mandatory legislation. They said they'll have to go into every room, presumably to PAT test electrical sockets? And will be wearing PPE.
> 
> I can't find anything that says this check is mandatory. It is for gas checks, but not electrical. Legislation is being brought in in July to make them the same I think.
> 
> ...



Contacted by who? PAT is required in a work place but not a home. My scam radar has been activated.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Tories announce public sector pay freeze for two years, freezing the pay of nurses for two years and announce it on international nurses day.



I'd be highly unsurprised if this happens , but it's not actually confirmed so far, no??
Independent is citing it as one of the possibilities (we were briefly discussing these on the UK thread last night)




			
				Independent said:
			
		

> A raft of tax hikes, public sector pay freezes and an end to the triple lock on pensions could be deployed to mitigate the damages to the nation’s economy caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus, it has been reported.
> 
> Now a confidential treasury assessment cited by _The Daily Telegraph_ is reported to say the UK’s deficit could reach heights of £337bn this year due to the government’s attempts to keep the economy afloat during the crisis.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 13, 2020)

Supine said:


> Contacted by who? PAT is required in a work place but not a home. My scam radar has been activated.


I didn't mean actual PAT, just whatever domestic tests they do. But yes, good point, I was contacted by the electrician, not the agent, can't remember if they've mentioned this, perhaps a while back. I'll check they're legit, I don't think it's one that's been here before.


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

Not someone i would normally post data/estimates from


----------



## LDC (May 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Not someone i would normally post data/estimates from




Fucking hell. Not a total shock. But fucking hell. Could hit 100,000 in the next couple of months as well.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 13, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> I didn't mean actual PAT, just whatever domestic tests they do. But yes, good point, I was contacted by the electrician, not the agent, can't remember if they've mentioned this, perhaps a while back. I'll check they're legit, I don't think it's one that's been here before.


Yeah, I've had this too - but they only test certain things and not every socket.  If I remember rightly, they tested the fusebox and the main hard-wired switches for the oven, etc.


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

School's in France open which is great for the children's mental health.


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

Good to see the BIG society pulling together...


----------



## zora (May 13, 2020)

Sounds legit...fully in line with the big three government guidelines. Untrained, unpaid, unprotected.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Good to see the BIG society pulling together...



I definitely wouldn't want a volunteer shoving things up my nose.


----------



## 20Bees (May 13, 2020)

The earlier volunteer army had very little to do, maybe they could be swab operatives...?


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

I for one have had enough of experts


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Fucking hell. Not a total shock. But fucking hell. Could hit 100,000 in the next couple of months as well.



Heading that way


----------



## Orang Utan (May 13, 2020)

This is heartbreaking 








						My sister died of coronavirus. She needed care, but her life was not disposable | Rory Kinnear
					

I hope our focus in future is the easing of lives such as Karina’s, says actor Rory Kinnear




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 212307


That made me laugh when I watched it - he walked straight into that obvious trap.  

I expert Starmer had the letter prepared, knowing scruffy sack of spuds PM would lie.

This put it well:


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2020)

What about these antibodies tests then? My parents have both ordered them and I'm a bit dubious myself. My impression is that they are likely to be unreliable 🤔


----------



## 2hats (May 13, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> What about these antibodies tests then? My parents have both ordered them and I'm a bit dubious myself. My impression is that they are likely to be unreliable 🤔


Of dubious value right now. There are a lot floating around which simply aren't accurate enough (little better than a coin toss) or simply don't work at all. Additionally, unless you know what you are doing, when to use one and how to interpret the results (know exactly what it is testing for), even one that has good accuracy (sensitivity, specificity) may produce invalid results (ie misinform).

Work is underway to try to identify which manufacturers' lines of cassettes might be trustworthy and even whether the less reliable ones can be used in a programme of wider testing to produce statistically useful data for the population as a whole - to inform planning (note: does not necessarily equate to meaningful results for the individuals taking those tests).

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of mass produced ones that failed QA have been dumped and are in the hands of the less than scrupulous who are selling them online.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2020)

2hats said:


> Of dubious value right now. There are a lot floating around which simply aren't accurate enough (little better than a coin toss) or simply don't work at all. Additionally, unless you know what you are doing, when to use one and how to interpret the results (know exactly what it is testing for), even one that has good accuracy (sensitivity, specificity) may produce invalid results (ie misinform).
> 
> Work is underway to try to identify which manufacturers' lines of cassettes might be trustworthy and even whether the less reliable ones can be used in a programme of wider testing to produce statistically useful data for the population as a whole - to inform planning (note: does not necessarily equate to meaningful results for the individuals taking those tests).
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of mass produced ones that failed QA have been dumped and are in the hands of the less than scrupulous who are selling them online.


 That's what I thought.


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

Selfish cunts following the example set by our royal family and politicians. 









						Police turn around people travelling from England to Scotland during lockdown
					

POLICE in Cumbria were incredibly busy over the bank holiday weekend as people from as far afield as London were caught trying to cross into…




					www.thenational.scot


----------



## Badgers (May 13, 2020)

Today's unhelpful update was sponsored by major Tory donor Taylor Wimpy. The greedy and unscrupulous property developer is offering NHS staff 5% off their poorly build shoebox properties apparently. Sadly the cunt government has frozen their wages for two years so they can't buy one


----------



## campanula (May 13, 2020)

Indeed, I had this letter chainsawjob. I had to get a tad irate as my partner has respiratory damage. I had no luck at all, speaking to the engineers and went round the houses a bit at the city council. Eventually, I spoke to someone at the council who agreed to put off the inspection until mid June. I think I may even have the option to extend this if the 'shielded group' are still being advised to stay isolated...even though I am not in that original 12 week cohort. Had to make a bit of a fuss though.


----------



## Marty1 (May 13, 2020)

Some new video called ‘Plandemic’ has gone viral on social media.









						Coronavirus: 'Plandemic' virus conspiracy video spreads across social media
					

A slickly-produced "documentary" has exploded across social media, peddling medical misinformation.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## editor (May 13, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Some new video called ‘Plandemic’ has gone viral on social media.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Why are you even mentioning this garbage that everyone already knows about?


----------



## Marty1 (May 13, 2020)

editor said:


> Why are you even mentioning this garbage that everyone already knows about?



Just read it on BBC, thought it of relevance to this thread.

Didn’t realise it had already been mentioned.

Edit: just searched ‘plandemic’ - seems to have been mentioned originally on the coronavirus conspiracy corner thread - I’ve got that thread on ignore so I’d have missed it anyway.


----------



## yield (May 13, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Just read it on BBC, thought it of relevance to this thread.
> 
> Didn’t realise it had already been mentioned.


Many times over different threads. She has a grudge. Waste of time. Only interesting in that it has gone viral.


----------



## Marty1 (May 13, 2020)

yield said:


> Many times over different threads. She has a grudge. Waste of time. Only interesting in that it has gone viral.



See my edit.


----------



## editor (May 13, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> Just read it on BBC, thought it of relevance to this thread.
> 
> Didn’t realise it had already been mentioned.
> 
> Edit: just searched ‘plandemic’ - seems to have been mentioned originally on the coronavirus conspiracy corner thread - I’ve got that thread on ignore so I’d have missed it anyway.


So with you putting the conspiracy thread on ignore, you thought you'd add a conspiracy post here anyway - and not even bother adding any kind of opinion about it?


----------



## krtek a houby (May 14, 2020)

editor said:


> Why are you even mentioning this garbage that everyone already knows about?



It's not like he's got form for this kind of thing


----------



## Marty1 (May 14, 2020)

editor said:


> So with you putting the conspiracy thread on ignore, you thought you'd add a conspiracy post here anyway - and not even bother adding any kind of opinion about it?



I haven’t watched the video in question but judging by the reporting - it looks like a pile of shit, though strange that it’s been professionally made, don’t you think?

Anyway - I can’t post on the conspiracy thread - you booted me off (can’t remember your reasoning).


----------



## editor (May 14, 2020)

Marty1 said:


> I haven’t watched the video in question but judging by the reporting - it looks like a pile of shit, though strange that it’s been professionally made, don’t you think?
> 
> Anyway - I can’t post on the conspiracy thread - you booted me off (can’t remember your reasoning).


I'm booting you off this one too.


----------



## Aladdin (May 14, 2020)

Have to have blood tests done today at my GP. 
Am geared up as this is my first trip out since early March.
Mask and glasses. 
I am terrified


----------



## krtek a houby (May 14, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> Have to have blood tests done today at my GP.
> Am geared up as this is my first trip out since early March.
> Mask and glasses.
> I am terrified



Most likely, it'll be fine. As you say, you've got your masks/visor etc. Can you walk to the GP or do you have to use public transport?


----------



## Supine (May 14, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> Have to have blood tests done today at my GP.
> Am geared up as this is my first trip out since early March.
> Mask and glasses.
> I am terrified



I did the same last week. It turned out to be easy. Try not to worry.


----------



## Mogden (May 14, 2020)

Next door were undergoing renovation work before lockdown. This would be the same house that had a party just before lockdown. Apparently this change means the street can now be flooded with workmen and deliveries. I look forward to constant banging and hammering with little escape


----------



## Aladdin (May 14, 2020)

krtek a houby said:


> Most likely, it'll be fine. As you say, you've got your masks/visor etc. Can you walk to the GP or do you have to use public transport?



I drove. 
It was ok. Patients stayed outside at social distance and nobody was allowed in unless they had a mask. Dr and receptionist had visors and aprons and gloves. 
I was in and out in 6 mins. 
Came home and straight into the shower. Put all my clothes in the wash. 
😯


----------



## krtek a houby (May 14, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> I drove.
> It was ok. Patients stayed outside at social distance and nobody was allowed in unless they had a mask. Dr and receptionist had visors and aprons and gloves.
> I was in and out in 6 mins.
> Came home and straight into the shower. Put all my clothes in the wash.
> 😯



Good to hear!

Been putting off a trip to the hospital myself, so I can empathize with your worries.


----------



## Aladdin (May 14, 2020)

krtek a houby said:


> Good to hear!
> 
> Been putting off a trip to the hospital myself, so I can empathize with your worries.



I'm due to go to hospital end of the month. 
Hope its cancelled.


----------



## Mogden (May 14, 2020)

Reasonably amused by this instructional guide to making a face mask that one of our local bus companies has provided 



			https://trentbarton.co.uk/userfiles/coronavirus/make_a_mask.pdf


----------



## scifisam (May 14, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> Wasn't sure where to ask this... we've been contacted to say an electrical safety check needs to be carried out on our home (private rented), and are implying it's to comply with mandatory legislation. They said they'll have to go into every room, presumably to PAT test electrical sockets? And will be wearing PPE.
> 
> I can't find anything that says this check is mandatory. It is for gas checks, but not electrical. Legislation is being brought in in July to make them the same I think.
> 
> ...



I had one turn up at my house too, and I refused to let them in. Probably easier for me since I'm on the shielding list. The electricity check isn't mandatory and you're not going to be at risk if you delay it for a few weeks, but having strangers come into your home is a risk. 

The thing is, you can't realistically be out of the room while a stranger walks around and checks things - for the electricians themselves they risk being accused of theft as well as catching covid. It's not right for your landlord and their employer to ask them to do it.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 14, 2020)

Thanks scifisam, I agree, I decided I wasn't happy for them to do it. No one has been in our home since lockdown except us, why let in two strangers, and let them touch things in every room? The letting agent was really unpleasant about it, I rang them today to tell them. She tried to strong arm me into it saying landlords need these safety certificates in time for July when the new legislation comes in, implying my tenancy might be at risk if I refuse, as landlords can't legally let the property without one. Well maybe, but tbh, you'd hope they'd put this requirement on hold due to Covid but knowing our government...


----------



## chainsawjob (May 14, 2020)

Thanks campanula, sorry, I missed your post. I hope you can continue to put them off, it's totally unreasonable of them to insist given your partner's vulnerability and being in the shielded group.


----------



## weepiper (May 14, 2020)

What's happening with supermarket/food shopping elsewhere? It's generally been very civil in Edinburgh so far with people generally resigned to queuing, social distancing etc. Today I detected a shift in people's patience for it, with several people essentially trying to queue jump and having to be managed by store staff. Nothing too obnoxious but it makes me wonder how it will go when more people are back at work and don't have the time to spend half an hour to an hour longer than 'normal' to do their food shopping. I also noticed much more face mask use than I've seen before - I've often felt a bit of a prat covering my face when most other people aren't but I'd say 60-70% of the people in the shop were wearing a mask of some sort.


----------



## Yuwipi Woman (May 15, 2020)

My favorite Chinese takeout just closed their doors.   I hope they're closing up for the duration, but it didn't look like it.  All of the fixtures had been removed.  Where will I get my mapo tofu now? 

<edited to add>
Still feeling very lucky to still have a job and a roof over my head, however long as that lasts.


----------



## Teaboy (May 15, 2020)

weepiper said:


> What's happening with supermarket/food shopping elsewhere? It's generally been very civil in Edinburgh so far with people generally resigned to queuing, social distancing etc. Today I detected a shift in people's patience for it, with several people essentially trying to queue jump and having to be managed by store staff. Nothing too obnoxious but it makes me wonder how it will go when more people are back at work and don't have the time to spend half an hour to an hour longer than 'normal' to do their food shopping. I also noticed much more face mask use than I've seen before - I've often felt a bit of a prat covering my face when most other people aren't but I'd say 60-70% of the people in the shop were wearing a mask of some sort.



With the face mask thing the UK government did sort of apologetically mumble something that people should probably wear face masks in crowded place like supermarkets, weirdly though the guidance was half-hearted at best.  Still, I expect to see a lot more of them now.


----------



## Doodler (May 15, 2020)

weepiper said:


> What's happening with supermarket/food shopping elsewhere? It's generally been very civil in Edinburgh so far with people generally resigned to queuing, social distancing etc. Today I detected a shift in people's patience for it, with several people essentially trying to queue jump and having to be managed by store staff. Nothing too obnoxious but it makes me wonder how it will go when more people are back at work and don't have the time to spend half an hour to an hour longer than 'normal' to do their food shopping. I also noticed much more face mask use than I've seen before - I've often felt a bit of a prat covering my face when most other people aren't but I'd say 60-70% of the people in the shop were wearing a mask of some sort.



More facemask wearing where I live in the East of England  too. The local Asda seems better organised than the Tesco with its one-way system and sanitiser sprays. Some people manage to ignore the arrow signs and frequent tannoy announcements because they're [add your favoured insult]. There was a queue argument that turned into a scuffle outside a small Co-op. This got into the local paper because not much happens here. Mrs Doodler thinks the Lidl is worst for slow-moving shoppers and aisle-blockers and won't go in there now.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 15, 2020)

weepiper said:


> What's happening with supermarket/food shopping elsewhere?



I'd say people have been getting restive about the social distancing rules here for at least a couple of weeks now, I'd say about a third of the people in my Asda on my weekly shop aren't bothering at all now, charging around and being inconsiderate, and aggressive if you challenge them. The floor signs aren't very obvious/easy to follow, so people have always just ignored or not noticed them. Yeah I expect it's going to get worse with people having less time. I've always been in the minority wearing a mask, it's been around 10 % only. Rural/small town area though, not a city, where the Asda is. It will be interesting to see if more people wear them now, and whether people can get hold of them. I last shopped on Wednesday, in Tesco briefly for things I hadn't got in Asda, and their floor signs and aisle spacing was better (bigger store), but I reckon it's largely down to individual store managers how vigilant/organised they are, and how well supported/protected the staff are. I was glad to see more of them wearing full face plastic visors in Asda this week. A supervisor told me they stopped telling people to follow the floor arrows because they were being subjected to so much abuse


----------



## Badgers (May 15, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> A supervisor told me they stopped telling people to follow the floor arrows because they were being subjected to so much abuse


I do feel sorry for the staff but the supermarkets have done VERY well financially and should be getting security in to protect staff and customers from said cunts.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I do feel sorry for the staff but the supermarkets have done VERY well financially and should be getting security in to protect staff and customers from said cunts.


Yeah, and paying their staff a decent wage/giving them decent contracts (unlike Asda's recent pisstake when they forced everyone to sign new less favourable contracts requiring staff to be more flexible on hours). They do have extra security, on the door, but I've not seen them have to deal with any aggro in store. The woman who's usually there could be someone I've seen working the gates at Boomtown, I might ask her if she does


----------



## LDC (May 15, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> I'd say people have been getting restive about the social distancing rules here for at least a couple of weeks now, I'd say about a third of the people in my Asda on my weekly shop aren't bothering at all now, charging around and being inconsiderate, and aggressive if you challenge them. The floor signs aren't very obvious/easy to follow, so people have always just ignored or not noticed them. Yeah I expect it's going to get worse with people having less time. I've always been in the minority wearing a mask, it's been around 10 % only. Rural/small town area though, not a city, where the Asda is. It will be interesting to see if more people wear them now, and whether people can get hold of them. I last shopped on Wednesday, in Tesco briefly for things I hadn't got in Asda, and their floor signs and aisle spacing was better (bigger store), but I reckon it's largely down to individual store managers how vigilant/organised they are, and how well supported/protected the staff are. I was glad to see more of them wearing full face plastic visors in Asda this week. A supervisor told me they stopped telling people to follow the floor arrows because they were being subjected to so much abuse



Yeah, I went to the supermarket for the first time in ten days or so yesterday, social distancing had definitely noticeably lessened, ime more by people that were wearing masks who seemed to think it gave some some power to ignore all the rules.


----------



## chainsawjob (May 15, 2020)

That's the trouble isn't it LynnDoyleCooper


----------



## Badgers (May 15, 2020)

Cunts 








						Exclusive: Government quietly scraps scheme to put homeless people in hotels
					

EXCLUSIVE: The ‘Everyone In’ policy, launched by the government in March, has been wound up



					www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (May 15, 2020)

chainsawjob said:


> Yeah, and paying their staff a decent wage/giving them decent contracts (unlike Asda's recent pisstake when they forced everyone to sign new less favourable contracts requiring staff to be more flexible on hours). They do have extra security, on the door, but I've not seen them have to deal with any aggro in store. The woman who's usually there could be someone I've seen working the gates at Boomtown, I might ask her if she does


All of those things of course. 

The (fairly big) Lidl near me had one security guard policing the queue 'into' the store but nothing inside. 

Asda, M&S are the only other two I have been in and they put staff on the door.


----------



## spoooky (May 15, 2020)

Burundi have expelled the WHO
Burundi Expels WHO Officials


----------



## William of Walworth (May 15, 2020)

spoooky said:


> Burundi have expelled the WHO
> Burundi Expels WHO Officials



This should be in the worldwide thread not the general one really, IMO, but anyway ...

Do you approve?


----------



## William of Walworth (May 15, 2020)

weepiper said:


> What's happening with supermarket/food shopping elsewhere? It's generally been very civil in Edinburgh so far with people generally resigned to queuing, social distancing etc.



I'm still finding this by and large, here in Swansea. 
Sainsbury's is nearby to us and I most often use that, and I've seen very few problems 
Even Lidls (also not far off) isn't all that bad for behaviour IME.
It's much shorter-staffed and worse for queues, and also somewhat more prone to aisle-dawdling and slow-moving people, as mentioned above. But not terrible really .... it might be down partly to me choosing quieter times to go there.


----------



## spoooky (May 15, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> This should be in the worldwide thread not the general one really, IMO, but anyway ...
> 
> Do you approve?


thanks William I'll be careful next time. 
I think the WHO is an entirely trustworthy organisation along with its main donor Bill Gates who can only have a good intentions.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 15, 2020)

"Its main donor Bill Gates"


----------



## Teaboy (May 15, 2020)

spoooky said:


> thanks William I'll be careful next time.
> I think the WHO is an entirely trustworthy organisation along with its main donor Bill Gates who can only have a good intentions.



Fuck billionaires and WHO are a bit suss in some ways but they are verge of sorting out Malaria once and for all when no one else has given a shit since forever because it was just poor people it mostly killed.


----------



## Helen Back (May 15, 2020)

Has anyone found a mask on Amazon or ebay that isn't a totally useless ripoff? And how do I ACTUALLY sort by customer review because Amazon's sort by review doesn't seem to do anything.


----------



## Orang Utan (May 15, 2020)

Helen Back said:


> Has anyone found a mask on Amazon or ebay that isn't a totally useless ripoff? And how do I ACTUALLY sort by customer review because Amazon's sort by review doesn't seem to do anything.


I wouldn’t trust any reviews on Amazon, especially customers


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 15, 2020)

Helen Back said:


> And how do I ACTUALLY sort by customer review because Amazon's sort by review doesn't seem to do anything.


Clicking on the yellow bars should display the chosen reviews scoring that number.  But as OU said treat them with caution.


----------



## Helen Back (May 15, 2020)

Yes, I'm aware that Amazon pays people to write 5 star reviews in exchange for free stuff so I'll order some salt as well.  But I'm hoping that the quantity of reviews, not the content, can give some sort of true indication of whether it's worth bothering with or not.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 15, 2020)

Good on the Dutch.









						Dutch official advice to single people: find a sex buddy for lockdown
					

Those without a sexual partner asked to come to mutually satisfactory agreements




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Aladdin (May 15, 2020)

'Hug machine' lets great-grandmother embrace children
					

With a little bit of ingenuity and some plastic, a great-grandmother in the US state of Illinois was able to safely hug her great-grandchildren for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic led to social distancing measures.




					www.rte.ie
				





Brought tears to my eyes.


----------



## BlanketAddict (May 16, 2020)

Anyone else had a nightmare trying to get their test results?

The actual test went very well, a very smooth process. So far so good...

Getting your results I found to be the issue. A week down the line, after several calls to the help centre etc, nobody knew anything (status of test, results and so on). 

Finally got my results this morning, 9 days later. 

To top off the whole experience: 'Results UNCLEAR, please arrange retest'

Aaaaaargh!!!!!


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2020)

I've just been offered a test through this app: COVID Symptom Study - Help slow the spread of COVID-19

Not sure why as apart from a sore throat the last few days which I often get in summer I feel absolutely fine, but oh well worth doing I guess. 

The email I had about the tests told me to confirm I was an essential worker (although I'm not) as apparently they have permission from the department of health to do this as part of the study, but not to encourage family members to take the tests 

In any case I've just requested one for myself only although I'm almost certain not to have it currently so I'm a bit surprised, they did say they were contacting people they didn't think had it in order to monitor the spread though. 

I'd be interested to see what the result would have been two months ago.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 16, 2020)

Social distancing? Not on Brighton front at 1pm earlier today.


----------



## Supine (May 16, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> View attachment 212917
> 
> Social distancing? Not on Brighton front at 1pm earlier today.



Looks ok to me


----------



## Pickman's model (May 16, 2020)

Supine said:


> Looks ok to me


two metres is a mite over six feet, so imagine a circle round each of those people or groups of people that's about 12 feet in diameter


----------



## Supine (May 16, 2020)

Pickman's model said:


> two metres is a mite over six feet, so imagine a circle round each of those people or groups of people that's about 12 feet in diameter



Yeah but just passing somebody is way way down the risk scale compared to spending time talking to somebody close up. People in that pic seem to be in family units or just passing other groups. Just imho obviously.


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2020)

It is gonna get mental. 
War is the only back up plan.


Off to get loo rolls


----------



## phillm (May 17, 2020)

Badgers said:


> It is gonna get mental.
> War is the only back up plan.
> 
> 
> Off to get loo rolls



Now that's stocks are plentiful in the shops time to prep to the max for the BIG ONE - whatever that is and maybe get a catapult to defend those supplies.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 17, 2020)

BlanketAddict said:


> Anyone else had a nightmare trying to get their test results?
> 
> The actual test went very well, a very smooth process. So far so good...
> 
> ...


My sister has had exactly the same issue. Told to get tested, waited ages for the results, only to be told they were inconclusive and she has to take another test.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (May 17, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> View attachment 212917
> 
> Social distancing? Not on Brighton front at 1pm earlier today.



It's a bit first week in April that genre isn't it?


----------



## Mrs Miggins (May 18, 2020)

It's been so long since I touched another person. Another human being. I am quite tactile and often just touch an arm or a shoulder or just a nudge when I'm in a good conversation with someone. Or if the person I'm talking to needs some reassurance. I'd fucking kill for a hug from a friend.


----------



## Teaboy (May 19, 2020)

I'm getting confused about this idea of air bridges between the UK and countries deemed to be low risk.  A means of skipping quarantine requirements.  I'm amazed that any country would want to airbridge with us given how rampant the virus has been in the UK.

Is it just as they've not been hit as hard they've still not quite grasped the problem or are they simply prepared to trade tourist money for a local spike in infection?


----------



## robsean (May 19, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I'm getting confused about this idea of air bridges between the UK and countries deemed to be low risk.  A means of skipping quarantine requirements.  I'm amazed that any country would want to airbridge with us given how rampant the virus has been in the UK.
> 
> Is it just as they've not been hit as hard they've still not quite grasped the problem or are they simply prepared to trade tourist money for a local spike in infection?


No. It's the delusion that the government's peddling today.


----------



## Raheem (May 19, 2020)

"There's no reason you can't just do the quarantine electronically, away from the border."


----------



## Ax^ (May 19, 2020)

Raheem said:


> "There's no reason you can't just do the quarantine electronically, away from the border."



oddly that how they think they work out Brexit to..

now oddly if I flew from Heathrow to Dublin atm I had to nominate a house where I was going to spend 14 days in insolation.

but the same is not in effect from people from Ireland due to the comman travel area


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (May 19, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I'm getting confused about this idea of air bridges between the UK and countries deemed to be low risk.  A means of skipping quarantine requirements.  I'm amazed that any country would want to airbridge with us given how rampant the virus has been in the UK.
> 
> Is it just as they've not been hit as hard they've still not quite grasped the problem or are they simply prepared to trade tourist money for a local spike in infection?



Other countries are powerless before our fearsome negotiators, haven't you noticed?


----------



## kalidarkone (May 19, 2020)

BlanketAddict said:


> Anyone else had a nightmare trying to get their test results?
> 
> The actual test went very well, a very smooth process. So far so good...
> 
> ...


Did you do it yourself?
I've heard the tests are quite brutal, that the nose swab has to go so far up it feels like it's near the eye and the throat swab needs to be tickling the tonsils. In which case it's best done by someone else.


----------



## MickiQ (May 19, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I'm getting confused about this idea of air bridges between the UK and countries deemed to be low risk.  A means of skipping quarantine requirements.  I'm amazed that any country would want to airbridge with us given how rampant the virus has been in the UK.
> 
> Is it just as they've not been hit as hard they've still not quite grasped the problem or are they simply prepared to trade tourist money for a local spike in infection?


It was on the news that the US was interested in a UK air bridge but they have got to be fucking kidding, they far worse even than us. We will never get it under control without shutting out the Yanks.


----------



## MickiQ (May 19, 2020)

I have just had someone selling double glazing door to door, he was wearing a mask and carried on a shouted conversation from the end of the drive but come on how the hell is that essential?


----------



## two sheds (May 19, 2020)

You wouldn't have heard him if you'd had double glazing  

Ted Moult used to do those ads a good half century ago.


----------



## MickiQ (May 19, 2020)

two sheds said:


> You wouldn't have heard him if you'd had double glazing
> 
> Ted Moult used to do those ads a good half century ago.


I have got double glazing (as indeed does every house in the cul-de-sac) I opened the door, I am expecting a booze delivery tomorrow and my hopes were up it had come a day early.


----------



## frogwoman (May 19, 2020)

kalidarkone said:


> Did you do it yourself?
> I've heard the tests are quite brutal, that the nose swab has to go so far up it feels like it's near the eye and the throat swab needs to be tickling the tonsils. In which case it's best done by someone else.


. I did a test yesterday through the app I've been using to record symptoms and I'm kinda worried I messed it up because I didn't feel like I had pushed the nose swab up enough.


----------



## frogwoman (May 19, 2020)

I am almost certain the test is negative unless I am _really_ unlucky. No idea why I was offered it (although I do have a sore throat and a headache) I'd have been interested in what the result would have said in March though.


----------



## LDC (May 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> . I did a test yesterday through the app I've been using to record symptoms and I'm kinda worried I messed it up because I didn't feel like I had pushed the nose swab up enough.



Did it feel _really_ unpleasant?


----------



## frogwoman (May 19, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Did it feel _really_ unpleasant?



It did feel quite unpleasant bur not too bad (which makes me worry it was wrong) , the throat part was worse though I was gagging and almost threw up!


----------



## miss direct (May 19, 2020)

I’m feeling utterly fed up here in Istanbul. We are on another four day curfew (ends at midnight), will have three days of semi normality and then four more days of curfew. This virus has affected everything in my life. I feel miserable. I’m working hard but earning pennies (online teaching) and can’t seem to move forwards as don’t know what the future holds. 

The numbers seem down to manageable here (about 30 covid deaths reported today) but I just don’t believe or trust what we’re told. I want to get on with life.


----------



## BlanketAddict (May 20, 2020)

kalidarkone said:


> Did you do it yourself?
> I've heard the tests are quite brutal, that the nose swab has to go so far up it feels like it's near the eye and the throat swab needs to be tickling the tonsils. In which case it's best done by someone else.



I do recall the nose swab was a bit pointy. Certainly stuck it up there to the point of uncomfortableness!


----------



## Aladdin (May 20, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> No. Nobody is going near hospitals.
> My brother works in the same hospital. He heard from a colleague and phoned my dad.



Brother saw my aunt yesterday in a covid ward.  He has a patient in the same room as her. 4 in the room. All covid19 patients. He was all geared up and gowned up etc. Had a quick chat with her. She's 86. Has a heart valve problem and is due for open heart surgery in 3 weeks time if the surgeons feel they can go ahead. She's extremely fatigued by the virus but not needing a ventilator and so far has not needed O2.


----------



## frogwoman (May 20, 2020)

I'm hearing a lot more ambulances in the last few days.


----------



## rekil (May 20, 2020)

Mrs Miggins said:


> It's been so long since I touched another person. Another human being. I am quite tactile and often just touch an arm or a shoulder or just a nudge when I'm in a good conversation with someone. Or if the person I'm talking to needs some reassurance. I'd fucking kill for a hug from a friend.


Spare a thought for the toning mist bus pest.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 20, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I'm hearing a lot more ambulances in the last few days.



Do you live near a hospital, or on a main route to one?
(I was just wondering if there's some possible explanation for more ambulances, not trying to minimise what you've heard)


----------



## frogwoman (May 20, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Do you live near a hospital, or on a main route to one?
> (I was just wondering if there's some possible explanation for more ambulances, not trying to minimise what you've heard)



Near a road which kinda goes to one I guess? Dont really live near one though. It's about 20 mins away.


----------



## gentlegreen (May 20, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I'm hearing a lot more ambulances in the last few days.


Yes - and with the roads empty it had me wondering - and covid-19 cases are presumably not usually dire emergencies ...
My thinking is it's because the roads are empty and a lot of us are walking in the road ... so people may not be expecting traffic ...


----------



## gentlegreen (May 20, 2020)

The whole cycling boom thing...

My near neighbour asked me to help him with a pushbike for his missis so she could get to work more easily at 4am...
I struggle with people thinking you can leave bikes outdoors for two years and then expect to ride them ... so the chain was seriously rusty and the front wheel bearing was a bit crunchy .. the ancient knobbly rear tyre had blown out when they pumped it up  - he was surprised when I insisted on lubing the chain !

Luckily I had some worn kevlar-lined tyres - at the stage where I usually put them outside for casual users .
First time I've properly spoken to him in the two or three years he's lived there - as I suspected he knows my sister and nephew from working at M&S - has her on Facebook ...

Then as I had his bike up on the stand, someone else asked how much I charged for a service - but I had to refuse - I'm not qualified / experienced - and a reluctant mechanic except on my own bike  - and even this bike had a couple of features I was unfamiliar with... (I only have experience of maintaining a particular bike I bought 20 years ago ...)

There's now a street Facebook group and of course the local Facebook and Nextdoor groups are busy .. and I've given gardening advice etc ... sadly there's no sign of me actually getting a social life out of this ...


----------



## LDC (May 20, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> It did feel quite unpleasant bur not too bad (which makes me worry it was wrong) , the throat part was worse though I was gagging and almost threw up!



Gagging sounds about right, think the nose one seems worse to me but maybe that's just my imagination! See what the results are I guess. Good luck, weirdly the best result is probably a positive!

Edited to explain: as in to have had it mildly and not needed hospital, and then hoping for some level of immunity!


----------



## Anju (May 20, 2020)

After only leaving the house for a bit of food shopping and a morning dog walk for a couple of months I finally got some work starting last week. Was happy to do it as it's painting a nursery with one other person. 

First day the guy I'm working with walks up and puts his hand out to shake hands, which I replied to with an elbow bump. Took a day of me having to back away when we talked for him to get the message. He's aware of social distancing and even comments on other people not doing it. We walked to the shop together yesterday and he bought a can of red bull which he opened and drank on the way back, which I assume is a risk. Tonight he's going to a kids birthday party, though hopefully I managed to convince him not to go.

Had the owner and a couple of people come in to measure up for flooring and they all got too close when chatting. 

I had a skip delivered today and the driver gave me his pen to sign for it, which I took as I could wash my hands straight away. Gave it back to him and he licked his finger to separate my copy of the paperwork. 

It's really difficult to keep up the necessary hygiene stuff when you're working and that's in a big building with one other person and hand sanitizer in every room. How people will manage in busier settings I don't know. 

Very much seems like some people have been social distancing when it's forced on them, in supermarkets and other well organised places but don't really understand the idea behind it, so lifting lockdown is being seen as relaxation of that as well.


----------



## two sheds (May 20, 2020)

Hard breaking habits of a lifetime.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 20, 2020)

Who is beaker?   

He's an MP but no idea who.


----------



## 2hats (May 20, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Who is beaker?
> 
> He's an MP but no idea who.
> 
> View attachment 213736


Your chinless wonder proposing medals for NHS workers is Tom Randall, Gedling (Con).


----------



## scifisam (May 20, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> The whole cycling boom thing...
> 
> My near neighbour asked me to help him with a pushbike for his missis so she could get to work more easily at 4am...
> I struggle with people thinking you can leave bikes outdoors for two years and then expect to ride them ... so the chain was seriously rusty and the front wheel bearing was a bit crunchy .. the ancient knobbly rear tyre had blown out when they pumped it up  - he was surprised when I insisted on lubing the chain !
> ...



Why wouldn't it lead to a social life? Sounds like your neighbours appreciate your skills and are happy to talk to you. That's a start. It's no France, obvs. And it must have felt good to be the one with the kevlar tyres and needed skills


----------



## DownwardDog (May 21, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> Then as I had his bike up on the stand, someone else asked how much I charged for a service - but I had to refuse - I'm not qualified / experienced - and a reluctant mechanic except on my own bike  - and even this bike had a couple of features I was unfamiliar with... (I only have experience of maintaining a particular bike I bought 20 years ago ...)



Just go for it. The scrandy doing the 50 quid rip off services at Halfords won't exactly be Ugo De Rosa.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 21, 2020)

We're lucky where we are -- in Swansea, there's a bike-recycling centre (a co-op) which collects old/abandoned/scrap bikes. 

It's a place where people know they can dump their unwanted bikes at, as well (and it's in a student area  ).

This place has all the spares you could want, as you can imagine, and also it does nicely-priced repairs.

In normal times that is -- I'm far from sure whether or not it's open at the moment


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2020)

I don't have the rona, my test is negative


----------



## editor (May 21, 2020)

The honey pot for all those conspiracy nuts who don't bother to check the credibility of their sources.



> Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.





> Researchers identified more than 100 false narratives about COVID-19 that are proliferating on Twitter by accounts controlled by bots.
> 
> Among the misinformation disseminated by bot accounts: tweeted conspiracy theories about hospitals being filled with mannequins or tweets that connected the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless towers, a notion that is patently untrue.
> 
> ...







__





						NPR Cookie Consent and Choices
					





					www.npr.org


----------



## magneze (May 21, 2020)

'The rona'. How and why did this start happening? It's spreading worse than the virus! 😷


----------



## izz (May 21, 2020)

It feels like a week since I got up this morning. Is this normal ?


----------



## Numbers (May 22, 2020)

izz said:


> It feels like a week since I got up this morning. Is this normal ?


Y/day seemed like it was a long day for sure.


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2020)

Not the best news


> Recent public health warnings about a severe and puzzling inflammatory syndrome linked to covid-19 have focused on children. But some doctors say they are also seeing the illness, similar to Kawasaki disease, in a few young adults. A 20-year-old is being treated for the condition in San Diego, a 25-year-old has been diagnosed at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and several patients in their early 20s are hospitalized with the syndrome at NYU Langone in New York City.





			https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/21/misc-c-kawasaki-coronavirus-young-adults/


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2020)

Going well then... 









						Tens of thousands of coronavirus tests have been double-counted, officials admit
					

Two samples taken from the same patient are being recorded as two separate tests in the Government's official figures




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## Cerv (May 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Going well then...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



what's next week's back pedal on the testing target going to be? "we've bought a bulk box of 100k cotton swabs"


----------



## 8ball (May 22, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Who is beaker?
> 
> He's an MP but no idea who.
> 
> View attachment 213736



Surely that pic has been messed with...
?


----------



## 2hats (May 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Going well then...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


What amuses me is that every day just before each briefing, his own department publishes the actual numbers, highlighting the subterfuge.

Hancock comes out (yesterday) and says 128,340 'tests completed'...


Only two hours prior @DHSCgovuk tweeted 67,681 people actually tested:


----------



## 2hats (May 22, 2020)

8ball said:


> Surely that pic has been messed with...
> ?


Nope. Screen grab from BBC Parliament channel:


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2020)

Britons not welcome in Greece until coronavirus infection rate declines, says tourism minister
					

‘The UK has a big difference in terms of the current medical status of the country with Greece,’ tourism minister Harry Theoharis told ITV




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 22, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Britons not welcome in Greece until coronavirus infection rate declines, says tourism minister
> 
> 
> ‘The UK has a big difference in terms of the current medical status of the country with Greece,’ tourism minister Harry Theoharis told ITV
> ...


'the leper of Europe'


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> 'the leper of Europe'


Just sent this to (half Greek) neighbour who was supposed to be holidaying their next week. She was not amused to say the least.


----------



## zahir (May 22, 2020)

Some more reports on the Greek plans for reopening tourism.









						UK unlikely among first 20 countries allowed to send tourists to Greece - Keep Talking Greece
					

Greece will open its doors to overseas holidaymakers from June 15, but the UK is not expected to be




					www.keeptalkinggreece.com
				












						Greeks concerned about tourism opening without test or quarantine - Keep Talking Greece
					

Many Greeks were shocked on Wednesday to hear the country will open its gates to foreign visitors in




					www.keeptalkinggreece.com


----------



## Mrs Miggins (May 22, 2020)

I can barely describe the unbridled joy of rubbing my eyes or sticking a finger up my nose immediately after a proper, thorough, washing of my hands. It feels like a long forgotten pleasure.

(I'm on the wine....sorry)


----------



## farmerbarleymow (May 22, 2020)

(((scolded dogs)))




Badgers said:


> Just sent this to (half Greek) neighbour who was supposed to be holidaying their next week. She was not amused to say the least.


It's the Brits who're lepers and not the Greeks.


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2020)

Going well then...





__





						Pressure on Dominic Cummings to quit over lockdown breach | Dominic Cummings | The Guardian
					

<strong>Exclusive:</strong> PM’s adviser was with parents away from London home when he had coronavirus symptoms




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## frogwoman (May 23, 2020)

At least 44k dead ffs. He should be sent to prison.


----------



## elbows (May 24, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> At least 44k dead with none of the benefits of the lockdown but all the economic devastation. He should be sent to prison.



That implies there was no point in the late lockdown. I strongly disagree, there were still benefits from locking down at the stage we did, its just it would have been so much better an outcome if it had been done 2 weeks earlier than that. Dont accidentally give ammo to the anti-lockdown scum.


----------



## frogwoman (May 24, 2020)

elbows said:


> That implies there was no point in the late lockdown. I strongly disagree, there were still benefits from locking down at the stage we did, its just it would have been so much better an outcome if it had been done 2 weeks earlier than that. Dont accidentally give ammo to the anti-lockdown scum.



You're right, sorry x


----------



## ruffneck23 (May 24, 2020)

Just got 12 bottles of Corona for 9 quid, there is an upside.. 

Funny thing is , I only took notice as 4 people left the shop whilst I was in the queue with the same idea.


----------



## Spandex (May 25, 2020)

I saw an illegal street hairdresser yesterday.

He'd set up outside a closed restaurant with an outside plug socket, which he used for his clippers. Put a stool down, used a bin bag for for a gown and did quick cuts for passers by while someone was lookout for the police coming.

Illegal street hairdressers? It's like something out of The Day Today.


----------



## ruffneck23 (May 25, 2020)

That's it , I've finally cracked up , surely I just havent read this from him?


----------



## Supine (May 25, 2020)

ruffneck23 said:


> That's it , I've finally cracked up , surely I just havent read this from him?




no. Just a parody account


----------



## ruffneck23 (May 25, 2020)

Supine said:


> no. Just a parody account


Thank goodness , thought Id flipped , I guess the bit at the top where it say ' Parody ' should have given it away. Need to stop posting before coffee


----------



## Mogden (May 26, 2020)

Car show rooms?? Really? This has only just hit me.


----------



## Spandex (May 26, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Car show rooms?? Really? This has only just hit me.


With opticians still closed how else are people supposed to test their eyesight?


----------



## Mogden (May 26, 2020)

Spandex said:


> With opticians still closed how else are people supposed to test their eyesight?


Free test drive available. Terms and conditions apply. Journey only permitted between Durham and Barnard Castle.


----------



## nagapie (May 26, 2020)

Car dealership opening does actually benefit a lot of vulnerable people as for example there has been no motability scheme running for 3 months. Many people are waiting for their transport and no new applicants are being taken now or until at least September. This means that no one with a mobility issue can get their own transport via the scheme. Many of these people will be those that are too vulnerable to catch public transport.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 26, 2020)

nagapie said:


> Car dealership opening does actually benefit a lot of vulnerable people as for example there has been no motability scheme running for 3 months. Many people are waiting for their transport and no new applicants are being taken now or until at least September. This means that no one with a mobility issue can get their own transport via the scheme. Many of these people will be those that are too vulnerable to catch public transport.




They could so easily be making allowances around all that stuff. In fact they should’ve been doing that right from the start. I think it’s got more to do with the collapse of the car industry. Hertz in America have declared bankruptcy, Aston Martin in trouble, they’re all in trouble. If they really cared about people with disabilities who need access to vehicles, it would’ve been so fucking easy for them to sort that out. They might dress it up as thoughtful concern, but this is about the car industry.


----------



## nagapie (May 26, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> They could so easily be making allowances around all that stuff. In fact they should’ve been doing that right from the start. I think it’s got more to do with the collapse of the car industry. Hertz in America have declared bankruptcy, Aston Martin in trouble, they’re all in trouble. If they really cared about people with disabilities who need access to vehicles, it would’ve been so fucking easy for them to sort that out. They might dress it up as thoughtful concern, but this is about the car industry.



I 100% agree that they should have found a way to keep it going as an essential service through the lockdown and I don't think for a minute that they're doing it for the motability scheme but nevertheless the scheme is very dependent on car dealerships being open.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (May 26, 2020)

nagapie said:


> I 100% agree that they should have found a way to keep it going as an essential service through the lockdown and I don't think for a minute that they're doing it for the motability scheme but nevertheless the scheme is very dependent on car dealerships being open.




Well yeah, it’s an associated benfit for sure but I highly doubt anyone said “we need to do this before all these other things becasue gosh darn it, it needs to be done to help peope!” When they were saying “how cam we dress this up so it doesn’t look like feather nesting?” someone said “..... well, we could always say how it benefits the disables....


But yes, you’re quite right to flag up how necessary this is to a really significant number of people who have been badly ignored during this crisis.


----------



## two sheds (May 26, 2020)

And you wouldn't think people would be crowded together in a show room.


----------



## nagapie (May 26, 2020)

SheilaNaGig said:


> Well yeah, it’s an associated benfit for sure but I highly doubt anyone said “we need to do this before all these other things becasue gosh darn it, it needs to be done to help peope!” When they were saying “how cam we dress this up so it doesn’t look like feather nesting?” someone said “..... well, we could always say how it benefits the disables....
> 
> 
> But yes, you’re quite right to flag up how necessary this is to a really significant number of people who have been badly ignored during this crisis.



I doubt they mentioned it as a motivator at all but then I never watch the briefings.


----------



## Badgers (May 27, 2020)

Bleak


----------



## Sprocket. (May 27, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> 'the leper of Europe'



Ding dong!


----------



## Sprocket. (May 27, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Just sent this to (half Greek) neighbour who was supposed to be holidaying their next week. She was not amused to say the least.


We were supposed to be in Greece now for two weeks celebrating our silver wedding anniversary.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 27, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> 'the leper of Europe'


Unfortunately a leper never changes its SPADs


----------



## Badgers (May 28, 2020)

__





						Text message tells vulnerable people they are dropped from shielding list | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Outcry after some in England told they would lose government support without doctors being able to talk to them first




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

I’ve broken the rules by having more than one person round (in the garden not inside) and am planing to do that again on Monday (couple driving out to visit me, same idea garden and go for a walk).
Am writing this here to guage am I out on a limb with this or not. Do feel free to berate me. The couple planning to visit are old, sort of pretend aunt and uncle, and i do have a bit of disquiet about it, certainly won’t be hugging them but do I disinfect the bathroom in case they need to come in and touch stuff? Idk.


----------



## LDC (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> I’ve broken the rules by having more than one person round (in the garden not inside) and am planing to do that again on Monday (couple driving out to visit me, same idea garden and go for a walk).
> Am writing this here to guage am I out on a limb with this or not. Do feel free to berate me. The couple planning to visit are old, sort of pretend aunt and uncle, and i do have a bit of disquiet about it, certainly won’t be hugging them but do I disinfect the bathroom in case they need to come in and touch stuff? Idk.



I wouldn't do it, and don't think people should. But I do get why some people are. 

How would you feel if one of them caught it and died in the 2 weeks after they visited you, that's partly what I balance things against.


----------



## LDC (May 28, 2020)

Party with sound system playing on the street last night, accumulating cars and people (up to about 40) on the street and in and out of the house where the party was. Police came twice, first time about 5pm but not much changed. Second time about 10.30pm in more force, told the party in no uncertain terms to leave and stop it, which apart from 2-3 drunk men shouting abuse for a bit, they did.

Quite enjoyed one of the police pointing out the hypocrisy of the people having a 'Love the NHS' poster in their window and having a crowd round breaking social distancing.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 28, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I wouldn't do it, and don't think people should. But I do get why some people are.
> 
> How would you feel if one of them caught it and died in the 2 weeks after they visited you, that's partly what I balance things against.


I feel the same. You're also contributing to the general feeling that "well if they're doing it, why can't we" which is what leads to a total breakdown. If enough people around you aren't bothering to keep to the rules, you start to feel silly yourself for doing so.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> I feel the same. You're also contributing to the general feeling that "well if they're doing it, why can't we" which is what leads to a total breakdown. If enough people around you aren't bothering to keep to the rules, you start to feel silly yourself for doing so.


I fully get that, and what LynnDoyleCooper said. They asked me last week and I said sure yes (I am very visitable because I live inside this national trust place that’s now re opened to all visitors) but am not feeling great about it. It does seem entirely mad though to say to them (a couple) only one of you can come.  I think I will say I’m feeling a bit worried, not because of the rules just because what if.
 But then that will be true for a long time, even after the pubs open and Johnson declares it safe to have parties again.


----------



## LDC (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> I fully get that, and what LynnDoyleCooper said. They asked me last week and I said sure yes (I am very visitable because I live inside this national trust place that’s now re opened to all visitors) but am not feeling great about it. It does seem entirely mad though to say to them (a couple) only one of you can come.  I think I will say I’m feeling a bit worried, not because of the rules just because what if. But then that will be true for a long time, even after the pubs open and Johnson declares it safe to have parties again.



Have you said to them, or do they know, that it's not allowed under the rules? And that there is an increased risk to everyone? I guess also it's a bit depending on what they've done so far in terms of how essential it is for them. Like if they've been really strict and haven't seen anyone, and don't have anyone nearer to see, or if one wouldn't drive on their own.

Some breaking of rules by some people is bit more understandable for me. And those of us that can stick to the rules make it slightly more safer collectively for those in difficult situations to bend them slightly. Hence why I get more annoyed at friends who are doing fine, see plenty of people at work or in shared houses, then still go out and meet someone (before they were allowed to) compared to someone that lives alone, isn't working, and is struggling doing the same.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Just realised I’m unclear - is it against the rules for them (one household) to meet me (one person) outdoors?
They have been ok mentally but have only seen their grandchildren through the front window for 2 months, that seems to be the bit that’s upset them the most. I’ve been nowhere apart from for walks and weekly shop.


----------



## Boudicca (May 28, 2020)

There are rules and there are risks.  I understand the risk factors and I understand why the rules have been made.  I am OK with breaking rules where I feel there are no risks involved.

I am not OK with people having BBQs in their gardens and not socially distancing.

However...

I have a good sized garden with a gate from the outside bimble and have had a friend round for socially distanced tea.  I had two separate tables set up 3 metres apart.  My friend has been out of the house for walks 4 times in the last 9 weeks.  I only go out for shopping once or twice a week and sometimes for walks.  She has recently turned 70 but doesn't have any of the health conditions in the vulnerable category.  I am younger but do have a heart condition.   We live in the region with the lowest Covid stats.

 I won't go to the beach at the bottom of my road as it is too crowded.  And now full of bloody virus-ridden Londoners. 

I'm pretty sure my garden is a safer place than the beach or parks around here and also pretty confident that we pose very little risk to each other.


----------



## Boudicca (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> Just realised I’m unclear - is it against the rules for them (one household) to meet me (one person) outdoors?
> They have been ok mentally but have only seen their grandchildren through the front window for 2 months, that seems to be the bit that’s upset they the most.


You would be breaking the rules a little bit less if you met them in the park rather than your garden. Also make them pee in the woods and don't let them into the house.  So your only sin then would be meeting two people instead of one.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Boudicca said:


> You would be breaking the rules a little bit less if you met them in the park rather than your garden. Also make them pee in the woods and don't let them into the house.  So your only sin then would be meeting two people instead of one.


But the park is really crowded! (The paths). Your post is basically how I’ve been thinking. I do want to check in with them though make sure they know exactly which rules apply.


----------



## Teaboy (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> Just realised I’m unclear - is it against the rules for them (one household) to meet me (one person) outdoors?



I think its technically against the rules as there is more than one of them.

I can't advise you but I can say that I live in a small block of flats in an area where there are lots of flats though usually conversions from 3/4 story town houses.  People share communal areas.  If we want to sit in our shared garden we can't tell our neighbours to clear off so over the weeks there has just been a general consensus that as long as we're outside and distancing is observed its going to happen.

All around our area I see similar with residents stood / sat around in gardens or even car parks just chatting as neighbours.  Distancing being observed meticulously.  In fact in some ways its a nice sight because it has brought neighbours together in a way that's not happened before.

All of this is of course against the rules but that is the reality of the situation.  In the urban setting where people live on top of each other and any space is often communal we can't just shut ourselves inside our homes with our own front doors and our own gardens.

What I would say though is the toilet issue.  If it was me I'd make sure everyone knows inside of the house / flat is out of bounds.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

I can quite easily disinfect loo doorknobs switches etc before they visit, instead of telling them to pee in the open air or stop at the service station on the m1 which tbf is not likely safer than here.  All very complicated though, easier to just not. But I do think about the long term, the rules might change next week whilst the situation we’re in will be long.


----------



## kalidarkone (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> I can quite easily disinfect loo doorknobs switches etc before they visit, instead of telling them to pee in the open air or stop at the service station on the m1 which tbf is not likely safer than here.  All very complicated though, easier to just not. But I do think about the long term, the rules might change next week whilst the situation we’re in will be long.


If you do that then also disinfect them afterwards.


----------



## kalidarkone (May 28, 2020)

I let my son use my dining room/kitchen area so he could have some counselling (via zoom) in private rather then within his shared house. I was at work and he had strict instructions to clean the table and seat and door handles with bleach on his way out and put the wipes in the bin outside. When I came home (he had left a few hours before) I cleaned going into the house. However that wont be happening again as he has been gallavanting and taking risks.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Lol.








						Groups of up to six people allowed to meet in England from Monday
					

Boris Johnson announces further easing of coronavirus lockdown measures including reopening of dentists




					www.theguardian.com
				



So come Monday we won’t be breaking the rules.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 28, 2020)

So was there any maths or science that specifically informed this new six-outside guidance (why not 4 or 5, or 7 or 8?), or is it strictly back-of-a-fag-packet pragmatism - the smallest number that will demonstrate a change in policy without leading to a politically-indefensible rise in infection numbers?


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

Loads of cafes and pubs opening in the peaks, no seats as such but plenty of ledges, etc occupied peak car pars very little SD, city parks full of students, SD observed by most women but not some men. No loos open though whuch gets quite unpleasant.

Its nearly over tbh, for now.


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

MY friend, ex inf disease nurse, says we can get it sitting on park benches, etc.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> Loads of cafes and pubs opening in the peaks, no seats as such but plenty of ledges, etc occupied, parks full of students, SD observed by most women but not some men.
> 
> Its nearly over tbh, for now.


Isn't 'most (wo) men' another way of saying 'not some (wo) men'?


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

DaveCinzano said:


> So was there any maths or science that specifically informed this new six-outside guidance (why not 4 or 5, or 7 or 8?), or is it strictly back-of-a-fag-packet pragmatism - the smallest number that will demonstrate a change in policy without leading to a politically-indefensible rise in infection numbers?


Six is a good number for 1x average nuclear family meeting 1xset of grandparents, is all I can think of . So yeah, fag packet, let’s cheer up the populace or something.

That my plans for Monday have become legal overnight just reaffirms to me how we are all just going to have to make our own minds up for at least a year probably two as to how we choose to adapt to the risk whilst the gov removes their rules quickly as they think they can.


----------



## two sheds (May 28, 2020)

Or perhaps one family of husband, wife and son in London say with sister, grandfather and grandmother in Durham say.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 28, 2020)

I imagine the Filth hate it - with 2 or 3 people a copper on their own or in a pair can deal with, but with 6 being the new magic number it's going to be larger groups they're going to be wanting to disperse, with greater levels of belligerence (nobody will want to be the 7th, 8th, 9th etc person, different dynamics as we get towards crowd psychology and so forth), leading to more calls for back up before anything is broken up, leading to more bravado, leading to increased levels of violence necessary to enforce the diktat, and so on.


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Party with sound system playing on the street last night, accumulating cars and people (up to about 40) on the street and in and out of the house where the party was. Police came twice, first time about 5pm but not much changed. Second time about 10.30pm in more force, told the party in no uncertain terms to leave and stop it, which apart from 2-3 drunk men shouting abuse for a bit, they did.
> 
> Quite enjoyed one of the police pointing out the hypocrisy of the people having a 'Love the NHS' poster in their window and having a crowd round breaking social distancing.




NHS staff feel the same way, last one tonight


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I wouldn't do it, and don't think people should. But I do get why some people are.
> 
> How would you feel if one of them caught it and died in the 2 weeks after they visited you, that's partly what I balance things against.





bimble said:


> I’ve broken the rules by having more than one person round (in the garden not inside) and am planing to do that again on Monday (couple driving out to visit me, same idea garden and go for a walk).
> Am writing this here to guage am I out on a limb with this or not. Do feel free to berate me. The couple planning to visit are old, sort of pretend aunt and uncle, and i do have a bit of disquiet about it, certainly won’t be hugging them but do I disinfect the bathroom in case they need to come in and touch stuff? Idk.




Completely understand if they were your age, yes, but they are very much in the at risk group, and will indeed need the toilet, etc.


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> I fully get that, and what LynnDoyleCooper said. They asked me last week and I said sure yes (I am very visitable because I live inside this national trust place that’s now re opened to all visitors) but am not feeling great about it. It does seem entirely mad though to say to them (a couple) only one of you can come.  I think I will say I’m feeling a bit worried, not because of the rules just because what if.
> But then that will be true for a long time, even after the pubs open and Johnson declares it safe to have parties again.





treelover said:


> Completely understand if they were your age, yes, but they are very much in the at risk group, and will indeed need the toilet, etc.



Bit baffled here, statement with no mention of opening, etc.









						Latest statement on reopening and coronavirus (COVID-19)
					

The National Trust's latest statement on reopening and coronavirus (COVID-19) can be found here:



					www.nationaltrust.org.uk


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

DaveCinzano said:


> I imagine the Filth hate it - with 2 or 3 people a copper on their own or in a pair can deal with, but with 6 being the new magic number it's going to be larger groups they're going to be wanting to disperse, with greater levels of belligerence (nobody will want to be the 7th, 8th, 9th etc person, different dynamics as we get towards crowd psychology and so forth), leading to more calls for back up before anything is broken up, leading to more bravado, leading to increased levels of violence necessary to enforce the diktat, and so on.




That filth will be my nephew, tx, who has dealth with people spitting and waving needles, during Covid, but hasn't done one DS penalty in Cleveland

though of course if he is ordered to use force, he will, esp on demos, etc.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> Completely understand if they were your age, yes, but they are very much in the at risk group, and will indeed need the toilet, etc.


Chatted to her about it today and she was quite cross thinking I might be suggesting  that she didn’t know that our plan was against the (pre Monday) rules, she explained that she knows the rules perfectly well and would like to bring a socially distanced picnic to eat in my garden. It’s safer here than in the park. I’m not going to tell them they can’t use my loo and should go to the public toilet in the park instead I’m just going to clean everything very well. 

We are all going to have to make our own judgements, that sounds individualistic but look how they’re prioritising opening estate agents and car dealerships, it’s going to be silly to outsource your responsibility to the government imo.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> Bit baffled here, statement with no mention of opening, etc.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



yes. They’re not advertising it but they (nt) opened the gate almost 2 weeks ago here, as people were parking unsafely  all along the access road.  It’s crazy busy.


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

I still don't understand how people can't see that nothing has changed. We have no vaccine. We still don't accurately know how far it spreads, how easily it can be caught from surfaces. We don't have accurate and consistent testing. There is no way to know who has it on sight of them. Suddenly bustling about in the sunshine with 5 other people, next to a group doing the same and another group on the other side of your group, is okay now?


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I still don't understand how people can't see that nothing has changed. We have no vaccine. We still don't accurately know how far it spreads, how easily it can be caught from surfaces. We don't have accurate and consistent testing. There is no way to know who has it on sight of them. Suddenly bustling about in the sunshine with 5 other people, next to a group doing the same and another group on the other side of your group, is okay now?


Nothing has materially changed but that could be the case for many years. I think it’ll be a series of loosenings and tightening of the rules for quite a long time.


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> Nothing has materially changed but that could be the case for many years. I think it’ll be a series of loosenings and tightening of the rules for quite a long time.


Yes it's going to be back and forth but loosening would be 3 people meeting rather than 2, so parents and grown child or grandparents with grandkid. Not let's have a street party cos as long we're in groups of 6 it doesn't matter.


----------



## campanula (May 28, 2020)

We drove to Norfolk and met my grand-daughter and daughter (who have been assessed by medics and told, that in the absence of tests, they have most likely had Corona. I am not really very conflicted about this tbh since we did not leave the truck till we were in the woods (did no petrol filling or shopping), kept a distance outside and went home again. I arrived home with all the Scummings stuff going on but maintain there is absolutely no comparison beyween his actions and mine. I am perfectly capable of making a decision which takes community health into full consideration...and doing so because I am a responsible person...not because it is a 'rule'.


----------



## LDC (May 28, 2020)

I think saying 6 basically means it's effectively unenforceable tbh, at least unless it's obviously large gatherings, but most groups will be ignored. Relies on self-policing, which will probably be OK in many ways, but we'll definitely continue to get significant (but lower) infection and death rates across the country. Also think it's clear that we'll get localized lockdown when some areas surge in cases.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Yes it's going to be back and forth but loosening would be 3 people meeting rather than 2, so parents and grown child or grandparents with grandkid. Not let's have a street party cos as long we're in groups of 6 it doesn't matter.


Most likely the schools and shops reopening will have more impact than this small groups of people meeting outdoors maintaining distancing thing.


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> Most likely the schools and shops reopening will have more impact than this small groups of people meeting outdoors maintaining distancing thing.


Sober yes. But in this weather add in alcohol and it'll get messy.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Sober yes. But in this weather add in alcohol and it'll get messy.


Without a doubt. I think they were pretty much forced to announce this tbh, if they are going to go ahead and open shops car dealerships etc it’s just not reasonable to tell families they can’t sit in a park 2m apart from each other (and people are not in the mood to take instruction from these people right now anyhow).


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> Without a doubt. I think they were pretty much forced to announce this tbh, if they are going to go ahead and open shops car dealerships etc it’s just not reasonable to tell families they can’t sit in a park 2m apart from each other (and people are not in the mood to take instruction from these people right now anyhow).


Exactly. But it's all moving towards the general public taking the blame for a second wave. Undoubtedly there will be eating events between friends and family this weekend. Are they doing disposable cutlery? A wipe of the sauce bottle every time it is passed? A drop of bleach on the chair when a messy kid spits out their burger and it hits their lap and everything else? I don't think I'm being unrealistic about these assumptions but with the amount of gaslighting they've already subjected us to I can see this setup for a fall.


----------



## bimble (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> Exactly. But it's all moving towards the general public taking the blame for a second wave. Undoubtedly there will be eating events between friends and family this weekend. Are they doing disposable cutlery? A wipe of the sauce bottle every time it is passed? A drop of bleach on the chair when a messy kid spits out their burger and it hits their lap and everything else? I don't think I'm being unrealistic about these assumptions but with the amount of gaslighting they've already subjected us to I can see this setup for a fall.


We have the worst numbers in the whole world I think I saw recently. Some time in the future an enquiry will find that had they locked down earlier and not allowed massive horse and football events whilst the virus was raging that would not have been the case. I don’t think blaming the public will work anymore tbh, apart from in a very short term way, but maybe I’m having a stray moment of optimism.


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

bimble said:


> We have the worst numbers in the whole world I think I saw recently. Some time in the future an enquiry will find that had they locked down earlier and not allowed massive horse and football events whilst the virus was raging that would not have been the case. I don’t think blaming the public will work anymore tbh, apart from in a very short term way, but maybe I’m having a stray moment of optimism.


I do have very mild concern that I'm pessimistic rather than realistic, then I snap out of it  I'd rather be overcautious and alive. It's not the fear of death but the fear of missing out on all the cool stuff I still want to do!


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2020)

is it viable to have sterile, self sterilising? portaloos outside cafes, pubs, so people can stay outside, etc. maybe charge 30p, etc.


----------



## prunus (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I still don't understand how people can't see that nothing has changed. We have no vaccine. We still don't accurately know how far it spreads, how easily it can be caught from surfaces. We don't have accurate and consistent testing. There is no way to know who has it on sight of them. Suddenly bustling about in the sunshine with 5 other people, next to a group doing the same and another group on the other side of your group, is okay now?



Remember that key to this is that each of the 6 people still have to remain 2m from each of the other people, and will be outdoors. In such conditions evidence is growing that transmission is unlikely.

However I’ve not seen much emphasising this part of the new rule (though it is part of it), and so, again, communication failure is the great weakness here. Although it’s happening so often it’s starting to look like a feature not a bug.


----------



## Mogden (May 28, 2020)

prunus said:


> Remember that key to this is that each of the 6 people still have to remain 2m from each of the other people, and will be outdoors. In such conditions evidence is growing that transmission is unlikely.
> 
> However I’ve not seen much emphasising this part of the new rule (though it is part of it), and so, again, communication failure is the great weakness here. Although it’s happening so often it’s starting to look like a feature not a bug.


We're human and immensely fallible. How many times have you seen someone so distracted by conversation that they've not noticed someone next to them or behind them and done the bump then "Sorry mate". Yes people will be more aware but not a soul will be glued to the spot and I'd put money on them concentrating on distancing from the people they are there with and not others. I know in my garden I'd not get 6 with the distancing. Didn't stop the neighbours filling up their garden this weekend. I just don't trust humans, can you tell


----------



## prunus (May 28, 2020)

Mogden said:


> *We're human and immensely fallible*. How many times have you seen someone so distracted by conversation that they've not noticed someone next to them or behind them and done the bump then "Sorry mate". Yes people will be more aware but not a soul will be glued to the spot and I'd put money on them concentrating on distancing from the people they are there with and not others. I know in my garden I'd not get 6 with the distancing. Didn't stop the neighbours filling up their garden this weekend. I just don't trust humans, can you tell



Indeed, this is precisely why it needs to be drummed into us repeatedly. Which it isn’t.

And I’m right with you on the lack of trust.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 28, 2020)

treelover said:


> is it viable to have sterile, self sterilising? portaloos outside cafes, pubs, so people can stay outside, etc. maybe charge 30p, etc.



Not really aware (from festivals  ) that there's such a thing as self-sterilising portaloos?

And in any case there's the issue of getting people, especially near pubs, to clean their hands properly etc.

Those portaloos would have to be staffed with really well trained** cleaners constantly cleaning them, for that to have any hope of working .....

**and decently paid too! Yeah, right ......


----------



## kropotkin (May 28, 2020)

DaveCinzano said:


> So was there any maths or science that specifically informed this new six-outside guidance (why not 4 or 5, or 7 or 8?), or is it strictly back-of-a-fag-packet pragmatism - the smallest number that will demonstrate a change in policy without leading to a politically-indefensible rise in infection numbers?


It will lead to a politically indefensible rise in infection numbers


----------



## Supine (May 28, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> It will lead to a politically indefensible rise in infection numbers



Not if it's six people who are socially distanced appropriately. Obviously it increases the risk though as it is very difficult to keep to the rules if your passing close to somebody or sharing any objects at your BBQ or whatever.


----------



## kropotkin (May 28, 2020)

But that won't happen, so the decision to allow it will lead to a rise in cases and therefore deaths.


----------



## campanula (May 28, 2020)

I dunno. To be fair, groups of 6 (and more) outside have been going on throughout the entire pandemic. Standing in shopping queues, walking on our daily exercise, doing the dog walk, visiting the allotment. And yet, at least in the circles I move, compliance with the 2m rule has been  conscientiously implemented...because we are still keeping a semblance of community awareness as well as self-interest. In itself, I don't think it should make much difference... but if going to shops, bars, schools are deemed acceptable, I think the uptick in infection will be very evident. The inside/outside thing is the point of danger, I think...because we tend to act differently when indoors whereas maintaining a reasonable distance outdoors is psychologically easier as well as physically more doable.

But, as usual, the message is deliberately (I think) left vague and ambiguous with the emphasis on numbers rather than circumstances...I have to think this wishy-washy approach is a deliberate distancing and preparation for scapegoating.


----------



## Supine (May 28, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> But that won't happen, so the decision to allow it will lead to a rise in cases and therefore deaths.



A question I've been wondering about is the average daily death total for things like heart disease and cancer in the UK. Do you have any idea? 

The thing I'm struggling with is how to put covid into perspective with diseases that as a society we've grown used to.


----------



## kropotkin (May 29, 2020)

Heart disease is one of the most common causes of death,a quick Google says 170000/yr. That's 42k in three months. Covid has killed at least 60k in the same period. And that's during lockdown. 

Do you seriously think that outside lockdown it will go down?


----------



## Supine (May 29, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> Do you seriously think that outside lockdown it will go down?



Absolutely not! I'll be staying locked down a lot longer than any gov recommendations. 

Although I am working so have been getting used to the social distancing measures which will be around for years and years.


----------



## kropotkin (May 29, 2020)

Current estimates are around 137000 infected people. The doubling time at worst has been around 2 days, 5 days mostly. Assuming some degree of social distancing remains after next week, with much reduced social interactivity, let's assume a doubling time of 14 days. Let's reduce to 100000 people. 

That means 8 weeks to c1.5 million infections. That's another full lockdown in my understanding.


----------



## Supine (May 29, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> That means 8 weeks to c1.5 million infections. That's another full lockdown in my understanding.



Yeah. It's not talked about much but the original Imperial modelling predicted 10-12 lockdowns and relaxations. The politicians are going for relaxing and staying below 1 but that's obviously the optimistic option.


----------



## Badgers (May 29, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> Heart disease is one of the most common causes of death,a quick Google says 170000/yr. That's 42k in three months. Covid has killed at least 60k in the same period. And that's during lockdown.
> 
> Do you seriously think that outside lockdown it will go down?


There is a huge wave of cancer, heart disease and similar cases/deaths on the way. The number of diagnosed cases has dropped hugely during this shit and a lot of late diagnosis will follow sadly.


----------



## 20Bees (May 29, 2020)

I wonder if there is a way to determine how many suicides will be directly related to lockdown.


----------



## kropotkin (May 29, 2020)

Badgers said:


> There is a huge wave of cancer, heart disease and similar cases/deaths on the way. The number of diagnosed cases has dropped hugely during this shit and a lot of late diagnosis will follow sadly.


Yes, referrals to the cancer mdt (regional new-case meetings for each cancer type) dropped off a cliff two months ago. Loads of cancers therefore undiagnosed. My respiratory colleagues in my hospital had a backlog of 2500 clinic appointments missed due to the virus.


----------



## Chilli.s (May 29, 2020)

Neighbor with kids who usually stay with seperated parents now seem to be openly "interpreting the rules" in a way that allows free movement of kids to both separate households.  They are richer people will who have been doing this all along but now it's blatant with loads of bags and shouts of bye see you monday.


----------



## crossthebreeze (May 29, 2020)

Chilli.s said:


> Neighbor with kids who usually stay with seperated parents now seem to be openly "interpreting the rules" in a way that allows free movement of kids to both separate households.  They are richer people will who have been doing this all along but now it's blatant with loads of bags and shouts of bye see you monday.


Kids have always been allowed to go between separated parents' households during lockdown though (but obviously some families have altered contact arrangements during this time).


> On 23 March, the government published full guidance on staying at home and away from others, which clarified that where parents do not live in the same household, children under 18 can be moved between their parents’ homes.


COVID-19 guidance for children and families - Cafcass - Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service


----------



## Badgers (May 29, 2020)

kropotkin said:


> Yes, referrals to the cancer mdt (regional new-case meetings for each cancer type) dropped off a cliff two months ago. Loads of cancers therefore undiagnosed. My respiratory colleagues in my hospital had a backlog of 2500 clinic appointments missed due to the virus.


Whilst I am suspicious of speculation there are a few senior doctors I follow online and they are suggesting the deaths from these diseases could rival the COVID-19 death rate


----------



## kropotkin (May 29, 2020)

Nowhere near, but it will still be much higher than usual.


----------



## Raheem (May 29, 2020)

20Bees said:


> I wonder if there is a way to determine how many suicides will be directly related to lockdown.


By comparing stats to other years with no lockdown, I suppose. 

It's unlikely that there will have been 60,000 excess suicides up to now.


----------



## 20Bees (May 29, 2020)

Of course - and there will be individuals on the radar for mental health issues but some who may have reacted with uncharacteristic alarm or misery at the prospect or the reality of lockdown. A history of depression coming to a head during this time might be recorded or documented differently from an unexpected dramatic reaction with tragic results.


----------



## phillm (May 31, 2020)

Is the virus getting weaker - I do hope so.









						New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says
					

The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.




					mobile.reuters.com


----------



## bimble (Jun 1, 2020)

I’ve got logistical questions about how to safely do this thing today (old couple coming to eat in my garden). 
It’s perfectly legal now for them to do this, and for them to use my (very clean) loo, but how do we manage sharing food . No shared cutlery I suppose everyone help yourself with your own spoon? What else should I be thinking of any ideas?


----------



## Supine (Jun 1, 2020)

bimble said:


> I’ve got logistical questions about how to safely do this thing today (old couple coming to eat in my garden).
> It’s perfectly legal now for them to do this, and for them to use my (very clean) loo, but how do we manage sharing food . No shared cutlery I suppose everyone help yourself with your own spoon? What else should I be thinking of any ideas?



No shared anything and don't do it until you are sure about what your doing...


----------



## bimble (Jun 1, 2020)

Supine said:


> No shared anything and don't do it until you are sure about what your doing...


Well they’re coming in a couple of hours. We all wash hands before touching any food related things and again after. No serving spoons just take your stuff onto your plate with your own cutlery, they can sit at table and I’ll perch a distance away. It’s the practical stuff that will make a difference and that a half decent public info system could help with.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 1, 2020)

bimble said:


> I’ve got logistical questions about how to safely do this thing today (old couple coming to eat in my garden).
> It’s perfectly legal now for them to do this, and for them to use my (very clean) loo, but how do we manage sharing food . No shared cutlery I suppose everyone help yourself with your own spoon? What else should I be thinking of any ideas?


There is nothing legally wrong with this but I just would not be encouraging old couples with this sort of thing. Not doing the same with my parents for sure! 

If you must then fully wash hands, spoons and such! 
A better idea would be for them to bring their own food/cutlery. 
Even better idea is for them not to come at all!


----------



## bimble (Jun 1, 2020)

Re not encouraging them, this is a fierce and opinionated Scottish woman who was having absolutely none of it when I called her to have a chat about are you sure you want to do this. Older people are not babies and these ones at least are not staying in their flat until some undefined day in the future, it’s about how to do it safely now not whether they should be leaving the house at all. All cutlery getting a big wash now.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 1, 2020)

bimble said:


> Re not encouraging them


Have you considered telling them no?


----------



## bimble (Jun 1, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Have you considered telling them no?


No. They said can we come picnic in yr garden and I just said yes. Am just going to make sure we stay well distanced and everything is done safely. 
There’s going to be loads of this isn’t there, people with good intentions having different views on managing risk & how to respond to the situation for the foreseeable.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 1, 2020)

bimble said:


> No. They said can we come picnic in yr garden and I just said yes. Am just going to make sure we stay well distanced and everything is done safely.
> There’s going to be loads of this isn’t there, people with good intentions having different views on managing risk & how to respond to the situation for the foreseeable.


In that case I wish you and them good luck


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Jun 1, 2020)

Badgers said:


> There is nothing legally wrong with this but I just would not be encouraging old couples with this sort of thing. Not doing the same with my parents for sure!
> 
> If you must then fully wash hands, spoons and such!
> A better idea would be for them to bring their own food/cutlery.
> Even better idea is for them not to come at all!


It's a risk assessment, no? If I were doing this, I'd ask myself who else has been in the house in the last week, who else have I been in contact with in the last week, do I work in a hospital or care home, do any of the people I've been in contact with in the last week work in a hospital or care home? There are ways of working out if you're more or less likely to be infected than the general population. Many of us can say 'less likely' with some degree of confidence depending on the answers to questions like the above.


----------



## bimble (Jun 1, 2020)

Exactly . 0 people have been inside my house apart from me for about 3 weeks, no close contact unless you count the cat. I’ve been weekly shopping and that’s it, etc. I do feel a bit defensive but understand that we are all going to have to make these calls and won’t make the same ones.


----------



## DexterTCN (Jun 1, 2020)

I have found that the masks are fucking great if you like singing.  Along with distancing if you're not loud you can have a great time.  

I've ordered a bigger one, can't really open your jaw all the way with the batman one.

Also...I'm Batman.


----------



## Anju (Jun 1, 2020)

One of my wife's friends from school was going on about having no income and having to be cautious about spending, after she was pulled up for moaning about people not socially distancing at a market. It was pointed out that not everyone can sit at home and get ocado deliveries.

This was a couple of weeks ago and since she has purchased and put
 on Facebook trainers, sun shelter, dog bed, dog agility course, 2 £260 sun loungers and the item in the picture, which when combined in my mind with the claim of cautious spending has had me in stitches. Can't work out how people can be quite so self absorbed / delusional.


----------



## phillm (Jun 1, 2020)

Anju said:


> One of my wife's friends from school was going on about having no income and having to be cautious about spending, after she was pulled up for moaning about people not socially distancing at a market. It was pointed out that not everyone can sit at home and get ocado deliveries.
> 
> This was a couple of weeks ago and since she has purchased and put
> on Facebook trainers, sun shelter, dog bed, dog agility course, 2 £260 sun loungers and the item in the picture, which when combined in my mind with the claim of cautious spending has had me in stitches. Can't work out how people can be quite so self absorbed / delusional.
> ...


As it says in the good book "Thous shalt not covet thy neighbours tortoise enclosure". Anyway, totally boring pets I was traumatised as a child when Blue Peter's tortoise snuffed it during hibernation. Rather have a hare.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

phillm said:


> As it says in the good book "Thous shalt not covet thy neighbours tortoise enclosure". Anyway, totally boring pets I was traumatised as a child when Blue Peter's tortoise snuffed it during hibernation. Rather have a hare.


At least you a hare probably tastes nice when it's cooked in a stew.


----------



## phillm (Jun 1, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> At least you a hare probably tastes nice when it's cooked in a stew.


For some reason, I was reminded of the vandalism of the Blue Peter garden when I was younger. I was inwardly rather wrongly amused now I see it for what it was wanton vandalism with no excuse. Please don't vandalise your neighbour's tortoise enclosure. Not that you would.
Apologies it is Anju not you U have no idea if you covet anything untoward.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

This is interesting - describing COVID-19 as a vascular disease, rather than respiratory.









						Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything
					

Many of the infection’s bizarre symptoms have one thing in common




					elemental.medium.com


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

phillm said:


> For some reason, I was reminded of the vandalism of the Blue Peter garden when I was younger. I was inwardly rather wrongly amused now I see it for what it was wanton vandalism with no excuse. Please don't vandalise your neighbour's tortoise enclosure. Not that you would.
> Apologies it is Anju not you U have no idea if you covet anything untoward.



We laughed  hysterically at this when it was announced on Blue Peter. Such solemnity invited ridicule. Well, it did in my household


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> We laughed  hysterically at this when it was announced on Blue Peter. Such solemnity invited ridicule. Well, it did in my household


That's because you're a wrong 'un - who would laugh at the death of animals.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> That's because you're a wrong 'un - who would laugh at the death of animals.


They were just fish weren’t they?


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> They were just fish weren’t they?


Speciesist


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Speciesist


Fish ain’t a species. In fact there’s No Such Thing As A Fish


----------



## phillm (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> We laughed  hysterically at this when it was announced on Blue Peter. Such solemnity invited ridicule. Well, it did in my household



This was a goodie at a risk of a major derail...


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Fish ain’t a species. In fact there’s No Such Thing As A Fish


OK, smartarse, you're a gillophobe.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 1, 2020)

phillm said:


> This was a goodie at a risk of a major derail...




I'd assumed that was pig related


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Fish ain’t a species. In fact there’s No Such Thing As A Fish


I’ll Try queuing at the no such thing and chip shop


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 1, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> I’ll Try queuing at the no such thing and chip shop


Orang Utan is certainly no expert in biology.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> OK, smartarse, you're a gillophobe.


Not scared of little ones, just sharks. Like eating fish though


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Orang Utan is certainly no expert in biology.


There really is no such thing as a fish though, taxonomically


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 1, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> There really is no such thing as a fish though, taxonomically





but fish aren't liable to pay taxes


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 1, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> but fish aren't liable to pay taxes


Not yet!


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 1, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> but fish aren't liable to pay taxes


They are. The lumpfish sum tax for a start


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 1, 2020)

and i'd forgotten about the pollock tax


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 1, 2020)

in other news, local Ikea re-opened today and apparently generated huge queues of people complaining about all the other people going there


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 2, 2020)

This is interesting - maps denoting pavement widths in different cities.















						Maps show UK pavements not wide enough for social distancing - in pictures
					

Spatial analysis by Esri UK has found that most pavements around the country are less than 3 metres wide




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Supine (Jun 2, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> and i'd forgotten about the pollock tax



Don't forget carperation tax if you run a business


----------



## Badgers (Jun 2, 2020)

A useful timeline 









						A timeline of failure.
					

Through arrogance and incompetence, thousands have needlessly died.



					appeasement.org


----------



## Badgers (Jun 2, 2020)

Sir David Norgrove response to Matt Hancock regarding the Government’s COVID-19 testing data
					

Dear Secretary of State,  Thank you for your letter of 27 May, in which you described some welcome, though limited, additions to the official data on COVID-19 tests, including a proposed note on methods (not yet published at the time of writing). I am afraid though that the figures are still far f




					www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk
				




Sir David Norgrove response to Matt Hancock regarding the Government’s COVID-19 testing data


----------



## Badgers (Jun 2, 2020)

> Under rules set to be published today, new arrivals to the UK will be able to go food shopping, change accommodation and use public transport during a 14-day quarantine period.







__





						Critics round on No 10 over 'ridiculous' rules for 14-day quarantine | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian
					

Exclusive: opponents claim exemptions to rules could mean great economic pain for little public health benefit




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jun 2, 2020)

June 8th far too late, & the rest surely is a joke, right? What is the fuckin point


----------



## Badgers (Jun 2, 2020)

> Downing St is scrapping its COVID-19 press conferences on Saturdays and Sundays and now only holding them during the week.



Must all be nearly over then


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 2, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Must all be nearly over then


the viewing figures are down and they've been told that the only way to restore them is to reduce the frequency


----------



## Teaboy (Jun 2, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Must all be nearly over then



They're not much use.  It doesn't appear any senior cabinet members fancy working on the weekend so its normally some nobody.  Also the reporting of the data is always on a lag.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 2, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> They're not much use


That was all you needed to write


----------



## robsean (Jun 2, 2020)

.......and we're "moving on".


----------



## gentlegreen (Jun 2, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> The whole cycling boom thing...
> 
> My near neighbour asked me to help him with a pushbike for his missis so she could get to work more easily at 4am...
> I struggle with people thinking you can leave bikes outdoors for two years and then expect to ride them ... so the chain was seriously rusty and the front wheel bearing was a bit crunchy .. the ancient knobbly rear tyre had blown out when they pumped it up  - he was surprised when I insisted on lubing the chain !
> ...


Inevitably two weeks later I spent an hour this afternoon doing a full service on that bike 

Well he's helping keep M&S working and she the buses, so I suppose it's for a good cause...


----------



## DexterTCN (Jun 2, 2020)

My second mask came today.  Cute kittens.

Strangley...the velvety material and strong elastic reminds me much more of sexy knickers.  I'm pretty sure someone is cutting them in half and making masks.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 3, 2020)

Interesting: 









						Ibuprofen tested as treatment for breathing difficulties in coronavirus hospital patients
					

If successful, trial could reduce hospital stays, say researchers




					www.independent.co.uk
				






> A trial has been launched in the UK to test whether ibuprofen can help with breathing difficulties in Covid-19 hospital patients.
> 
> Scientists hope a modified form of the anti-inflammatory drug and painkiller will help to relieve respiratory problems in people who have more serious coronavirus symptoms but do not need intensive care unit treatment.
> ...
> ...


----------



## editor (Jun 3, 2020)

FFS: 



> The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
> 
> A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.
> 
> ...












						Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
					

Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Ted Striker (Jun 3, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (Jun 3, 2020)

Ted Striker said:


>



Fucking idiot. Hands all over his face today. Likely he has spread it all over the place. MPs queuing like they were at a fairground to appease a cunt and a cunt party to get their own shouty way. 

A failed state


----------



## zora (Jun 3, 2020)

Ted Striker said:


>




Fucking hell.  Had a post sitting in my drafts from the UK thread from last night, could not be bothered to post it then, but seems apt enough now ... "This bloody government...I give up. Voting to merrily spread Covid amongst themselves again just like at the start of it all, and probably bring it into the Central London shop where I likely will be working again in two weeks time and into their communities up and down the country..."
There aren't enough facepalms in the world...


----------



## zahir (Jun 3, 2020)

zora said:


> Fucking hell.  Had a post sitting in my drafts from the UK thread from last night, could not be bothered to post it then, but seems apt enough now ...


I was meaning to ask, but didn’t get round to it, how long it was likely to be before Westminster saw its second wave.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2020)

Follow the science...


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2020)

Not ideal this... 





__





						Coronavirus hospital admissions in Greater Manchester at highest since April
					

Andy Burnham said the latest numbers from Tuesday were ‘a concern’ after they rose for a second consecutive week. But he said it was ‘too early to call it a trend’



					www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk


----------



## elbows (Jun 4, 2020)

Its possibly worth hearing him say it to get the fuller context, and he also says some interesting things about 'local lockdowns', local information, working with communities and empowering people. All of that stuff is covered by the first 10 mins of the video.


----------



## 8ball (Jun 4, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Follow the science...




I agree.  If we pick up anything heavier than a ream of paper at my workplace, we have to go on a course.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2020)

Face coverings on public transport mandatory from 15/06 

Is that the government doing something two/three months too late again? Or are they going to try and ram more people on public transport?


----------



## 8ball (Jun 4, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Face coverings on public transport mandatory from 15/06



I'll need to get a mask sorted.

I like this one, but not sure of its protection rating.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

I've got one of these on the way:


----------



## 8ball (Jun 4, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> I've got one of these on the way:
> View attachment 216087



Yeah, was thinking it would be fun getting on the tram or tube with that.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

8ball said:


> Yeah, was thinking it would be fun getting on the tram or tube with that.


I'm going to wear it to work (a library) to ensure the huggysnotty kids give me a wide berth


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 4, 2020)

Any recommendations for masks that don't involve elastic behind the ears (which i find kinda uncomfortable and gets tangles with glasses?)


----------



## zora (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> Any recommendations for masks that don't involve elastic behind the ears (which i find kinda uncomfortable and gets tangles with glasses?)



There is the T-Shirt tie method


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> Any recommendations for masks that don't involve elastic behind the ears (which i find kinda uncomfortable and gets tangles with glasses?)


Rubber gimp mask?

I've got some that tie behind the head which sound more comfortable that hooking around the ears.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> Any recommendations for masks that don't involve elastic behind the ears (which i find kinda uncomfortable and gets tangles with glasses?)


I've just got a pack of what's described as: Bandana Multifunctional Headwear Face Scarf Wide Seamless Headwrap Balaclava Tube Neckwarmer for Dust,Outdoors,Sports Festivals
They work much better than the elasticated masks, especially if you wear glasses - you can have them higher up your face and perch your glasses over them and not have them get steamed up like you do with the other type. They feel much less claustrophobic. I don't think I could spend a whole workday with a mask on but I could with one of these snood things


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 4, 2020)

zora said:


> There is the T-Shirt tie method



Thanks - tried and I wasn't very good at it



farmerbarleymow said:


> Rubber gimp mask?



_disapproving look over glasses_



Orang Utan said:


> I've just got a pack of what's described as: Bandana Multifunctional Headwear Face Scarf Wide Seamless Headwrap Balaclava Tube



Thanks - know what to search for now.

Maybe this one?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> Thanks - tried and I wasn't very good at it
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I've just come back to say I've found one for you:


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

this one's even better Puddy_Tat


----------



## 8115 (Jun 4, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> I've got one of these on the way:
> View attachment 216087


What is this from? I mean, there's obviously a cultural reference or something but what is it?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

8115 said:


> What is this from? I mean, there's obviously a cultural reference or something but what is it?


A plague mask. During the Black Death, disease was thought to be caused by miasma (bad smells). These  masks were worn by doctors visiting plague-ridden areas. The end of the “beak” would have a nosegay with fragrant herbs in it, to flush out the miasma and protect the wearer


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 4, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> A plague mask. During the Black Death, disease was thought to be caused by miasma (bad smells). These  masks were worn by doctors visiting plague-ridden areas. The end of the “beak” would have a nosegay with fragrant herbs in it, to flush out the miasma and protect the wearer



Did it work?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Did it work?


What do you reckon?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 4, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> What do you reckon?



Not the herbs but the PPE aspect of it. Did it reduce transmission at all?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Not the herbs but the PPE aspect of it. Did it reduce transmission at all?


I doubt it considering that the vector for transmission was fleas


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

CORRECTION 
It wasn’t the Black Death. The masks didn’t show up until the 17th century








						Plague doctor - Wikipedia
					






					en.m.wikipedia.org


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 4, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> The masks didn’t show up until the 17th century



was the post a bit slow?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> was the post a bit slow?


They were invented by Louis XIII’s physician, apparently!


----------



## mx wcfc (Jun 4, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> was the post a bit slow?




I bought a couple of badges in the same theme.  In March.  Not yet here.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

What is the policy of ‘journey makers’ on public transport? Who are they?









						How wearing face coverings on public transport will be policed
					

People may be fined or refused permission to board




					www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
				






> They will also introduce 'volunteer journey makers' to assist in 'reminding people about the need for face coverings on public transport'.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Jun 5, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> was the post a bit slow?



Delivery was outsourced to Ye Olde Sercoe.


----------



## Cerv (Jun 5, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What is the policy of ‘journey makers’ on public transport? Who are they?
> 
> 
> 
> ...



isn't enforcing the bylaws of public transport already the job of the BTP?
if someone refuses to wear a mask, some volunteer can't exactly kick them out the train station can then.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

Cerv said:


> isn't enforcing the bylaws of public transport already the job of the BTP?
> if someone refuses to wear a mask, some volunteer can't exactly kick them out the train station can then.


My thinking too  likely the transport companies need more staff to manage this and the government won't pay. Hence volunteers?


----------



## Dogsauce (Jun 5, 2020)

‘Big society’ bollocks innit. Might be one of the things the right want to get out of all this.


----------



## Sunray (Jun 5, 2020)

Was reading an article in the Guardian, there is a section of the scientific community what are saying the total impact of the virus is overstated.  Clearly, if you get very sick, these aren't words you much care for, but the article at the bottom, is saying no matter what action governments have taken, the virus appears to peak then dies off.    

This is hard to disagree with the point of view, it's being born out across the world apart from Iran, they are saying its testing regime is massively improved hence the numbers, deaths aren't on the rise yet, so bear this out.








						The first wave of Covid-19 is not over – but how might a second look?
					

The pandemic’s future will be decided by human action and several unanswered questions about the nature of the virus




					www.theguardian.com
				




Perhaps the virus is letting incompetent governments off the hook.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

Sunray said:


> Perhaps the virus is letting incompetent governments off the hook.


Perhaps to some degree  

Sadly the UK government has been a disaster from start to finish on this and are still responsible for larger deaths per million than most of the world.


----------



## co-op (Jun 5, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Perhaps to some degree
> 
> Sadly the UK government has been a disaster from start to finish on this and are still responsible for larger deaths per million than most of the world.



We don't have the evidence to say that yet; if the view offered at the end of the article that Sunray linked to is right, then govt action may have been - broadly - irrelevant, and we don't yet know if that view is right or wrong.

It's possible that countries like the US and the UK have worse Covid death figures because they also have worse underlying health in their wider populations - which we already have quite a lot of evidence for, and also explanatory theory for, ie that countries with higher degrees of social inequality also have worse obesity, worse chronic disease rates, lower fitness rates etc etc.


----------



## co-op (Jun 5, 2020)

Sunray said:


> Was reading an article in the Guardian, there is a section of the scientific community what are saying the total impact of the virus is overstated.



I've got to be honest and I took flak on the Sweden thread for saying this but I think there is quite a bit of evidence that this might be the case. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth acting on the basis of a worse scenario initially, but we should be ready to re-assess where things are.


----------



## Sunray (Jun 5, 2020)

Actions taken by the population have had an effect, there is no doubt.  The more robust the action the better the outcome.  
Limp wristed like the dumbass brigade like we have at the moment, 50000+ dead in a small country.  

I'm really hoping its fizzling out for the time being. I also believe its possbile to eradicate, but feel the current government isn't capable of that as an outcome.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

co-op said:


> We don't have the evidence to say that yet; if the view offered at the end of the article that Sunray linked to is right, then govt action may have been - broadly - irrelevant, and we don't yet know if that view is right or wrong.
> 
> It's possible that countries like the US and the UK have worse Covid death figures because they also have worse underlying health in their wider populations - which we already have quite a lot of evidence for, and also explanatory theory for, ie that countries with higher degrees of social inequality also have worse obesity, worse chronic disease rates, lower fitness rates etc etc.


May be true to a small extent. 

New Zealand might have a healthier population than us? Certainly the Germans do. However that is no way an argument for the death per million we have managed. 

By 'we' I mean almost solely this disgraced government and their feckless, greedy friends.


----------



## Sunray (Jun 5, 2020)

Nobody lives in New Zealand.  Nothing happens.  

No WuHan -> Auckland/Wellington trade route because the Chinese don't know New Zealand exists.  The Chinese often miss it off maps.

Bit racist too, look funny at the airport and you're deported.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

Only 357 today 
R number going up 
World beating 









						UK coronavirus death toll passes 40,000
					

True scale of deaths passed 50,000 earlier this week




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## two sheds (Jun 5, 2020)

Vitamin K found in some cheeses could help fight Covid-19, study suggests
					

Scientists in Netherlands explore possible link between deficiency and Covid-19 deaths




					www.theguardian.com
				




can't actually read it any more because I've not registered  

but I recall geminisnake telling me about this - vitamin D which is also thought to resist coronavirus needs  vitamin K to be absorbed unless you drink milk since vitamin D is fat soluble. Apparently K2 can also help resist cv. 

Have just ordered  *Vitamin K2 (MK-4) | 1,000mcg x 120 Tablets | Menaquinone-4, Soy free, 1mg * look good value.


----------



## Teaboy (Jun 5, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Only 357 today
> R number going up
> World beating
> 
> ...



Oh is this still going?  Is this still a thing? Its just that I've recently been for a walk followed by a visit to Tesco and I kinda assumed the virus has just gone away?


----------



## Badgers (Jun 5, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Oh is this still going?  Is this still a thing? Its just that I've recently been for a walk followed by a visit to Tesco and I kinda assumed the virus has just gone away?


#letsmoveon


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Jun 5, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Vitamin K found in some cheeses could help fight Covid-19, study suggests
> 
> 
> Scientists in Netherlands explore possible link between deficiency and Covid-19 deaths
> ...


You don't need to be registered to read it just click on the 'not now fuck off' button, but here is the article anyway.



> Patients who have died or been admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 have been found to be deficient in a vitamin found in spinach, eggs, and hard and blue cheeses, raising hopes that dietary change might be one part of the answer to combating the disease.
> Researchers studying patients who were admitted to the Canisius Wilhelmina hospital in the Dutch city of Nijmegen have extolled the benefits of vitamin K after discovering a link between deficiency and the worst coronavirus outcomes.
> Covid-19 causes blood clotting and leads to the degradation of elastic fibres in the lungs. Vitamin K, which is ingested through food and absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract, is key to the production of proteins that regulate clotting and can protect against lung disease.
> The Dutch researchers are now seeking funding for a clinical trial, but Dr Rob Janssen, a scientist working on the project, said that in light of the initial findings he would encourage a healthy intake of vitamin K, except to those on blood-thinning medications such as warfarin.
> ...



I eat plenty of cheddar and eggs, along with the multivit I take has 100% of vitamin K, and a separate 100mcg of vitamin D.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 5, 2020)

farmerbarleymow said:


> You don't need to be registered to read it just click on the 'not now fuck off' button,



How did I not see that  

ta for quoting it in full - interesting piece


----------



## Dogsauce (Jun 6, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Oh is this still going?  Is this still a thing? Its just that I've recently been for a walk followed by a visit to Tesco and I kinda assumed the virus has just gone away?



my local small Tesco has done away with the hand sanitiser and person on the door policing entry. Might as well have gone away as far as they care (and this is the south west where we‘re back above R=1).


----------



## Badgers (Jun 8, 2020)

Sounds a bit flaky 





__





						First arrivals under UK quarantine rules: 'They didn't even check my temperature' | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian
					

Passengers at Heathrow express surprise and confusion over new coronavirus controls<br>




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jun 8, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Sounds a bit flaky
> 
> 
> 
> ...



What a crock of shite.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 8, 2020)

Just watching the News on France24.
Good to see the British government being ridiculed in the first three stories. 
Re aspects of the opening of quarantine measures and begging the European workforce that left due to Brexit to return and help the British economy.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 10, 2020)

Interesting read this... 





__





						HuffPost is now a part of Verizon Media
					






					www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
				






> The government and the NHS repeatedly failed to answer questions about which private companies worked on the Nightingales or what multi-million pound contracts were handed out. Basic information about these contracts has also not been published on public databases where information should appear within 30 days.





> The Financial Times has also reported that consultancy firm KPMG was drafted in as project manager, with NHS England hiring a team of about 60 consultants to build the seven Nightingale hospitals working alongside military planners.



There is a lot of missing financials and a lot of people getting very wealthy behind this virus.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 10, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Interesting read this...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


_see also_ ferries


----------



## William of Walworth (Jun 10, 2020)

Here the full FT article (paywalled) from Badgers ' post above, in case you can't get to it (it's paywalled). I didn't realise that dated back to May 4th, but it's good.                        


* Consultants in line of fire over projects to tackle coronavirus *
Tabby Kinder, May 4th 2020
UK government faces criticism over transparency of contracts handed to KPMG and Deloitte

On Mother’s Day weekend in March, just before Britain was plunged into lockdown, phones started ringing in the homes of senior consultants at some of the UK’s biggest accountancy firms. Government agencies were taking emergency measures to protect against, test for and treat coronavirus and needed help managing what was rapidly becoming a daunting logistical challenge. 
NHS England hired a team of about 60 consultants at KPMG to build seven temporary Nightingale hospitals that could treat thousands of coronavirus patients in need of critical care. 
Deloitte was recruited by the Department of Health and Social Care to help create a network of up to 50 testing facilities around the UK and by the Cabinet Office to assist with the procurement of personal protective equipment for frontline NHS staff. 
A month later, a string of complaints from health officials and industry figures over the services provided have raised concerns at the rapid outsourcing of consultants during the pandemic — particularly the transparency around contracts and whether the firms are set up to manage such critical projects during a national health emergency. 
The KPMG and Deloitte projects were contracted out to the accounting firms without competition, and the agreements, which detail the sums paid for the work, have not yet been made public. They are just three of many consulting contracts agreed at pace by the government as the pandemic gripped the country. 
The British government was able to recruit the firms quickly after it suspended its usual procurement procedures, which require contracts with a value of more than £10,000 to be publicly advertised and awarded only after a competitive tender. The move enabled a speedy response to the Covid-19 crisis but clouded visibility over how taxpayer money was being spent on private firms. Despite the new rules stating that departments must publish a contract award notice within 30 days of its agreement, almost none have done so. 
An agreement between EY and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in April to provide guidance for various business sectors on how to reopen after the lockdown has also not yet been published. 
“There is a worrying lack of transparency over government spending to combat the impact of coronavirus,” Rachel Reeves, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, told the Financial Times. “The government must cast its net widely as part of this national effort and not just rely on opaque arrangements with the Big Four accountancy firms.”    There is a worrying lack of transparency over government spending to combat the impact of coronavirus    Rachel     Deloitte and KPMG said they had agreed to work for reduced rates for the government on its coronavirus services, but both declined to give details of the fees. Senior consultants at the large accounting firms have in the past been charged out at up to £1,000 per hour, while more junior staff can bring in fees of around £300 an hour. 
NHS England has not revealed how much has so far been spent on the Nightingale hospitals. The Department for Business said it would not comment on its commercial contracts. “There’s a risk that we never know what was spent under the emergency system,” said Ian Makgill, director of OpenOpps, which monitors public sector contracts. 
Gus Tugendhat, founder of Tussell, which collects information on UK government contracts stressed that the crisis “should not be used as a pretext for lowering standards of transparency. Accountability around how much is being spent, on what and with whom matters more than ever.” 
The Big Four firms, which also include PwC, audit almost all of Britain’s large companies and have advisory practices that employ tens of thousands of consultants. They have won hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of new government contracts in recent years despite several high-profile audit failures and fines for misconduct. 
The government has been criticised for the large sums it has spent on consultants in the past, including paying more than £100m for advice on Brexit and £600m on the HS2 rail link. 
But its reliance on consultants during the Covid-19 crisis has prompted fresh scrutiny. 
Dr Simon Festing, chief executive of the British Healthcare Trades Association, said: “People who are just brought in from the outside are not going to have the technical expertise. It’s a different order of complexity.” 
Ms Reeves added that the firms had “questionable experience in areas such as medical testing and procuring personal protective equipment”. 
KPMG and Deloitte have relationships with ministers and in the healthcare service, having worked on the design of NHS Improvement, a body set up in 2016 that oversees the NHS foundation trusts. 
Yet Deloitte has been criticised for a series of administrative errors at coronavirus testing centres that have lost NHS staff results or sent them to the wrong person. Doctors, frustrated by the failures at a testing site at Chessington in Surrey, discussed how to take control of the centre. 
Deloitte has also been accused of delays in its procurement of PPE for hospitals. Several manufacturers that offered to provide kit described the process as shambolic and claimed there was a lack of understanding on the specifications that must be adhered to when making life-saving products. 
“We need to ask how did Deloitte come to be appointed and how much did it cost for these very poor decisions to be made,” said Rosie Cooper, MP for West Lancashire and a member of parliament’s health and social care committee. The committee, led by Jeremy Hunt, is investigating the government’s management of the coronavirus outbreak. Deloitte said it was supporting the government on testing but that it did not “run or manage” the centres. It said it was providing operational support on the procurement of PPE. The department of health said the “full weight of the government is behind our PPE strategy” in response to a request for comment on its work with Deloitte. 
KPMG was lauded for the speed with which the Nightingale hospitals were up and running. The first facility in east London’s Docklands was completed nine days after KPMG was drafted in as project manager, working alongside military planners and several smaller infrastructure consultancies, including Mott MacDonald and Archus. 
But a month on, the unknown sums paid to consultants are part of a debate on the value of the hospitals, the majority of which have taken only a handful of patients. 
The government said it was “supported by a number of public and private sector partners” when asked about its reliance on consultants to provide key public services during the coronavirus pandemic. “[They] are providing additional expertise and resource to help deliver significant programmes of work as part of the national effort,” said a spokesperson.

Additional reporting by Niku Asgari and Gill Plimmer

[ETA : Cutting out surplus text, adding paragraph breaks, etc.]


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 10, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Here the full FT article (paywalled) from Badgers ' post above, in case you can't get to it (it's paywalled). I didn't realise that dated back to May 4th, but it's good.


You spend all that time adding underlines and emojis to your own posts, but you can't add a few paragraph breaks when you share?


----------



## William of Walworth (Jun 10, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> You spend all that time adding underlines and emojis to your own posts, but you can't add a few paragraph breaks when you share?



And for the attebntion of Orang Utan and Badgers

You weren't to know, but I was unexpectedly called away/out for a (now-fixed) emergency.

I always intended to do the paragraph breaks and remove surplus text -- now done (and that was before I saw your post  )

(Sorry -- I get really fucking paranoid about people 'liking' posts that criticise me, even when the criticism is half-justified ... would have been fully justified if I'd just left it as it was and never edited it)


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 10, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> (Sorry -- I get really fucking paranoid about people 'liking' posts that criticise me, even when the criticism is half-justified ... would have been fully justified if I'd just left it as it was and never edited it)


Just pulling your leg, don't worry about it.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jun 10, 2020)

OK, fair dos ....... now read it maybe?
It's not a bad article.

I think most people here know how to get to FT articles via Google, but it does help I think to see them straight away


----------



## Badgers (Jun 10, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> (Sorry -- I get really fucking paranoid about people 'liking' posts that criticise me, even when the criticism is half-justified ... would have been fully justified if I'd just left it as it was and never edited it)


Daft old sod


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 10, 2020)

Silly billy, I don’t give a shit about paragraph breaks


----------



## William of Walworth (Jun 10, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> Silly billy, I don’t give a shit about paragraph breaks



I do -- I'm normally a bit of a pefectionist about things like that. 
Plus the initial C & P included some annoying additional stuff.
All sorted now


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 10, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> I do -- I'm normally a bit of a pefectionist about things like that.
> Plus the initial C & P included some annoying additional stuff.
> All sorted now


I was just liking that post cos I thought it was funny


----------



## Badgers (Jun 10, 2020)

Boris Johnson announces lockdown 'bubbles' letting two households hug and kiss
					

The new rules mean some grandparents will be able to hug their grandchildren for the first time since March - and it'll be good news for some couples who live apart too




					www.mirror.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Jun 10, 2020)

> *People be allowed* to hug, kiss, share meals or *even have sex* in each other's homes for the first time since March 23.


Top copy


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 10, 2020)

Sunray said:


> Nobody lives in New Zealand.  Nothing happens.
> 
> No WuHan -> Auckland/Wellington trade route because the Chinese don't know New Zealand exists.  The Chinese often miss it off maps.



From early February:



> Auckland Airport is the main entry and exit point for travel between New Zealand and China. Currently around 45 flights arrive from mainland China each week out of a total of 554 weekly international arrivals at Auckland Airport. There are six airlines operating routes to five cities in mainland China. Direct flights between Auckland and mainland China account for 8% of total international seat capacity at Auckland Airport.











						Auckland Airport response to travel restrictions
					

Review your travel plans to China ahead of coming to the airport



					corporate.aucklandairport.co.nz


----------



## Sunray (Jun 10, 2020)

Yossarian said:


> From early February:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Didn't say no flight.  No trade route.  

Those flights are just for the Chinese who have a map with it on and are curious.









						New Zealand keeps getting left off world maps – and Kiwis aren't happy
					






					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 10, 2020)

NZ does shitloads of business with China.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 11, 2020)

Face coverings to be mandatory on public transport
					

From 15 June, people in England could be fined for not wearing a covering, the transport secretary says.




					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Today is my first time on a (Thameslink) train to London since this shit started today. The train is pleasingly empty but literally *nobody* wearing masks  

A lot of unmasked staff at the gates along with two masked up BTP but no staff on the train barring (hopefully) the driver. 

#goingwellthen


----------



## Supine (Jun 11, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Face coverings to be mandatory on public transport
> 
> 
> From 15 June, people in England could be fined for not wearing a covering, the transport secretary says.
> ...



Trains are great at the moment. There is no benefit to wearing a mask if you're by yourself so it's understandable. I always have mine ready to wear but don't unless anyone gets close.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 11, 2020)

Supine said:


> Trains are great at the moment. There is no benefit to wearing a mask if you're by yourself so it's understandable. I always have mine ready to wear but don't unless anyone gets close.


What is the point of the rule then? Or is it just more vague guidance? It seems pretty black and white to me. 

Perhaps I am more aware of this shit as going to a cancer centre?


----------



## Supine (Jun 11, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What is the point of the rule then? Or is it just more vague guidance? It seems pretty black and white to me.
> 
> Perhaps I am more aware of this shit as going to a cancer centre?



The rule is for when the trains are filling up when people go back to work


----------



## Badgers (Jun 11, 2020)

Supine said:


> The rule is for when the trains are filling up when people go back to work


I guess it starts on the 15th officially. Still seems a weak effort like most of the UK so far.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 11, 2020)

The final straw  






						Yeast of our worries: Marmite supplies hit by Covid-19 beer brewing slowdown | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Company says due to brewer’s yeast being in short supply, production of the spread has been affected




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## MickiQ (Jun 11, 2020)

Badgers said:


> The final straw
> 
> 
> 
> ...


When my middle daughter still lived at home, she loved that shit, She would toast a slice of thick toast, get a spoon and slather it with the vile crap and just wolf it down.
It made everyone else in the house heave just sniffing it. She lives with her boyfriend and either he must like it as well or he has no sense of smell whatsover.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jun 11, 2020)

Badgers said:


> The final straw
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I'm no fan of Marmite, but I'm giving this an  for the words 'due to brewer's yeast being in short supply'


----------



## Badgers (Jun 13, 2020)

£200m (and likely more) spent to treat 51 patients. 









						London's NHS Nightingale 'treated 51 patients' - BBC News
					

The temporary field hospital in the ExCel centre was built to care for up to 4,000 coronavirus patients.




					www.bbc.com


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> £200m (and likely more) spent to treat 51 patients.


While I'm firmly in the camp that the government royally fucked up the response to the pandemic, I'm inclined to give them a pass here. The fact Nightingale wasn't needed just means that the lockdown and the rules they did enforce, albeit way too late, did make enough of a difference that we didn't overwhelm the NHS to the extent that we needed to use temporary field hospitals. That feels like a win, regardless of how you feel about the rest of it.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 13, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> While I'm firmly in the camp that the government royally fucked up the response to the pandemic, I'm inclined to give them a pass here. The fact Nightingale wasn't needed just means that the lockdown and the rules they did enforce, albeit way too late, did make enough of a difference that we didn't overwhelm the NHS to the extent that we needed to use temporary field hospitals. That feels like a win, regardless of how you feel about the rest of it.


I get that. 

Would have preferred a better funded NHS, promised hospitals built and MOST important lockdown two weeks earlier.

This, like the testing, track and trace, app and a lot of other shit has been a massive waste of money not to mention the deaths caused.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> While I'm firmly in the camp that the government royally fucked up the response to the pandemic, I'm inclined to give them a pass here. The fact Nightingale wasn't needed just means that the lockdown and the rules they did enforce, albeit way too late, did make enough of a difference that we didn't overwhelm the NHS to the extent that we needed to use temporary field hospitals. That feels like a win, regardless of how you feel about the rest of it.



Totally, plenty of fuck ups, but these weren't them at all. Nobody knew how it was going to go, preparing for the worst and the possibility of NHS facilities being over-whelmed was essential. It also might still be used this winter.


----------



## killer b (Jun 13, 2020)

I wouldn't call it a win yet - the hospitals partly weren't overwhelmed because lots of people just stayed at home and died instead.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Totally, plenty of fuck ups, but these weren't them at all. Nobody knew how it was going to go, preparing for the worst and the possibility of NHS facilities being over-whelmed was essential. It also might still be used this winter.


It won't be. They are clearing it out July 1st.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I get that.
> 
> Would have preferred a better funded NHS, promised hospitals built and MOST important lockdown two weeks earlier.
> 
> This, like the testing, track and trace, app and a lot of other shit has been a massive waste of money not to mention the deaths caused.


Well, quite, I think we can all agree on that. But if they hadn't built Nightingale and it turned out the country did need it, we'd be having a quite different conversation.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 13, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Well, quite, I think we can all agree on that. But if they hadn't built Nightingale and it turned out the country did need it, we'd be having a quite different conversation.


I do get it but still...


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

I read somewhere that it was closed because there weren't enough NHS staff to keep it open, although I've not seen that confirmed anywhere else. Could they otherwise not have treated patients there to take the load off other hospitals who could have then admitted their usual patients, who've gone without treatment over that time?


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

two sheds said:


> I read somewhere that it was closed because there weren't enough NHS staff to keep it open, although I've not seen that confirmed anywhere else. Could they otherwise not have treated patients there to take the load off other hospitals who could have then admitted their usual patients, who've gone without treatment over that time?



No, it (although they really, as there's a load of them around the country) was not used as their weren't the patients to use it. There were issues with them though, not least a war of egos among the various agencies staffing them (military, NHS, Trusts, gov, etc.) and deciding what category of patients to take in them, which is a much more complicated decision that it might appear at first.

The Trust I worked for at the time was asked to provide some staff for the Harrogate one (as were the other Trusts in the area), but it was really a small number (maybe 15 in total of a few types) to do a 4 week rotation. They got plenty of volunteers (including me), so staffing wouldn't have been an issue up here.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

Fair play, my second point still stands though?


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jun 13, 2020)

killer b said:


> I wouldn't call it a win yet - the hospitals partly weren't overwhelmed because lots of people just stayed at home and died instead.



Those patients they shoved in care homes should have gone to nightingales


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Fair play, my second point still stands though?



That was one of the issues with deciding what patients to take. If you're not taking CV patients but a mix of others with a variety of diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions, then you need a massive range of staff skills and facilities, another huge problem to sort out.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> Those patients they shoved in care homes should have gone to nightingales



Who would staff that then? All the nurses and doctors needed elsewhere? A whole load of new nursing home staff? And what about CV spreading in that facility, as people were being discharged for all sorts of reasons, some of which was they were due for it, or it was rushed a bit, not that they needed to be in hospital but were not allowed to be. Sorry, but that's a bonkers idea.

They didn't 'shove them in care homes'. They lived there, they discharged them back to their homes.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> That was one of the issues with deciding what patients to take. If you're not taking CV patients but a mix of others with a variety of diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions, then you need a massive range of staff skills and facilities, another huge problem to sort out.



No, they could have taken CV patients in Nightingale since that was set up to specialize in it, and other hospitals taken the patients they normally take.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

two sheds said:


> No, they could have taken CV patients in Nightingale since that was set up to specialize in it, and other hospitals taken the patients they normally take.



What type of CV patients though? That was one of the big sticking points. Critically ill, or ill enough to be in hospital but not critical? Or some mix? Or the care home people someone else suggested?


----------



## Badgers (Jun 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> What type of CV patients though? That was one of the big sticking points. Critically ill, or ill enough to be in hospital but not critical? Or some mix?


Perhaps they should have thought of that first?


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Perhaps they should have thought of that first?



Well quite. And even without that surely they could fill up with critically ill since that's what it's specially there for, and if there aren't enough of them then separate out a ward for less-than-critically-ill.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

They did both concurrently, otherwise time would have been wasted. Surely you get that? Some of your criticisms are really quite odd.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Well quite. And even without that surely they could fill up with critically ill since that's what it's specially there for, and if there aren't enough of them then separate out a ward for less-than-critically-ill.



Yeah, it's all that simple.  Between about 3 of you on here you can't even decide between whether they even should have been opened, or what patients they should have taken.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, it's all that simple.  Between about 3 of you on here you can't even decide between whether they even should have been opened, or what patients they should have taken.



I agree with others on here that it doesn't look like they should have been opened if they were going to be closed again haven hardly taken any patients. The money could have been diverted to other hospitals in the NHS that needed it.

And once it had been opened then it seems logical to take on critical patients and if they didn't have enough to be full then, separate out a ward to take on non-critical patients. At least that would free up other hospitals to take on patients that they would have been taking if it weren't for cv.

Doesn't that seem right? I don't want to get into an argument because you've been at the sharp end, but I'm not sure anyone on here has argued anything different.

Eta: I thought it was a good idea to build it at the time, but that was because I assumed they'd fill it up with patients.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2020)

But we didn't know we weren't going to need them! Early on it looked like a possibility we might have. Can you imagine what a disaster and how much you'd be moaning if they'd not been opened and thousands of people died from a lack of facilities. It feels like this criticism is like you putting on a seatbelt at start of a drive, moaning that you didn't use it when you got back, then after ten drives moaning that installing it was a waste of money and time as it's not getting used.

I think what grates is people with no medical understanding making suggestions that make it obvious they don't understand a fraction of the complexities of dealing with sick patients, don't comprehend their own lack of knowledge, and then being certain that they have better answers than people that work in this area.

I think there are plenty of good criticisms to be made of stuff done by both the government and the NHS, but they'll get lost if people are just making criticisms of eveything and anything, including the things that worked or are working OK or well.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> But we didn't know we weren't going to need them! Early on it looked like a possibility we might have. Can you imagine what a disaster and how much you'd be moaning if they'd not been opened and thousands of people would have died from a lack of facilities. I feels like you putting on a seatbelt at start of a drive, moaning that you didn't use it, then after ten drives moaning that installing it was a waste of money and time as it's not getting used.
> 
> I think what grates is people with no medical understanding making suggestions that make it obvious they don't understand a fraction of the complexities of dealing with sick patients, don't comprehend their own lack of knowledge, and then being certain that they have better answers than people that work in this area.
> 
> I think there are plenty of good criticisms to be made of stuff done by both the government and the NHS, but they'll get lost if people are just making criticisms of eveything and anything, including the things that worked or are working OK or well.



Ok - like I said (my ETA crossed your post) I agreed with it being built. I don't think anybody disagreed with that. It was closing it without using it that I and I presume others on here disagreed with.

Anyway I'll leave this.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jun 13, 2020)

Sunray said:


> the Chinese don't know New Zealand exists.





They eat dogs too, you know. 



farmerbarleymow said:


> You don't need to be registered to read it just click on the 'not now fuck off' button, but here is the article anyway.
> 
> 
> 
> I eat plenty of cheddar and eggs, along with the multivit I take has 100% of vitamin K, and a separate 100mcg of vitamin D.



Our vitamin K2 arrived in the post today.  While I could just be unlucky, I have broken more bones than the average person over the last ten years, so it can't hurt. Glad to have coronavirus research bring it to my attention.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

Yep mine too a couple of days ago, to accompany the vit D.


----------



## existentialist (Jun 13, 2020)

two sheds said:


> I read somewhere that it was closed because there weren't enough NHS staff to keep it open, although I've not seen that confirmed anywhere else. Could they otherwise not have treated patients there to take the load off other hospitals who could have then admitted their usual patients, who've gone without treatment over that time?


TBH, if things had been a LOT worse (no credit to HMG here), then the decision to open the Nightingale Hospitals could have been one of those "stopped clock" moments (as in "a stopped clock is right twice a day"). From the point of view of the general criticism of Government policy, I think they're a bit of a red herring. Far more important are the logistics fuckups (like privatising the PPE stockpile to a bunch of shysters) and ongoing administrative dick-in-the-blender events post-pandemic.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 13, 2020)

Indeed, like I say - no problem at all with them opening it.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 16, 2020)

Rule Brittania 









						New Zealand's first Covid cases in 24 days came from UK
					

The two women had been given special exemption to visit a dying parent in New Zealand.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## elbows (Jun 16, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Rule Brittania
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Oops I just posted that in another thread, I was late.

If there had not been so much else going on in March with the pandemic here and elsewhere, there probably would have been more focus on the number of exported cases the UK was producing back then too. It was one of the signs that our epidemic was at a more advanced stage back then than the government scientific advisors realised, just like it was a sign in Iran and Italy and Spain that their epidemics were rather large.

I cant make the same claims on this side of the wave, except the obvious that levels of infection in the UK are too high to get away with too much complacency on this and other fronts just yet.


----------



## zora (Jun 16, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Rule Brittania
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Mind you, why NZ would have not tested them given the respective states of the epidemics here and there is somewhat beyond me...


----------



## Badgers (Jun 16, 2020)

zora said:


> Mind you, why NZ would have not tested them given the respective states of the epidemics here and there is somewhat beyond me...


Yup... 

Regardless it enforces the international view of the UK as a 'plague island'


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 16, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Yup...
> 
> Regardless it enforces the international view of the UK as a 'plague island'


they will cry out 'bring out your politically dead' as they carry boris johnson out of number 10 and sling his useless torso on a cart


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 16, 2020)

Seems a bit of a fuckup on the nz end as apparently they and others in the hotel were let out without being tested. *


----------



## Numbers (Jun 16, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Seems a bit of a fuckup on the nz end as apparently they and others in the hotel were let out without being tested. *


A guy (can't remember exact title but a NZ Vallance / Whitty level/type) on GMB this morning said they were released from quarantine early for compassionate reasons.


----------



## chalkhorse (Jun 16, 2020)

What are your thoughts on the Beijing outbreak, elbows? Do you reckon it's a sign of more to come? Or previous under-reporting breaking out, or perhaps both?


----------



## planetgeli (Jun 16, 2020)

Just back from a day in your Urban London town (MRI scan at UCHL) and have to say I was pretty impressed with what I saw. Maybe influenced by the fact I spent a long time in and around a hospital but masks on public transport fully adhered to, plus I'd say around 50% of people I saw were wearing masks in public. Impressed with lack of pedestrians around Euston Rd and Tottenham Court Road, though not impressed with the traffic on Euston Rd. That's a lot of 'essential journeys'. But on the whole I felt safe and that people where I was are still taking social distancing seriously. Far more than where I live in Wales, where complacency has set in as we haven't been badly hit.

Trains were a joy. Roughly 10 people each way (Swansea - Paddington and back).


----------



## Tankus (Jun 16, 2020)

Isn't this the week where we find out what the protests have done to us?


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jun 17, 2020)

chalkhorse said:


> What are your thoughts on the Beijing outbreak, elbows? Do you reckon it's a sign of more to come? Or previous under-reporting breaking out, or perhaps both?



Seoul has been reporting similar daily numbers for a few weeks. Despite initial reporting on that, it doesn't seem to excite the media quite as much as fantasizing over a second wave for China.


----------



## Roadkill (Jun 17, 2020)

Tankus said:


> Isn't this the week where we find out what the protests have done to us?



Incubation period is usually about 5-6 days, though sometimes longer, so if there are going to be cases as a result of the protests then yes, we'd probably start to see them around now.


----------



## chalkhorse (Jun 17, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> Seoul has been reporting similar daily numbers for a few weeks. Despite initial reporting on that, it doesn't seem to excite the media quite as much as fantasizing over a second wave for China.


OK - so are you saying second wave fears are exaggerated? Phew. 
No one actually wants them, just fearful, surely?


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jun 17, 2020)

chalkhorse said:


> OK - so are you saying second wave fears are exaggerated? Phew.
> No one actually wants them, just fearful, surely?



When we say "second wave", I don't think it's very clear what's really being discussed. If we mean another moment where the virus has spread enough to cause a large amount of sick people who need medical treatment, then no, I don't think we can expect a second wave in countries like South Korea, China, or New Zealand; they'd simply introduce measures before that could happen. 

Places like China and New Zealand and South Korea aren't trying to "flatten the curve", because that just means to let the sickness spread at a speed which medical services can handle. The same people die, but more slowly. But countries like China and New Zealand and South Korea are trying to eradicate the virus. They can't, probably, but they can keep levels very, very low, and because they're dealing with the virus at countable levels, they're not in danger of a second wave in the way the UK is right now. 

South Korea, however, is having some difficulties at the moment. All credit to brilliant SK, they're trying to do this without a lockdown, but they're teetering, and I worry about them much more than I do China, because here, it just locks the fuck back down at the first sign of local transmission. I wonder, I really do, why China is getting so much more attention that SK here, and I am heartily, wholly, totally fucking sick of the phrase "fears of a second wave".  









						South Korea sees rise in untraceable COVID-19 cases: KCDC
					

One in 10 coronavirus infections here in the past two weeks had unknown sources, with a considerable proportion of them in Greater Seoul, health authorities said Monday.   This is twice the proportion suggested by them as one of the standard metrics for maintaining “everyday life quarantine.”...



					www.koreaherald.com


----------



## elbows (Jun 17, 2020)

My decision to take a partial holiday from this subject this month (which feels like a total holiday compared to my normal quantity of posts) was in large part down to not wanting to get my brain crushed between two competing sentiments that I dont buy into - those looking for an imminent 2nd wave of dramatic proportions (often before the first wave has even finished) and those anti-lockdown types who fell silent on that theme for a while for obvious reasons, but inevitably started feeling emboldened to restart their dull shit as soon as the death rate in many European countries fell low enough.

I dont have much to say about Beijing except that I am glad we got to hear about it, they didnt try to hide that one. And yes it is annoying when the press give their attention in a lopsided manner, but I suppose its somewhat inevitable that there will be more focus on countries which have fresh outbreaks after going through periods with 'no new cases'.


----------



## Teaboy (Jun 17, 2020)

I'm also sick of the phrase 'second wave'.  I would say though that China is going to get a lot more attention because it has the largest population in the world. The implications are far far greater.  They also seemingly had it first so are much further down the road so people may be inferring things from that whether its meaningful or not.

There is a lot of talk about India and Pakistan in the UK at the moment as you would expect and obviously the never ending obsession with the US.  All have very high populations and are always going to be of more interest than smaller countries such as SK.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 18, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> There is a lot of talk about India and Pakistan in the UK at the moment as you would expect and obviously the never ending obsession with the US.  All have very high populations and are always going to be of more interest than smaller countries such as SK.


I never seem to see any news about anything other than the UK, US and occasionally France - BBC news, especially Breakfast, seems to have completely forgotten about the pandemic and daily deaths and now just reports on shop openings and football games.


----------



## iona (Jun 19, 2020)

I got a letter last month about taking part in this ONS study. Letter & participant info sheet say to phone up the company doing the testing and book an appointment for a healthcare worker to visit and do swabs/bloods. When I phoned I was told someone would call back in the next fortnight to book an appointment. Still not heard back, nearly three weeks later (will try to chase it up today but the ONS website's now saying you need to phone and ask for a call back just to register for the study). So that seems to be going about as well as UK testing generally has been.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 21, 2020)

Not sure of sources here but some concerns.


----------



## elbows (Jun 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Not sure of sources here but some concerns.




Well the meat processing plant outbreaks are worthy of attention.

I think that particular source is trying to overemphasise quite how recent that aspect is though, trying to add an extra layer to the story when thats actually a bit misleading and its a subject quite worthy enough of our attention even though its been apparent for way more than a few weeks now.

I havent got time to search to find the very earliest stories on the matter, so here is one from early May as a starter.









						Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots
					

Frigid temperatures, cramped conditions, and long hours put meat processing workers at higher risk for contracting the novel coronavirus.




					www.wired.com


----------



## Badgers (Jun 21, 2020)

Cheers elbows 

I had read various things about infections in the USA meat processing plants but not in the UK.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 21, 2020)

Is there a massive class action suit incoming?


----------



## two sheds (Jun 21, 2020)

Germany too - there was a story in a dutch paper toda (Volkskrant I think it was) but here's a uk story from May









						Coronavirus: Virus outbreaks push Germany to clean up abattoirs
					

Ministers agree a plan to ban temporary workers at slaughterhouses after a spate of cases.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				






> Germany has agreed a proposal to ban the use of temporary workers at slaughterhouses following a spate of coronavirus infections.
> 
> Hundreds of people working at abattoirs across Germany and France have tested positive for Covid-19 in recent weeks.
> 
> ...


----------



## Supine (Jun 21, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Cheers elbows
> 
> I had read various things about infections in the USA meat processing plants but not in the UK.



There was also a story about an outbreak in a mink farm. Maybe in Holland but I can’t quite remember.

Outbreaks in factories are going to be a thing for quiet some time I think. Some factories are very difficult to maintain social distancing so production lines will need to act like household units. Obviously this means the line needs to shutdown if anybody on the line goes down with it.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jun 21, 2020)

on bbc news this evening 









						2 Sisters Anglesey: 158 factory staff have coronavirus
					

More than 400 staff have now been tested following the outbreak at the chicken factory on Thursday.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Mogden (Jun 25, 2020)

I did a brief 2 week stint in a meat packing factory at Xmas time. I can absolutely say that hygiene was NOT a top priority. Nor was keeping stock fresh. I still remember vividly the smell of slightly off turkey breasts as I mashed them flat and rolled them into decorative meat log along with pancetta, slightly dubious & pungent cabbage leaves and lumps of frozen sausage meat for what was presumably joyless office Christmas parties at pubs and event venues. It wasn't fresh when I was making it never mind how it was by the time someone had cooked it poorly and shoved it under a heatlamp for a bit.

As a result of corona I've now been made redundant and had it confirmed today. Strangely to some I'm over the moon. Not been there 2 years but with holiday owing and their week pay off and other things I've got a chunk to come and they're keeping me on furlough until August so I have to officially sit and do nothing job-wise until then


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I did a brief 2 week stint in a meat packing factory at Xmas time. I can absolutely say that hygiene was NOT a top priority. Nor was keeping stock fresh. I still remember vividly the smell of slightly off turkey breasts as I mashed them flat and rolled them into decorative meat log along with pancetta, slightly dubious & pungent cabbage leaves and lumps of frozen sausage meat for what was presumably joyless office Christmas parties at pubs and event venues. It wasn't fresh when I was making it never mind how it was by the time someone had cooked it poorly and shoved it under a heatlamp for a bit.


Sounds fun  

When I did a few months working in an abattoir (1990s) it was almost spartan levels of hygiene. Still horrible but certainly nothing that would have worried me.


----------



## Mogden (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Sounds fun
> 
> When I did a few months working in an abattoir (1990s) it was almost spartan levels of hygiene. Still horrible but certainly nothing that would have worried me.


It was chilly even for me who is a human boiler in the winter and a cool cucumber in this weather. The place I've just been made redundant from is pretty much next door to the meat place. There were chunks of meat in the boot scrubbers and people talking, unmasked, very animatedly over the meat. It was a couple of years ago but I don't think it would have improved. There is a general odour in the area in all weathers.  It's as offputting as a stinky fish market 🤢


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Stay Alert and use common sense


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Best to get the pubs open ASAP


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Stay Alert and use common sense



can the police minister now dispatch cops without reference to chief cunstables and police & crime commissioners?


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Best to get the pubs open ASAP


get the tories on the beach

and then drive them into the sea


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Pickman's model said:


> can the police minister now dispatch cops without reference to chief cunstables and police & crime commissioners?


Dunno. Send in the army I say


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Tricky to tell if people are distancing but it does seem quite busy.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 25, 2020)

herd immunity on the way


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

two sheds said:


> herd immunity on the way


Was wondering today about 'herd immunity' and immune systems. Most the population have been distancing, staying out of (most) shops and work place  how much impact does that have on the immune system generally? Does that have any impact on the 'so called' herd immunity?


----------



## existentialist (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Was wondering today about 'herd immunity' and immune systems. Most the population have been distancing, staying out of (most) shops and work place  how much impact does that have on the immune system generally? Does that have any impact on the 'so called' herd immunity?


"Herd immunity" is just the situation which arises when enough people have been exposed to the infectious agent and are now immune, to the extent that there are insufficient infectable hosts for the virus to be able to stay in circulation.

The problem is that you usually want to achieve herd immunity via something controllable like vaccination, which - nutjob woo-merchant loonytunes times aside - is a LOT safer than just letting people get infected. Added to which, we don't know anything about the immunity behaviour of SARS-CoV-2, or even whether any immunity to subsequent infection is even conferred at all...and then, of course, there are the risks of complications from the infection itself.

Anyone thinking of going for herd immunity in the current situation was, in my view, guilty of a callous and cynical half-wittedness of epic proportions. #therearenotenoughlampposts


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Tricky to tell if people are distancing but it does seem quite busy.
> 
> View attachment 219371


I see dead people!


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> I see dead people!


If their selfish risk taking was limited to them I would wish death on them and their families. Sadly they will potentially spread it around for us all to share.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 25, 2020)

The common sense faculty has been disabled!


----------



## Badgers (Jun 25, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> The common sense faculty has been disabled!


The UK has not had it in my lifetime.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 25, 2020)

There would be less deaths if there was a drone strike on the beach.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 25, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> There would be less deaths if there was a drone strike on the beach.



Disgusting thing to say.




It's FEWER 








sorry


----------



## Numbers (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Tricky to tell if people are distancing but it does seem quite busy.
> 
> View attachment 219371


Let’s hope Covid has had a day off.

Makes me want to stay in for a few weeks more.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 25, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Disgusting thing to say.
> It's FEWER
> sorry


Don’t apologise, I’m fuming about this. The crowds not your pedantry.


----------



## two sheds (Jun 25, 2020)

Pedantry? PEDANTRY???


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 25, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Pedantry? PEDANTRY???


As above I don’t get out much.


----------



## elbows (Jun 25, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Was wondering today about 'herd immunity' and immune systems. Most the population have been distancing, staying out of (most) shops and work place  how much impact does that have on the immune system generally? Does that have any impact on the 'so called' herd immunity?



I've touched on this once or twice before I think, when trying to describe the logic behind certain established thoughts that sounded all wrong in this pandemic.

Epidemiologists spend most of their time dealing with epidemics, not pandemics. And they are used to operating in situations where mass vaccination is an option.

So in much of their working lives, one of the dangers they are highly attuned to is overall levels of population immunity against an existing virus starting to drop, because once that drops to a certain level then the situation becomes ripe for an epidemic. They would favour some kind of equilibrium, rather than the cycle of boom and bust (boom and bust being epidemic years and years with only background levels of virus activity).

When you remove vaccines from the toolkit and are dealing with a new novel virus where the population doesnt have existing immunity, their instincts are still inevitably primed to the stuff I've just mentioned, but there becomes little chance of generating acceptable public health policy from such thinking.

High levels of population immunity remain a desirable goal, but can hardly be sold as a desirable goal if there is no decent, sane and safe means of actually achieving it. Some people got in a mess over this because they could not let go of the goal despite the way of getting there being unacceptable in so many ways in the case of this pandemic. In the case of the UK government getting in a mess over it in March, it was part of their doomed attempt to sell their original plan, and we can see in SAGE papers that the idea came from someone within the behavioural modelling group, and the idea of bringing it up was for a very specific purpose:



> SPI-B have divergent opinions on the impact of not applying widescale social isolation at the same time as recommending isolation to at-risk groups. One view is that explaining that members of the community are building some immunity will make this acceptable. Another view is that recommending isolation to only one section of society risks causing discontent.



So it was just part of an attempt to justify the original UK plan, a plan that involved doing too little too late. And people were not happy with the plan, and it was while desperately having a final attempt at selling the plan to the public that Vallance decided to try that line of explanation that one or more people in SPI-B came up with days earlier. It blew up in his face straight away and the plan they were trying to defend using that herd immunity line was dead within a day or two.

Returning to the immunity stuff, let me create a fake scenario and then suggest what epidemiologists would think of it. If you told them we could stop anyone in the UK getting flu for the next 10 years, but then it would come back in and we would have no vaccine to deal with it initially, I'm pretty sure they would shit themselves with horror. Because thats the opposite of equilibrium, its a situation ripe for a huge epidemic, and they might fear something equivalent to a pandemic as a result. This is obviously a made up scenario but I'm using this inflated example to explore what sort of thinking they would have about people being kept tucked safely away from all infections for long periods of time.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> There would be less deaths if there was a drone strike on the beach.


Just cry there's a Tory in the water and the beach would clear faster than you can say Maastricht treaty


----------



## Badgers (Jun 26, 2020)

Cheers for that


----------



## Numbers (Jun 26, 2020)

First day in the office for me since this started.  Just fancied a change, came in via car and the company have some real good protocols in place, provide masks etc. which are mandatory to wear in shared spaces.  My floor usually holds a cpl of hundred people, there’s about 20 tops.  

Probably come in every Friday from now on.


----------



## gentlegreen (Jun 30, 2020)

I'm back at work for a bit - helping set up an office block with 100-odd socially-distanced work stations.
There are separate up and down stairs, but no masks - though we're tending to work separately and there are very few people on site. We're tending to work fairly light hours - 9.30 to 3.30 ... as it takes a while for stuff to get done ...
The guy I'm working with most lives alone like me...
My colleagues are looking and acting distinctly rough after not seeing them for 12 weeks - my first experience with people I know.
I've been chosen to work on site partly because of my own iffy mental state - I'm hoping that a month or more of this will help me finally go to HR and hand in my notice once I've brought the contents of my desk home on my bike - two panniers at a time...

It feels very weird not wearing a mask - though the workstations won't be used by clients for several weeks....
the top person at work is a medical doctor and the place is stuffed full of scientists, so I assume they have everything covered.


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## Pickman's model (Jun 30, 2020)

No word yet on going back to work but have to go in later this week to retrieve my stuff (moving to new workplace in autumn)


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## Pickman's model (Jun 30, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> the top person at work is a medical doctor and the place is stuffed full of scientists, so I assume they have everything covered.
> 
> View attachment 220171


you're a trusting soul


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 30, 2020)

I had a text from my manager (admin not engineering) yesterday, asking if it is okay for her to ring me on Thursday to discuss what may be happening in the near future.  I presume it is about a phased return to work, but experience tells me to be prepared for anything.
Occupational health are calling this morning to ‘see how I am’.  I guess to prepare my manager’s approach.


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## William of Walworth (Jun 30, 2020)

Myself and most colleagues are still just getting general texts saying "as you were" each Friday from the team-managers.

In our particular CS organisation, no thought was ever given to arranging for (m)any of us to work from home ...
A few higher managers, and one or two others doing properly emergency work, have actually been going in twice a week and WFH for the rest, but that's it.

Getting each of the rest of us a work-systems-secure laptop and printer wouldn't be an issue, even though expensive.

But it's overwhelmingly physical paperwork that we deal with in the offices, and they must have decided that physically delivering this to us several times a week (or even daily??  ), and collecting the processed files from us as well,  would be too complicated logistically.

There are thousands of us doing this type of work, we're a huge employer, and I'm among the minority who actually live near central Swansea -- most colleagues live well out of town.

So I can see why they knocked any idea of WFH on the head very early!! 

Even now, only very limited numbers from our standard teams are going back, and on a highly part-time basis (two days a week right now for those who are going in at all, as I understand it).

Our normally very busy offices have large number of banks of desks on each floor -- there are usually at least 50 to 60 individuals on our floor alone, for instance.

Apparantly, desk-dividers have been built, plus loads more of sanitiser provided, but they're being correctly ultra-strict about physical distancing in the office, and all sorts of other stuff.

And for myself? I'm in what Public Health Wales and my employers count as in a 'vulnerable' category.

Not high-level vulnerable (like post-transplant or whatever), just _standard_ vulnerable, as if I'm over 70 (I said 'as if'!  ) but generally OK.

So myself and a few others are likely to be among the very last to go back -- unless the Welsh Government make BIG changes -- and there's no news of this for the time being.

*So TLDR?*  :
I'm still at home (and not required to be strictly shielding either), and not WFH!
And on a CS thing called 'special leave' for the indefinite.
That is, on 'feather-bedded'  full pay  , too!  
I do appreciate my extreme luck (PCS rule!!).
Because although technically (and really) in a 'vulnerable' health category I've actually been in cracking health this year ....


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## hash tag (Jun 30, 2020)

This is a notice in a school in Leicester. The state of edukation today


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## killer b (Jun 30, 2020)

that's right isn't it?


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## Puddy_Tat (Jun 30, 2020)

i don't get it


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## two sheds (Jun 30, 2020)

... if you're american


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## hash tag (Jun 30, 2020)

Errr, no, not in my English dictionary it is not right


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## iona (Jul 1, 2020)

two sheds said:


> ... if you're american


Don't Americans always use "practice" and it's UK English that spells the noun that way but the verb "practise"?


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## two sheds (Jul 1, 2020)

iona said:


> Don't Americans always use "practice" and it's UK English that spells the noun that way but the verb "practise"?



Bloody hell you're not wrong, I must have been reading too many American articles - it looks wrong to me but isn't


----------



## gentlegreen (Jul 1, 2020)

Third day back at work and I reckon I'm going down with something already 
I had to get off and push my bike up the hill this morning (it doesn't help that I can't get onto the small cog at the moment as it needs a tweak).
Properly knackered ... touch of hayfever because they've let the grass grow at work, but there's more than that ...
Slight stiffness in the neck glands ...
Ironic that I'm helping set up a socially-distanced office block, but none of us are wearing masks ...


----------



## Espresso (Jul 1, 2020)

A tiny little bakery near me reopened this week. Now it's got perspex screens in the shop and it's one in and one out, which frankly is an improvement on the crush there always used to be in there, when ten people would be crammed in at the counter in a space that might comfortably hold five. It's been there forever in the same family. It's one of those places that everyone who's from here knows about because they used to go there with their granny for a jam tart for you and a meringue for her.

I was outside, idly waiting my turn and trying to decide if I wanted a cheese and onion pie or an Eccles cake (or both) with the bread I was really supposed to be getting, when a woman of about my general vintage came and joined the queue. She stood far enough away, and nodded at me so I said hello and wasn't it great that this place had reopened.  
Well, remind me not to pass the time of day with a stranger ever again.  
The man who was currently in the shop seemed to be buying a lot of things, so I stood on while this woman spoke for at least five minutes. She told me that she had popped down for a steak pie for the lady she cared for and that the government was lying to us and that they wanted to cull the old people and the immigrants and that I shouldn't get the vaccine and that this whole pandemic was man made and that no one had died in China, the government was just blaming them because they hated foreigners and that they'd manufactured the virus in order to force us into being a cashless society so they know where we are all of the time. 

Took the shine right off my Eccles cake, I don't mind telling you.


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## two sheds (Jul 1, 2020)

Shiny Eccles cakes are overrated


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## hash tag (Jul 1, 2020)

yep, should really have stuck with just the cheese, & onion pie.


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## Mation (Jul 1, 2020)

Not a lot of info yet on when or how we'll get back to work on site, apart from that it's likely to be part time there, in cohorts, and the rest of the week at home, for a long time to come. Probably the best option, given the cramped physical geography of our shared spaces. 

(Fuck. What the hell kind of sentence was that last one?  )


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## elbows (Jul 1, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Shiny Eccles cakes are overrated



Or this case more like "Eccles cakes are ppeeeooopppllleeeee!", well according to that woman.


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## Puddy_Tat (Jul 1, 2020)

iona said:


> Don't Americans always use "practice" and it's UK English that spells the noun that way but the verb "practise"?





two sheds said:


> Bloody hell you're not wrong, I must have been reading too many American articles - it looks wrong to me but isn't



I thought Americans used practise (also license) as both noun and verb, but in English English, -ce is noun and -se is verb

as in you (in England) get your driving licen*c*e from the driver and vehicle licen*s*ing agency.

the way i was taught to remember which to use is that they are like advice (noun) / advise (verb) which are pronounced differently as well.


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## two sheds (Jul 1, 2020)

Yep this is what I've discovered today, and nice way of remembering, ta 

eta: and showing how confused I am, this is wrong   - see iona's post below


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## William of Walworth (Jul 2, 2020)

Mation said:


> Not a lot of info yet on when or how we'll get back to work on site, apart from that it's likely to be part time there, in cohorts, and the rest of the week at home, for a long time to come. Probably the best option, given the cramped physical geography of our shared spaces.
> 
> (*Fuck. What the hell kind of sentence was that last one?*  )



I understood it all, no problem, but that's most likely because your workplace's situation is very similar to our workplace's situation!


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## iona (Jul 2, 2020)

Puddy_Tat said:


> I thought Americans used practise (also license) as both noun and verb


That would make sense but the first page of results when you google it all say it's always practice in American English.


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## two sheds (Jul 2, 2020)

iona said:


> That would make sense but the first page of results when you google it all say it's always practice in American English.



Yes this is what I should have posted.

And it's license (but practice) for both noun and verb in American English while licence/license and practice/practise for noun/verb  in English English.

I'm going word blind now - was trying to type lisence and lisense instead - licence for some reason looks wrong to me .

This has insenced/insensed me 

Eta: I'm now going to have to look them up every time. And I thought I was losing it when trying to search for "incensed"  because all that came up was "smelly things" and I thought I must have imagined the angry word.


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## Wilf (Jul 2, 2020)

two sheds said:


> You wouldn't have heard him if you'd had double glazing
> 
> Ted Moult used to do those ads a good half century ago.


Gawd. Ted Moult, there's a name I haven't heard for years. No idea who/what he was, just that he was famous enough to do double glazing ads. Off to wiki I go...

Edit: farmer, tv personality, adverts. Poor sod killed himself at 60.


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## Smangus (Jul 3, 2020)

I think this has to be my fav Covid storey so far 


Man offers to resign after showering during live video meeting


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## Sunray (Jul 3, 2020)

Smangus said:


> I think this has to be my fav Covid storey so far
> 
> 
> Man offers to resign after showering during live video meeting



Losing your job for failing to press the mute button is a bit harsh.


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## HAL9000 (Jul 4, 2020)

How N95 masks work



Ideas how to reuse N95 masks









						Publications — N95DECON
					






					www.n95decon.org
				






			https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e8126f89327941b9453eeef/t/5ef3082dfb45df1a89354ff5/1592985645916/2020-06-21_N95DECON_Time_factsheet_v1-2_final.pdf


----------



## Tankus (Jul 5, 2020)

Dunno if this  has already been posted..... But... Covid may remain with you for the rest of your shortened life if you survive it..... The roll is a sobering read... Plus other survivors comments... If you follow her thread down.... 


And here
Thousands Who Got COVID-19 in March Are Still Sick - The Atlantic COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months

Why risk this to yourself or family for a pint


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## gentlegreen (Jul 5, 2020)

My neighbour from further down the street met me on the garden path yesterday as she was posting invites to clap for the NHS anniversary at 5pm today - mine was personally addressed so I don't know how many she actually posted - but I wouldn't be surprised if she knows a lot of neighbours by name - she shops for the neighbour opposite with COPD. I've lived in the street for 35 years ...
I stopped doing anything on Thursdays a long time ago, and there was never much enthusiasm near me - but I hope I will walk down the street to join them - not least because it's clearly important to her - I even put my own NHS poster back up in my window for the weekend ...


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## gentlegreen (Jul 6, 2020)

So I clapped with my neighbours, but then inevitably the Downing street creature made sure it was seen to be doing it.


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## William of Walworth (Jul 6, 2020)

Tankus said:


> Dunno if this  has already been posted..... But... Covid may remain with you for the rest of your shortened life if you survive it..... The roll is a sobering read... Plus other survivors comments... If you follow her thread down....
> 
> 
> And here
> ...




I read that account of her experiences and it was truly scary -- I fully sympathise with her 

But I do have to ask, how *common* is it, might anyone know, for someone to endure such an extreme number of symptoms, and for so long?

I suspect that thankfully, cases as horrible as that are pretty rare.

If that's the case, your throwaway comment at the end about going to the pub is IMO unnecessary, irrelevant even!


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## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

I don’t see much sign of anyone monitoring how common this kind of experience is, in this country at least.


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## William of Walworth (Jul 6, 2020)

zahir said:


> I don’t see much sign of anyone monitoring how common this kind of experience is, in this country at least.



OK, probably not.
But I suppose I was really questioning how _representative_ such an extreme case might be.
My gut reaction is to think it isn't very representative of corona cases generally. Thankfully!


----------



## Brainaddict (Jul 6, 2020)

I was interested to see this article on long-term fatigue and other symptoms reference the studies on SARS, which showed long term health effects for some. Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise that the same thing happened with this disease Scientists investigate cases of post-Covid-19 fatigue


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## Tankus (Jul 6, 2020)

Is it ?....a throwaway?  ......bars,  restaurants, churches and sporting events ...all have featured quite prominently in contact tracing ...

Worth a read too








						Revealed: the long-term severe effects of Covid-19 that could go on for months
					

Wide-ranging and often 'bizarre' symptoms can persist weeks and even months after first falling ill




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## IC3D (Jul 6, 2020)

I was diagnosed with CFS after a severe virus many years ago. For years I had brain fog, fatigue became intolerant of caffeine, alcohol and other foods amongst  load of other wierd symptoms. Was horrible and I can well believe it is happening to a minority that had covid 19


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## LDC (Jul 6, 2020)

Unpicking the reason for long term symptoms and problems post some illnesses are complex though. Some of it can be physical health issues (damage, muscle wastage, etc) some of it can be mental health issues, and some is the interplay between the two. There's a number of conditions whose causes are disputed among medical professionals, patients, and sometimes pressure/representative groups. Anyway, this will also be playing out with CV, so the picture is far from a simple: get CV and survive = have long term physical health problems.


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## Brainaddict (Jul 6, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> the picture is far from a simple: get CV and survive = have long term physical health problems.


No-one has said that though. But there are figures available for SARS (one study said 17% of SARS survivors hadn't been able to return to work one year later, but I think that was severe hospitalised cases) and there is increasingly data available for CV-19. The CV-19 symptoms tracker app says that 1 in 10 people who got the virus that they've been tracking have had longer term symptoms. Which is not insignificant, and very different from, say, a bad cold, which lots of people wanted to compare milder cases to.


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## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Unpicking the reason for long term symptoms and problems post some illnesses are complex though. Some of it can be physical health issues (damage, muscle wastage, etc) some of it can be mental health issues, and some is the interplay between the two.



I wonder if there’s a risk here of blurring the difference between cognitive issues to do with the effects of the virus and depression and other mental health issues. I’d hope that people facing cognitive issues don’t just get offered a couple of sessions of CBT over the phone.



> Anyway, this will also be playing out with CV, so the picture is far from a simple: get CV and survive = have long term physical health problems.



Yes, I think my case is relatively mild but at the moment I’m not assuming that at some point everything is going to get back to normal.


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## existentialist (Jul 6, 2020)

Brainaddict said:


> No-one has said that though. But there are figures available for SARS (one study said 17% of SARS survivors hadn't been able to return to work one year later, but I think that was severe hospitalised cases) and there is increasingly data available for CV-19. The CV-19 symptoms tracker app says that 1 in 10 people who got the virus that they've been tracking have had longer term symptoms. Which is not insignificant, and very different from, say, a bad cold, which lots of people wanted to compare milder cases to.


But lots of people ARE saying that! There's a very well-entrenched view that "it's just a flu", and that both severity and mortality are being exaggerated by those with vested interests. I'm in the middle of some very uncomfortable discussions with just one such person, who insists she's already had it (probably unlikely), that it's being made a big deal of to serve ulterior motives, and that the restrictions are excessive and politically motivated.

For those of us who can see past a few soundbites, it's probably fairly obvious that a serious respiratory infection is likely to have further-reaching consequences, at least in some cases, but we would be wise not to assume that everyone realises this.


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## IC3D (Jul 6, 2020)

Interesting this discussion is playing out already by floating ideas of mental health issues in regard to symptoms. I hope research can be done so this cohort suffering long term symptoms can getaway from the syndrome label. Living with CFS is made tenfold worse when people don't believe you. Yes it leads to depression as any long term illness does and reading these accounts has reminded me about what I went through. Mental health professionals in this instance should hold back for the time being and hopefully good research on the phsysiology of post viral illness will bepu lished.


----------



## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

_See this from the NHS site:_

Patients who have been in hospital or suffered at home with the virus will have access to a face-to-face consultation with their local rehabilitation team, usually comprising of physiotherapists, nurses and mental health specialists.

Following this initial assessment, those who need it will be offered a personalised package of online-based aftercare lasting up to 12 weeks, available later this Summer.

Accessible, on-demand, from the comfort of their own home, this will include:


Access to a local clinical team including nurses and physiotherapists who can respond either online or over the phone to any enquiries from patients;
An online peer-support community for survivors – particularly helpful for those who may be recovering at home alone;
Exercise tutorials that people can do from home to help them regain muscle strength and lung function in particular, and;
Mental health support, which may include a psychologist within the online hub or referral into NHS mental health services along with information on what to expect post-COVID


----------



## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

Obviously it’s a good thing that this is being planned for but it does make me wonder how appropriate the ‘mental health support’ is going to be.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 6, 2020)

zahir said:


> Obviously it’s a good thing that this is being planned for but it does make me wonder how appropriate the ‘mental health support’ is going to be.


Oh, I expect they'll contract Serco to train up a few thousand school leavers to run some kind of CBT-based manualised bullshit along the lines of the IAPT thing they had a crack at a decade or so ago. They'll start with something nicely one-size-fits-all, and dumb it down to the point of uselessness. Think "Turkish PPE".


----------



## LDC (Jul 6, 2020)

zahir said:


> Obviously it’s a good thing that this is being planned for but it does make me wonder how appropriate the ‘mental health support’ is going to be.



Depends, mental health care in the NHS is like all the other parts of it; underfunded, etc etc.


----------



## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

Think a 'mild' case of Covid-19 doesn’t sound so bad? Think again | Adrienne Matei
					

Otherwise healthy people who thought they had recovered from coronavirus are reporting persistent and strange symptoms - including strokes




					www.theguardian.com
				




_The article links to this extract from a Dutch report on longer term effects:_



			https://www.biomax.com/lib/press-releases/Initial-Result-Announcment_English.pdf
		


The health of many Corona patients who have not been admitted to hospital is still 'frighteningly poor' after months. That's what Longfonds director Michael Rutgers says. Many home patients even have problems walking.

Fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pressure, headaches, muscle aches: almost three months after the first symptoms typical for the virus, part of the Corona patients who were sick at home still have serious complaints. This was the conclusion of a survey carried out by the Dutch Lung Foundation together with the treatment and knowledge centre CIRO and Maastricht University among more than 1600 people with Corona type complains. No less than 95 percent of those surveyed indicated that they had problems with simple daily activities. Longfonds director Michael Rutgers. „We're really shocked by this. More than six in ten even have problems walking.''

Of the people who participated in the study, 91 percent have never been in hospital because of Corona, and 43 percent have not been diagnosed by a doctor. "This is the first time that this large patient group has been identified. These people really need to be seen, heard and helped,'' says Rutgers. „We need to prevent this group of patients from ending up invisible after corona.''

The average age of participants in the study is 53 years. By far the largest group (85 percent) says that their health was good before the Corona infection; now only 6 percent experience good health. Nearly half of them said that they were no longer able to exercise after the corona infection. The health of corona patients who have experienced the disease at home is frighteningly poor,'' explains the Longfonds director. Until now, the focus has been - rightly so - on the people who have ended up in the hospital or even on the ICU. But we shouldn't forget this group of home-based Corona patients.''

Patients with lung problems after Corona can visit an online platform 'Coronalongplein' of the Lung Fund and the Lung Alliance Netherlands (LAN). There is also a 12,000 member Facebook group with Corona experiences and long-term complaints. Rutgers: "That thousands to tens of thousands of people still have complaints is certain; the question is whether that will remain so in the long run.”

Veterinarian Marcel de Kruijff is one of those patients: “The RIVM says that you can go back into the wide world if you are free of complaints for 24 hours, but that's not how it works. Everyone will think: this guy has to get a kick in the ass and then he'll be fine. But it really doesn't work.”

Top 10 most frequently mentioned complaints, almost three months after the first symptoms

Fatigue (87.8%)
Shortness of breath or tightness of breath (74.2%) 
Chest pressure (45.4%)
Headache (39.8%)
Muscle pain (36.2%)
Pain between shoulder blades (35.2%)
Palpitations (32.7%)
Increased resting heart rate (30.1%)
Dizziness (28.6%)
Coughing (28.3%)

Source: Lung Fund Survey, treatment and knowledge centre CIRO and Maastricht University


----------



## IC3D (Jul 6, 2020)

There's plenty of posts on nursing FB groups complaining of long term symptoms.


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## zahir (Jul 6, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Depends, mental health care in the NHS is like all the other parts of it; underfunded, etc etc.



Also Maslow’s hammer: “_I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”_


----------



## existentialist (Jul 6, 2020)

IC3D said:


> Interesting this discussion is playing out already by floating ideas of mental health issues in regard to symptoms. I hope research can be done so this cohort suffering long term symptoms can getaway from the syndrome label. Living with CFS is made tenfold worse when people don't believe you. Yes it leads to depression as any long term illness does and reading these accounts has reminded me about what I went through. Mental health professionals in this instance should hold back for the time being and hopefully good research on the phsysiology of post viral illness will bepu lished.


I think the problem with a lot of things like CFS, ME, fibromyalgia, etc., is that while there is clearly often a psychological component, people - especially people with conditions such as those - have got so used to being brushed off with excuses like "it's all in the mind" that they can often become actively resistant to the merest idea that state of mind is a factor, either way, in these conditions.

I haven't worked with many people with CFS, but I have a fairly regular stream of clients for whom fibromyalgia is on the list of conditions, and many of them do get at least some relief from a counselling intervention. But it does need to be properly and sensitively done - to be honest, I think the kind of "six sessions of CBT and off you go" approach isn't the best one for conditions like this. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?


----------



## editor (Jul 6, 2020)

This is going to screw with Trump's racism 








						Exclusive: Covid-19 may not have originated in China, Oxford University expert believes
					

Coronavirus may have lain dormant across the world and emerged when the environmental conditions were right for it to thrive rather than starting in China, an Oxford University expert believes. Dr Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), at Oxford...




					uk.news.yahoo.com


----------



## existentialist (Jul 6, 2020)

editor said:


> This is going to screw with Trump's racism
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Nah, he'll just go "fake nooos", and make extra China jokes at his next speech.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 6, 2020)

> There was a cruise ship that went from South Georgia to Buenos Aires, and the passengers were screened and then on day eight, when they started sailing towards the Weddell Sea, they got the first case. Was it in prepared food that was defrosted and activated?



A bit concerning (possibly).


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## elbows (Jul 6, 2020)

two sheds said:


> A bit concerning (possibly).



Like several other parts of the article, I thought this bit was weak. 8 days for a case to emerge, presumably via symptoms emerging, does not require special explanations. Nor should the idea that passengers were initially 'screened' imply much, such screening processes cannot begin to identify everyone who may already be infected.

Articles like this are good when they encourage people to keep questioning stuff and not rely on assumptions. They should also give people a sense of just how poorly many things are understood and how relatively little effort went into improving our understanding over many decades. But when the people involved in these articles sound too keen to find 'things that can only be explained by our own pet theories' then I go off them and start to nit pick at their ideas.

The idea that it was in sewage in europe in 2019 is also unconfirmed at this time, as usual multiple explanations for the initial studies findings exist. Was coronavirus really in Europe in March 2019?

I'm not necessarily keen on language about the virus 'remaining dormant' either. For me I find it easier to believe it wasnt totally dormant, but that all manner of viruses exist without us noticing them unless they have a really obvious burden on health of plenty of people. Thinking of it as dormant is a rather human-centric stance that hints at some of our blind-spots. I dont know its history pre Wuhan, I only know that in Wuhan it caused enough of a health impact that people noticed it for the first time. We know there are viruses out there which have animal hosts to thrive in, and that will sometimes have the opportunity to infect some humans. This probably happens far more than we will ever know. The big question is whether these viruses are then capable of spreading effectively in human populations in ways that are very hard to stop, or whether they fizzle out, or whether their healtchcare buden is great enough for anyone to really notice. I dont understand the blokes surprise about SARS 1 disappearing, it looked like a case of a virus that could spread between humans in certain settings but that wasnt quite as rampant as this SARS2, so when humans became aware of the SARS outbreaks they were able to get them under control and the outbreaks did not seem to extend much beyond the identified clusters. So transmission was successfully controlled and there was then no further spread in the general population. There are a whole bunch of influenza viruses that we have noticed in animals or the resulting small, controlled human outbreaks, which are considered to have pandemic potential, giving scientists sleepless nights and reasons to put in funding requests, but most of these may never unlock that potential and there are so many uncertainties that I feel this side of disease surveillance is still in its infancy in some ways.

As for the faecal transmission stuff, thats another lesson from known SARS 1 outbreaks and should not be a surprise. I think it should have been focussed on a little more with the basic public health messages, god knows I've brought it up enough since February but there you go. SAGE were certainly looking at the stacked risks from public toilets some time ago, I think I quoted them on that subject recently.


----------



## elbows (Jul 6, 2020)

And I would always invite people to think about how much of the picture we were missing by virtue of simply not looking.

In the UK in February the virus was not actually dormant as far as those vulnerable to death from it were concerned, its just we werent looking for it unless the people in question had an absurdly specific and narrow travel history. And it wasnt prevalent enough to cause the sorts of levels of healthcare burden that would sound the alarm on their own. Once we actually started looking we quickly found deaths, and then the number of infections also got to the level where the healthcare burden became obvious. But there were still periods where the virus was doing things here that could still be dismissed by certain mindsets as the virus being dormant, when it was anything but. As we come out of the other side of the first wave there may be plenty of times and places that, if we were not now actively seeking to find cases, could easily be considered to be virus-free if we didnt know better.

Even without the influence of mutations over time, a virus that can cause a dramatic, world-changing pandemic in one period can be an irrelevance that would hardly be noticed or cared about at others. It is convenient to attach simplistic explanations to these phenomenon, such as 'it mutated to become less dangerous', or that the virus somehow has its own mind and rhythm, when really its probably interplay between a whole bunch of factors, some which we have some reasonable understanding of and some that we probably dont. So its not terribly surprising that even many experts in relevant fields may be searching for a theory to comfort their sense that 'something doesnt add up', or interested laypersons like me who from time to time go on about 'still expecting a twist or two in the story of this virus'.

For the sake of the future, people and planet it would be very convenient if I could believe that there was a 'magic factor' which made this virus gain its devastating impact on human health, and that it turned out to be various forms of industrial and transport pollution, that would really upset the apple-cart in ways that could actually aid human progress eventually after much pain and transition. The virus that ate cars. If I had a different attitude to reality then I would probably be trying to peddle that idea, crudely fitting the 'facts' to serve my theory. Instead I will just be found occasionally bringing the theme up but not expecting it to go anywhere really, just one of many angles to muse over, just another thing that is unlikely to be a good fit for the complexities of this universe. Just another passing blip on the radar that I cannot afford to become too attached to.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jul 7, 2020)

elbows said:


> As for the faecal transmission stuff, thats another lesson from known SARS 1 outbreaks and should not be a surprise. I think it should have been focussed on a little more with the basic public health messages, god knows I've brought it up enough since February but there you go. SAGE were certainly looking at the stacked risks from public toilets some time ago, I think I quoted them on that subject recently.



When I did the quarantine here, they gave us tablets to put in the cistern of our toilet, and a special sachet of chemicals to pour over our shit before we flushed.  Taking no chances.


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 7, 2020)

editor said:


> This is going to screw with Trump's racism
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Seems like one of the more leftfield theories about the spread of the virus - his research also seems to have been on the sloppy side.



> As an example of this possibility, he pointed to the isolation of Western Samoa, which lost 22% of its population to Spanish Flu in 1918, and claimed the islands had no contact with the outside world. However, it is well documented that Spanish Flu arrived on board the SS Talune on 7 November, 1918, when six infected passengers from New Zealand were allowed ashore.[9][10].


----------



## zahir (Jul 7, 2020)

More on long term symptoms









						Coronavirus: Thousands say debilitating symptoms last 'for weeks'
					

Thousands of people with Covid-19 report recurring symptoms for far longer than 14 days.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Jul 8, 2020)




----------



## bimble (Jul 8, 2020)

Well this is terrifying.








						Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms
					

UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## LDC (Jul 8, 2020)

bimble said:


> Well this is terrifying.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



They'll be lots of this stuff, and some of it will be proven to be true over time, and some of it won't, but will make great (read scary) headlines in the meantime. The numbers in that study are really small too compared to total infections, so they're not that concerning tbh.


----------



## platinumsage (Jul 9, 2020)

editor said:


> This is going to screw with Trump's racism
> 
> 
> 
> ...





existentialist said:


> Nah, he'll just go "fake nooos", and make extra China jokes at his next speech.



Even a stopped clock.... That  article is a complete crock of shite containing as much woo as homeopathy.

Of course the Chinese state love it: www.twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1281141150628249600

Thread:


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 9, 2020)

I picked up what claim to be some KN95 masks recently, how useful are these?


----------



## Supine (Jul 9, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> I picked up what claim to be some KN95 masks recently, how useful are these?



what do you want to use them for?


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 9, 2020)

Supine said:


> what do you want to use them for?



Tube travel, they seemed a better idea than cotton masks


----------



## Supine (Jul 9, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> Tube travel, they seemed a better idea than cotton masks



you certainly wouldn’t be underprepared


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jul 10, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> I picked up what claim to be some KN95 masks recently, how useful are these?



These are what I would wear indoors. They protect you as much as protecting other people. Since there seems to be a low uptake in people wearing masks, these are the most useful kind.  

Where did you get them?


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 10, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> These are what I would wear indoors. They protect you as much as protecting other people. Since there seems to be a low uptake in people wearing masks, these are the most useful kind.
> 
> Where did you get them?



eBay, they are about all that are available on there of you look for ffp2 masks.

Paranoid they are a crock of shit fake of course.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jul 10, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> eBay, they are about all that are available on there of you look for ffp2 masks.
> 
> Paranoid they are a crock of shit fake of course.



They're probably fine. There are more than enough N95 masks for everyone at this point so there's no need to be selling fakes. If the UK govt chooses to not get a decent supply for key workers, that is due to their own shitness, not a lack of availability. I have shipped boxes of them out of China and to loved ones, and since the virus was brought under control here, they can be manufactured and exported in great quantities. 

These are basically identical to the kind I buy.


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 10, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> They're probably fine. There are more than enough N95 masks for everyone at this point so there's no need to be selling fakes. If the UK govt chooses to not get a decent supply for key workers, that is due to their own shitness, not a lack of availability. I have shipped boxes of them out of China and to loved ones, and since the virus was brought under control here, they can be manufactured and exported in great quantities.
> 
> These are basically identical to the kind I buy.



Yeah those look like the ones.

Main downside is they aren’t individually wrapped (two packs of 10)


----------



## SpookyFrank (Jul 10, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> If that's the case, your throwaway comment at the end about going to the pub is IMO unnecessary, irrelevant even!



I mean we know this thing kills a non-trivial number of the people it infects. If that's not cause enough to stay away from the pub then probably nothing will be.


----------



## platinumsage (Jul 10, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> I mean we know this thing kills a non-trivial number of the people it infects. If that's not cause enough to stay away from the pub then probably nothing will be.



What's non-trivial? 1800 people die on the roads each year - is that cause enough to stay away from roads and pavements?


----------



## two sheds (Jul 10, 2020)

Enough to walk out into the road without looking


----------



## two sheds (Jul 10, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> What's non-trivial? 1800 people die on the roads each year - is that cause enough to stay away from roads and pavements?



Sorry my response was a bit glib but cv is different in that it's infectious if nothing else. But yes our safety priorities are generally all over the place.


----------



## Numbers (Jul 10, 2020)

I’m in the office today, came in 2 weeks ago also.

Mrs dropped me off in Aldgate which was crazy busy with traffic, cyclists and people walking, I caught the Met line to Baker St, tube was sparse and everyone was wearing a mask, it felt comfortable enough.

Office is pretty empty, security provide us with 2 masks in a sealed bag +
individual hand sanitizer (I sneakily get another pack when security change).

Our offices are fogged every weekend and occupied desks are thoroughly cleaned every night.

All in feels safe enough.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 10, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Sorry my response was a bit glib but cv is different in that it's infectious if nothing else. But yes our safety priorities are generally all over the place.


There is psychology involved here . People are more scared of a) invisible things, b) things they can't control, c) things they've been told to be scared of.

Covid-19 ticks all the boxes, plane crashes are mainly (b) with a bit of (c), RTAs are...meh.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 10, 2020)

Yes rtas you feel you can avoid them, cv not so much.


----------



## Numbers (Jul 10, 2020)

Numbers said:


> I’m in the office today, came in 2 weeks ago also.
> 
> Mrs dropped me off in Aldgate which was crazy busy with traffic, cyclists and people walking, I caught the Met line to Baker St, tube was sparse and everyone was wearing a mask, it felt comfortable enough.
> 
> ...


Completely different experience on the way home.  Jubilee line from Baker St, by the time the tube got to London Bdg every seat (30) was occupied + I counted approx’ 25 people standing, even tho’ everyone was wearing a mask it was uncomfortably busy and made me a tad tetchy.


----------



## ska invita (Jul 10, 2020)

Coronavirus thrives at 4C, scientists find, raising fears of winter resurgence
					

It reflects a growing consensus that heat - in particular from sunlight - harms the virus’s ability to survive outside the body




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## retribution (Jul 11, 2020)

ska invita said:


> Coronavirus thrives at 4C, scientists find, raising fears of winter resurgence
> 
> 
> It reflects a growing consensus that heat - in particular from sunlight - harms the virus’s ability to survive outside the body
> ...


It's the first weekend of a 6 week lockdown here in Melbourne. I wondered whether our recent surge is related to the fact that we're in the cooler south.

As we bunker down again it's really bringing home how this is how it's going to be until we get a vaccine. Open up, lockdown, repeat...


----------



## ska invita (Jul 11, 2020)

retribution said:


> It's the first weekend of a 6 week lockdown here in Melbourne. I wondered whether our recent surge is related to the fact that we're in the cooler south.
> As we bunker down again it's really bringing home how this is how it's going to be until we get a vaccine. Open up, lockdown, repeat...


good luck with round 2...
it seems inevitable to me we're going to have a second lockdown in the uk (if not a third)....uk winters are colder and damper than melbourne - 4 degrees is much close to an average temperature...its partly that seeming inevitability that's making me try to embrace the summer and have as much fun in it as is possible....winter in lockdown would be really miserable and claustrophobic, so while the going is good im going to try and make hay


----------



## retribution (Jul 11, 2020)

ska invita said:


> good luck with round 2...
> it seems inevitable to me we're going to have a second lockdown in the uk (if not a third)....uk winters are colder and damper than melbourne - 4 degrees is much close to an average temperature...its partly that seeming inevitability that's making me try to embrace the summer and have as much fun in it as is possible....winter in lockdown would be really miserable and claustrophobic, so while the going is good im going to try and make hay



Thanks. Definitely (responsibly) enjoy what freedoms you can whilst you've got them!

Normally this weekend I'd be at Freerotation in Wales dancing to techno with friends. Instead I'm cooking pierogi,  listening to mixes, and havin a dance in the kitchen in Australia.


----------



## ska invita (Jul 11, 2020)

ive only a half size fridge and no room for a freezer so tend to shop every single day if working, or every other day if lazing. id love to have a stash, mainly as i dont like shopping + the odds of civilisational collapse  seem high to me

friends living in remote western scotland would food shop once a month, a 5 hour round trip to Fort WIlliam, volvo estate packed to the gills. id find that so hard, shopping for a month - it takes some serious planning, both in shopping and consuming..no popping out to the corner shop there


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jul 11, 2020)

Mystery surrounds Hove Lawns stone coronavirus tribute | The Argus
					

AN ENORMOUS tribute to those who have died from coronavirus in the UK has been created on a public green.



					www.theargus.co.uk


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 11, 2020)

ska invita said:


> ive only a half size fridge and no room for a freezer so tend to shop every single day if working, or every other day if lazing. id love to have a stash, mainly as i dont like shopping + the odds of civilisational collapse  seem high to me
> 
> friends living in remote western scotland would food shop once a month, a 5 hour round trip to Fort WIlliam, volvo estate packed to the gills. id find that so hard, shopping for a month - it takes some serious planning, both in shopping and consuming..no popping out to the corner shop there



We mostly eat veg so adjusting to a two week large shop was hard because fresh veg only last about a week if your lucky and you have to buy a ton.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 11, 2020)

ska invita said:


> ive only a half size fridge and no room for a freezer so tend to shop every single day if working, or every other day if lazing. id love to have a stash, mainly as i dont like shopping + the odds of civilisational collapse  seem high to me
> 
> friends living in remote western scotland would food shop once a month, a 5 hour round trip to Fort WIlliam, volvo estate packed to the gills. id find that so hard, shopping for a month - it takes some serious planning, both in shopping and consuming..no popping out to the corner shop there



I've only had a camping fridge since I got here, which is good to hold milk and yoghourt and a few other bits but not much more. I got a half-height freezer a few years ago (in shed no. 2) on the insistence of a lodger and have to say it's been very useful over the last couple of months.


----------



## ska invita (Jul 11, 2020)

ska invita said:


> ive only a half size fridge and no room for a freezer so tend to shop every single day if working, or every other day if lazing. id love to have a stash, mainly as i dont like shopping + the odds of civilisational collapse  seem high to me
> 
> friends living in remote western scotland would food shop once a month, a 5 hour round trip to Fort WIlliam, volvo estate packed to the gills. id find that so hard, shopping for a month - it takes some serious planning, both in shopping and consuming..no popping out to the corner shop there


Meant to post this on Badgers hoarding thread, woops!


----------



## pesh (Jul 11, 2020)

First days work in 4 months, everything is heavier than I remember and after paying for travel and renewing my PLI for the year I'm down about £50 :doh:


----------



## Cloo (Jul 12, 2020)

Our offices will remain shut until at least end of September apparently - my guess is they won't reopen this year. It wouldn't be too hard to work at distance there, although they reckon they could only safely get 25% of people in there, but the main issue is getting there. Not going in is basically the best way I can help avoid spreading anything, as not commuting massively cuts down the number of people I come into close, prolonged contact with on a weekly basis and I can do my job from home and avoid thatv contact entirely.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 13, 2020)

Not great herd immunity news 






						Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

<strong>Exclusive:</strong> King’s College London team found steep drops in antibody levels three months after infection




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## 2hats (Jul 13, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Not great herd immunity news
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Again, T cell part of the picture likely missing.


----------



## treelover (Jul 13, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Mystery surrounds Hove Lawns stone coronavirus tribute | The Argus
> 
> 
> AN ENORMOUS tribute to those who have died from coronavirus in the UK has been created on a public green.
> ...



thats is so so moving, each stone apparently has a number on it, a real labour of love


----------



## gentlegreen (Jul 14, 2020)

Third week back at work and benefiting greatly from the exercise.
Still quiet on the cycle path even though I'm setting off an hour later than previously so little in the way of bad behaviour and I'm making more allowances for debutant cyclists.
On the main road coming home though, business as usual with close overtakes on a blind bend 100 yards from a roundabout - yesterday with me frantically signalling "keep back" due to the oncoming bus that only I could see  and then gesticulating after them.
Thankfully as usual I quickly reverted to enjoying being outside as it's only a short road section before a park.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 14, 2020)

The Government's Ten Biggest Coronavirus Lies Unmasked – Byline Times
					

With mounting scandals and inconsistencies over the Government's handling of COVID-19, Stephen Colegrave and Peter Jukes have compiled a list of its biggest falsehoods so far




					bylinetimes.com


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 14, 2020)

I'm feeling very negative at the moment with the situation as the majority of the news about the virus is not good at all.  Apologies in advance because this post won't cheer anyone up.

The major breakouts in areas with warm climates and outdoor life just shows that the virus is happy regardless of the weather.  We've had a pretty good lockdown compared to some but there are far too many who seem to think its all over, they just don't have any handle on the situation.  I really fear for the next 6 - 8 months.

The news regarding antibodies and immunity is limited but what is out there is not good.  More reports coming through about people who are catching it twice or more are beginning to seep through.  The short to medium term health implications for some sound very grim.  The long term health implications regarding lung scarring is unknown but given they are seeing it in asymptomatic people its hard to be anything other than worried.

I am pretty sure I had the virus back at the end of March.  It was only a glancing blow but between me and my partner we ticked every covid box.  I am aware that I am very unfit having recently been the most sedentary I've ever been in my life but I played my first game of cricket of the season and at one point found myself gasping for air in a way I don't recall ever having done before.  I don't know, it's probably the lack of fitness.

Oh and the whole economy, jobs and livelihoods thing doesn't look super duper either, does it?


----------



## Doodler (Jul 14, 2020)

Patient outcomes must improve as more is learned but no you're right the jobs front looks like it might become as bad as the early-mid 1980s.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 14, 2020)

I don't seem to have the fatigue other people have had but I am not sure my lungs are back to normal at all. Don't really want to waste doctors time though and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to see them.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 14, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I don't seem to have the fatigue other people have had but I am not sure my lungs are back to normal at all. Don't really want to waste doctors time though and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to see them.



Phone interview? I've not seen whether asthma-type inhalers help but might be worth asking whether you could try one?


----------



## Supine (Jul 14, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I don't seem to have the fatigue other people have had but I am not sure my lungs are back to normal at all. Don't really want to waste doctors time though and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to see them.



You'd be helping them understand the disease of you talked to them about it


----------



## zahir (Jul 14, 2020)

two sheds said:


> I've not seen whether asthma-type inhalers help but might be worth asking whether you could try one?



I’ve been given an inhaler. I’ve only used it a couple of times and I’m not sure it was helpful but it might help other people, perhaps if they have a problem with oxygen levels which I don’t seem to have. The GP sounded a bit doubtful about the evidence for using it.


----------



## zahir (Jul 14, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I don't seem to have the fatigue other people have had but I am not sure my lungs are back to normal at all. Don't really want to waste doctors time though and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to see them.



I shouldn’t think the doctors would see it as wasting their time. It all seems geared to dealing with covid at the moment.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 14, 2020)

zahir said:


> I’ve been given an inhaler. I’ve only used it a couple of times and I’m not sure it was helpful but it might help other people, perhaps if they have a problem with oxygen levels which I don’t seem to have. The GP sounded a bit doubtful about the evidence for using it.



Blue (salbutamol) one?


----------



## zahir (Jul 14, 2020)

Yes. I think it’s the standard one used for asthma. I was given a prescription for the inhaler and a course of antibiotics when I spoke to the 111 doctor.

 (edit: actually from the local out of hours GP not the 111 doctor)


----------



## scifisam (Jul 15, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I don't seem to have the fatigue other people have had but I am not sure my lungs are back to normal at all. Don't really want to waste doctors time though and I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to see them.



No harm in talking to them. It would mean that if your lung problems get worse then they'd have a record of when it started.

You could also try using a peak flow meter peak flow meter to check whether your flow is unusual for your age and height - they're very cheap to buy. Though I guess they might be difficult to use if you've never used one before.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 15, 2020)

No, peak flow meters are easy. You just blow into them as hard/fast as you can 

They do vary person to person though. I've had asthma since I was 6ish so I have low peak flow. I was active (played football, ran cross country) when I was a teenager though so (I presume)  I have large lung volume which makes up for it a bit.


----------



## zahir (Jul 15, 2020)

They might also want to check oxygen levels and maybe get a chest x-ray done.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 15, 2020)

^^ this.  Before the shitshow I had a load of tests done - my doctor said I'd missed out on having them because I'd had asthma for so long, they never did them when I was young. It's good to give a baseline to compare how you're doing in the future. I presume will be valuable information for cv.


----------



## scifisam (Jul 15, 2020)

two sheds said:


> No, peak flow meters are easy. You just blow into them as hard/fast as you can
> 
> They do vary person to person though. I've had asthma since I was 6ish so I have low peak flow. I was active (played football, ran cross country) when I was a teenager though so (I presume)  I have large lung volume which makes up for it a bit.



I think it's probably tricky to get the hard/fast thing right the first time without being shown in person. Friends have tried mine (pre-covid, obvs) and just sort of breathed into it. Youtube probably helps though. 

They are helpful to track your own lung function even if for some reason your result is atypical, better or worse than expected, because it's the difference in your own lung function that counts most (unless you literally can't breathe, obvs ). With asthma it's more helpful to compare your peak flow against your best effort (in recent years, not over your whole life) than to compare it against a general chart, and I assume it's the same for everyone. Mine hasn't got any worse lately, and that helps me not to worry and means I can reassure my daughter.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 15, 2020)

scifisam said:


> it's the difference in your own lung function that counts most (unless you literally can't breathe, obvs ). With asthma it's more helpful to compare your peak flow against your best effort (in recent years, not over your whole life) than to compare it against a general chart, and I assume it's the same for everyone.



Yep, exactly that - I nearly added something like it


----------



## two sheds (Jul 15, 2020)

Best of all would be to have a reference reading _before_ you contract it, but retrospective readings are a bit difficult  . In view of coronavirus I'd imagine doctors will take readings from people as standard just in case.


----------



## ska invita (Jul 15, 2020)

probably posted on another thread, but shit like this really puts the fear of god back in me where im getting slack









						Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms
					

UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## sojourner (Jul 15, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> The long term health implications regarding lung scarring is unknown but *given they are seeing it in asymptomatic people* its hard to be anything other than worried.


Where did you read this, Teaboy ?


----------



## LDC (Jul 15, 2020)

ska invita said:


> probably posted on another thread, but shit like this really puts the fear of god back in me where im getting slack
> 
> 
> 
> ...



40 patients though, very low numbers.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 15, 2020)

sojourner said:


> Where did you read this, Teaboy ?



Me and my g/f were discussing this (she's a scientist who works in the larger healthcare industry) I've just googled _covid lung scarring asymptomatic_ and pages come up.  

Then again you may not wish to google it as there is f-all we can do about it.


----------



## LDC (Jul 15, 2020)

I really would warn people to be cautious about catastrophizing too much about some of this possible long term health post-infection stuff. A fair number of people who think they had CV had some normal winter bug or chest infection, both of which can linger a bit.

Then even if you did have it any possible long term health issues is very speculative currently, and the worst scenarios are likely to get the most headlines. There's also really complex stuff around fear, learnt patterns of behaviour, and projecting expectations on to your actual situation.


----------



## DexterTCN (Jul 15, 2020)

This is real.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 15, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I really would warn people to be cautious about catastrophizing too much about some of this possible long term health post-infection stuff. A fair number of people who think they had CV had some normal winter bug or chest infection, both of which can linger a bit.
> 
> Then even if you did have it any possible long term health issues is very speculative currently, and the worst scenarios are likely to get the most headlines. There's also really complex stuff around fear, learnt patterns of behaviour, and projecting expectations on to your actual situation.



Of course that's why this is 'chat' as its just general musings.  Over the years there have been loads of _we don't know what this means for the future_ style health scares which have to come very little, BSE (mad cow) springs immediately to mind.


----------



## LDC (Jul 15, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Of course that's why this is 'chat' as its just general musings.  Over the years there have been loads of _we don't know what this means for the future_ style health scares which have to come very little, BSE (mad cow) springs immediately to mind.



For sure, I'm just wary of, and concerned about, people starting to project symptoms and conditions onto their situation so just wanted to raise it.


----------



## Mogden (Jul 15, 2020)

Just FYI Southern trains are fucking clean, like the floor is the colour it should be and it smells of disinfectant even through a mask. I cannot recall this being the case in living memory.

It did occur to me that the dickheads wearing chin warmers would be best told they've got a massive spot on their nose so the paranoia will make them cover up


----------



## Combustible (Jul 16, 2020)

2hats said:


> Again, T cell part of the picture likely missing.



More about that



> Now comes a new paper in press at _Nature_. It confirms that convalescent patients from the current epidemic show T-cell responses (mostly CD4+ but some CD8+ as well) to various epitopes of the N (nucleocapsid) protein, which the earlier paper had identified as one of the main antigens as well (along with the Spike and M proteins, among others, with differences between the CD4+ and CD8+ responses as well). Turning to patients who had caught SARS back in 2003 and recovered, it is already known (and worried about) that their antibody responses faded within two or three years. But this paper shows that these patients _still have_ (17 years later!) a robust T-cell response to the original SARS coronavirus’s N protein, which extends an earlier report of such responses going out to 11 years. This new work finds that these cross-react with the new SARS CoV-2 N protein as well. This makes one think, as many have been wondering, that T-cell driven immunity is perhaps the way to reconcile the apparent paradox between (1) antibody responses that seem to be dropping week by week in convalescent patients but (2) few (if any) reliable reports of actual re-infection. That would be good news indeed.







__





						New Data on T Cells and the Coronavirus
					

Well, I was writing just the other day about what we don't know about the T-cell response to coronavirus infection, and as of today we know quite a bit more. And from what I can see, we have encouraging news, mixed with some things that we're going to need to keep an eye on.  Here's a post from Ma




					blogs.sciencemag.org


----------



## Numbers (Jul 16, 2020)

Walked up my local high street y/day (I usually go via the back streets if I go out) and was shocked to see so many people wearing masks, considering when in full swing of this thing hardly anyone was.  The folk not wearing them were all the Deliveroo drivers etc. who all hang out in bunches.

Still a security guard on the door of the CoOp, people being considerate etc. I was pleasantly surprised.

As an aside cos I've not been keeping up. On August 1st family have arranged a BBQ to celebrate a nieces graduation, it means 4 households and 12 people meeting up, BBQing and staying over - is this allowed these days?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 16, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Walked up my local high street y/day (I usually go via the back streets if I go out) and was shocked to see so many people wearing masks, considering when in full swing of this thing hardly anyone was.  The folk not wearing them were all the Deliveroo drivers etc. who all hang out in bunches.
> 
> Still a security guard on the door of the CoOp, people being considerate etc. I was pleasantly surprised.



I've noticed that too.  Its really good and reminds me just how people responded when we went into full lockdown. 



> As an aside cos I've not been keeping up. On August 1st family have arranged a BBQ to celebrate a nieces graduation, it means 4 households and 12 people meeting up, BBQing and staying over - is this allowed these days?



I don't think you'll be compliant unless the rules change, that being said I may have misunderstood the rules.









						Coronavirus (COVID-19): Meeting with others safely (social distancing)
					

Information on social distancing




					www.gov.uk
				




On the whole though I think you're OK during the outside bit.  We've all walked around parks and you'll see large groups of people clearly from different households meeting up. Whilst the tables themselves are spaced out in pub gardens the nature of pub benches mean groups of friends are shoulder to shoulder.  From everything I've seen the risk of transmission outside is very low.

The bit that would worry me is the staying over bit.  Estimates vary but I've seen figures of 60% - 80% of transmissions are familial, as in happen in the home.  We can't really rely on the Government to tell us whats safe we have to make our own call, that will be different for different people but those numbers do look a wee bit worrying from my perspective.


----------



## Numbers (Jul 16, 2020)

Thanks Teaboy 

My main concern is the mother-in-law, almost 80 and with an existing pulmonary condition.  
I've strongly suggested/recommended to my wife it's the wrong thing to do right now.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 16, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Thanks Teaboy
> 
> My main concern is the mother-in-law, almost 80 and with an existing pulmonary condition.
> I've strongly suggested/recommended to my wife it's the wrong thing to do right now.



It's really difficult isn't it?  So many older people live for the moments they get to spend around family, it provides so much joy, pride and purpose.  Trying to strike that balance between protecting the elderly without depriving them of a life worth living.


----------



## prunus (Jul 16, 2020)

Numbers said:


> As an aside cos I've not been keeping up. On August 1st family have arranged a BBQ to celebrate a nieces graduation, it means 4 households and 12 people meeting up, BBQing and staying over - is this allowed these days?



No. For group meet-ups it’s either:
a) any number of people from 2 households in any venue inside or outside (including staying over), or 
b) 6 people outside only from any number of households (though practically limited to 6 of course).

In either circumstance distancing should be observed between any members of different households: 2m apart, or, only where that is not possible, down to 1m apart where appropriate mitigation (in practice masks or screens) is used.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 17, 2020)

Matt Hancock orders pause in use of sub-standard coronavirus testing swabs
					

Health secretary tells MPs there is no evidence of clinical harm to patients




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Jul 17, 2020)

Cheerful news to start the day 









						Coronavirus: £3bn for NHS to prepare for possible second wave
					

PM says the government is "planning for the worst" as he warns Covid-19 may be more virulent in winter.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Doodler (Jul 17, 2020)

Enjoying my first train journey through East Anglia since lockdown. The people running the coffee van outside the station looked pleased with themselves - no competition from inside the station.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 17, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Cheerful news to start the day
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Until it turns out that £2.9bn of it has been appropriated from somewhere else, or they were going to be spending it anyway. This lot have a bit of a track record for that kind of shit.


----------



## Artaxerxes (Jul 17, 2020)

Not sure Boris can stamp his foot and magically make doctors and nurses appear. Unlike SPADs I understand these guys require some years of training before seeing patients.




existentialist said:


> Until it turns out that £2.9bn of it has been appropriated from somewhere else, or they were going to be spending it anyway. This lot have a bit of a track record for that kind of shit.





> allow the NHS to continue using additional private hospital capacity



This looks like the key scam here, especially considering that private hospitals usually leach off the NHS anyway via poaching staff and using its kit.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 17, 2020)

Artaxerxes said:


> Not sure Boris can stamp his foot and magically make doctors and nurses appear. Unlike SPADs I understand these guys require some years of training before seeing patients.


Maybe he can get some in from Eur...oh, no, he fucked that one, didn't he? Well, there's all those nurses and doctors in Africa. There won't be any problem bringing loads of them in, will there? Oh.

Ah well, I expect we've got loads of UK students and trainees in the pipeline...what's that? We've made medicine such an unpopular option - and priced the training out of the market - that fewer people are doing it?

Whoops.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 17, 2020)

Oh phew, that is reassuring


----------



## elbows (Jul 17, 2020)

Well its certainly true that the Telegraph cannot be trusted, and have proven numerous times that this expecially applies to all things lockdown and pandemic. If they'd had their way we'd never have had lockdown at all.

The study doesnt prove anything and at least one of its authors has been used multiple times for various anti-lockdown angles in the past. However I would not completely exclude all of the possibilities it is getting at. If we never end up having huge subsequent waves then some of the stuff they suggest could be why. But I wouldnt use it to predict anything in advance.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 17, 2020)

Worth testing though, perhaps starting with Telegraph editorial staff.

Eta: and there's no way that's true of the whole of the UK - it's really hardly touched Cornwall yet for example (relatively speaking).


----------



## Numbers (Jul 17, 2020)

Big day today for Captain Tom.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 17, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Worth testing though, perhaps starting with Telegraph editorial staff.
> 
> Eta: and there's no way that's true of the whole of the UK - it's really hardly touched Cornwall yet for example (relatively speaking).


Or West Wales.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 17, 2020)

Mind you neither of those are London, so they don't count.


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## Badgers (Jul 18, 2020)

114 England deaths yesterday. 
583 for the week. 
World beating.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jul 18, 2020)

Badgers said:


> 114 England deaths yesterday.
> 583 for the week.
> World beating.



yes but the figures are about to drop to zero




> The publication of the daily death figures will be paused while the issue is "resolved", Department of Health officials said.



small print within this article


----------



## BlanketAddict (Jul 18, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Big day today for Captain Tom.
> 
> View attachment 222630



I imagine every day is a big day when you get to that age.


----------



## BlanketAddict (Jul 18, 2020)

I have started rewatching the tv series Utopia from a few years ago. 

Feels quite pertinent...


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2020)

Coronavirus: WHO reports record single-day global increase in cases
					

The number of new cases has surpassed 250,000 in a day, the World Health Organization says.



					www.bbc.com
				





> The number of new cases of coronavirus rose by almost 260,000 in 24 hours - the largest single-day increase since the pandemic began, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.
> 
> According to the WHO, this is the first time the number of new daily infections has surpassed a quarter of a million.
> 
> The biggest increases were in the US, Brazil, India and South Africa.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 21, 2020)

My brother is having what I believe is a walking break down. He has also had a physical collapse at work. Complete exhaustion and stressed out from having dealt with covid19 patients for the past 18 weeks. His hip and knee are fucked and he just looks haunted. 🙁

I cannot understand people whinging about masks and whining about not getting abroad on holidays this year. 
I spoke with him on facetime earlier and he looks so tired and worried.  All his colleagues are exhausted. They are terrified of facing into a second wave.  I dont blame them.


----------



## phillm (Jul 24, 2020)

Is this peak madness or is there way to go?


----------



## ice-is-forming (Jul 25, 2020)

BlanketAddict said:


> I have started rewatching the tv series Utopia from a few years ago.
> 
> Feels quite pertinent...



Try this. It came out in Aus inbetween the fires and covid! The Commons (TV series) - Wikipedia


----------



## Badgers (Jul 25, 2020)

Is this accurate?


----------



## clicker (Jul 25, 2020)

I thought uk was 123 yesterday, but no idea on the others.
Eta actually doubting myself on 123 now. Greece was 0. But positive cases rising now due partly to tourism opening up. 26 positive tests there yesterday, 10 were tourists arriving.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 25, 2020)

Yep 123 reported yesterday, but the 7-day average is a better guide, that's down to 63, from 118 at the start of the month.


----------



## elbows (Jul 25, 2020)

And using combined ONS + NRS + NISRA data by actual date of death, the whole UK number was actually down to the 60-ish sort of level by the start of the month.


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## Aladdin (Jul 28, 2020)

Depressingly, the Irish government has decided that 2m social distancing wont be necessary in Primary or indeed secondary schools.

They announced plans for reopening in late August / Sept.
No requirement to wear masks despite everyone being told to wear masks on public transport and in shops and indoor gatherings.

Somehow the dept of Education knows that the virus just doesnt function in schools.

😳

Eta. The layput above is a joke. Everyone knows no kid likes sitting where 2 desks meet. The table legs become a nuisance and the edges of the desks butted against each other are a pain if you need to write on a page on top of them. Kids will move to sit either left or right of that point. 

It also assumes all kids sit rigidly all day in their spot.
Naive and frankly dangerous thinking. 
Looks like a plan for disease spreading .


----------



## Bwark (Jul 28, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> View attachment 224014
> 
> 
> Depressingly, the Irish government has decided that 2m social distancing wont be necessary in Primary or indeed secondary schools.
> ...


 I meant to ask will that work? I feel deep worry for any teacher as surely they need to be checking the pupils work whilst they are doing it and many could be asymptomatic. It sounds like Daniel confronting the lions den. I don't think I'd want to be a teacher in any country right now. This could be the beginning of a very serious outbreak when Ireland over many other countries seems to have contained it quite well compared to other countries.
God willing this will not start to spread from the so seemed healthy to the sick. My personal opinion is that this next term should be online teaching, despite the complications from very dodgy internet and parents who don't really have an investment in their kids education. I'm very glad not to have kids of primary or secondary age in this time.


----------



## phillm (Jul 28, 2020)

Telegraph (I know) and Matt 'Northern Rock'  Ridley (I know) but at least an optimistic spin to go with your brekkie...

*5 reasons why the coronavirus nightmare may soon be over
From vaccine triumphs to leadership learning curves, we can finally dare to hope for a breakthrough*

MATT RIDLEY
25 July 2020 • 7:00pm
Like the ancient mariner, the virus refuses to leave us alone. Resurging in Blackburn, Spain, and America, it is still going to be around here when the winter comes. As we head indoors, it will be back for a dreaded second wave, disguised among a host of colds and flus. Yet I am now optimistic that the nightmare will end this year or at least by the spring. Here are five reasons.

First, vaccine trials were promising. Having proved safe and capable of raising both a T-cell response and an antibody response, Oxford University’s vaccine, developed in collaboration with Astrazeneca, is now more likely to succeed than to fail, so long as its side effects are manageable in the elderly. And behind it comes a stream of other vaccines, some of which will surely work.

The second reason for hope is that, as Oxford University’s epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta has argued, herd immunity may be achieved more easily than we first thought. Indeed, from the way that infections have continued to dwindle despite lessening social distancing it seems probable that herd immunity has already been achieved in London at least. Half the population could be immune already because of recent exposure to coronavirus colds, while children seem to resist catching Covid-19, let alone passing it on. As the chief medical officer Chris Whitty has conceded, the epidemic was already in retreat before lockdown began. That is because the virus depends heavily on a few superspreaders, and pre-lockdown measures we were taking in March are remarkably effective: no handshakes, frequent hand washing, no large gatherings and so on.

So the third reason for optimism is that as long as we continue with these measures then this virus will struggle to keep spreading in the community. The one place where the virus did spread with horrible ease was in care homes and hospitals. Why was this? T-cell senescence is an issue, so old people’s immune systems are just not as good at coping with this kind of infection, and there were dreadful policy mistakes made, like stopping testing people, clearing patients out of hospitals to care homes without tests, and assuming no asymptomatic transmission. Healthcare and care home staff were not properly protected and were allowed to go from site to site. Many were infected and became carriers.

The fourth cause for cheer is therefore that now we know about asymptomatic transmission, we have more protective equipment and we have a better, if still imperfect, capacity to test, track and isolate cases, it is likely that the hospital-acquired epidemic of the spring will not be repeated.

My fifth excuse for being hopeful is that we now know better how to treat people who get seriously ill. Ventilation is not necessarily the answer, blood clotting is a real threat, making patients lie face down is helpful, dexamethasone can save lives and some antiviral drugs are showing promise.

These are reasons that even if a lot of people catch the virus this winter, fewer will die. Colds and flu viruses usually peak in mid winter when we are indoors. Viruses survive longer in colder and drier conditions, and centrally heated air dries out our protective mucus membranes. Covid-19 will certainly be hoping to peak then. But Australia offers a glimmer of reassurance. It’s winter there now, and this is proving to be the country’s weakest flu season on record. From January to the end of June, 21,000 Australians were diagnosed with flu. Last year more than 132,000 people were diagnosed in the same period. Social distancing is presumably the main reason. If that is repeated here, then not only will Covid have fewer flus and colds to hide behind, but it too will struggle to mount a seasonal peak. And fewer people will die from flu.

If we can beat this virus, then we can beat most respiratory ones. The ridiculous way in which we tolerate cold-spreaders, mocking them for taking a day off and praising them for trudging into work while feeling miserable, has to stop. It should be socially unacceptable to go to a party with a cold, let alone kiss the host on the cheek when you get there. Our children’s permanently runny noses need not be inevitable.

Ten years from now, I predict that we will not only have defeated Covid-19, but made colds rarer too.

Our bigger challenge this winter will be to tackle the backlog of treating cancer and other medical problems delayed by Covid. And to unleash economic growth to help those who lost their jobs.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 28, 2020)

Second part of this quote I agree with - I've been avoiding meeting people with colds cos I'm so pissed off with getting them. First part though the fact that it's the Torygraph oozes through. "praising them for trudging into work" - fuck that they know they often won't get paid and will get a black mark against them from bosses.



> The ridiculous way in which we tolerate cold-spreaders, mocking them for taking a day off and praising them for trudging into work while feeling miserable, has to stop. It should be socially unacceptable to go to a party with a cold, let alone kiss the host on the cheek when you get there.


----------



## Chilli.s (Jul 28, 2020)

phillm said:


> The ridiculous way in which we tolerate cold-spreaders, mocking them for taking a day off and praising them for trudging into work while feeling miserable, has to stop. It should be socially unacceptable to go to a party with a cold, let alone kiss the host on the cheek when you get there. Our children’s permanently runny noses need not be inevitable.


Yeah, I remember a member of staff at the school I worked in boasting about never having a day off and going in with the sniffs and sneezes. Management would hold them as an example of commitment and high standards, when they were actually irresponsible and ignorant.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jul 28, 2020)

Reading that article was very bad for my tendency (throughout all this) to cling to over-optimistic hope! 

Irrationally clinging though, a lot of the time


----------



## Badgers (Jul 28, 2020)

One question I have is how is the nations immune system? 

It is great that we are washing/sanitising hands more and masks are an essential part of stopping the virus. However there will (I assume) be the annual flu and colds coming up this winter and a large % of people have been limiting time with people and public places. The tube or bus is a petri dish of germs (for example) but travelling on it Mon-Fri throughout the year must have toughened up our immune systems to a degree?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 28, 2020)

Interesting situation down under, where because of social distancing, there's been a massive drop in flu cases.



> On _Newstalk Breakfast_ this morning however, Dr Ray Walley, a member of the GP Expert Advisory Group on COVID-19 said there are causes for optimism coming from other countries.
> 
> “There is good news coming from Australia and in New Zealand where I don’t think there have been any recorded cases of flu,” he said. “They are coming to the end of their winter over there.” “In Australia there has been very little flu. That has been the benefit of the lack of congregation that we have all adhered to, so that is good news.”
> 
> Data from New Zealand indicates that while some people have been reporting flu-like symptoms over the winter period, there has been a huge drop compared to previous years. Similarly, data from Australia shows a major drop in laboratory confirmed flu cases between April and July.











						COVID measures may see major fall in flu this winter | Newstalk
					

COVID-19 restrictions may lead to a significant fall in common winter illnesses like the flu, acc...




					www.newstalk.com


----------



## phillm (Jul 28, 2020)

That Donald Triump Jr banned video.

For information and I have no idea of the veracity of what is being said or why and it is very telling that all MSM has removed this with only Shitebart wishing to publicise this and it is the Tea Party Patriots who organised this so it is not that they don't have a very pointed agenda. The gist is that there is a cure for COVID and Fauci has suppressed it.

I am listening to it and sounds fairly barking so have refrained from posting it further.









						Misleading Virus Video, Pushed by the Trumps, Spreads Online
					

Social media companies took down the video within hours. But by then, it had already been viewed tens of millions of times.




					www.nytimes.com


----------



## phillm (Jul 28, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Big day today for Captain Tom.
> 
> View attachment 222630


Come on Prince Philip - earn your keep. Captain Tom has shown the way ...get walking...


----------



## Badgers (Jul 29, 2020)

Coronavirus: English care homes policy 'reckless', MPs say
					

Report criticises ‘appalling’ error of discharging untested patients from hospitals




					www.theguardian.com
				




Bring on the court cases in their thousands whilst nobody in the disgraced government loses their jobs or even accepts/apologises for the horror they have caused


----------



## Badgers (Jul 30, 2020)




----------



## Badgers (Jul 30, 2020)

It was not our governments fault, it was the EU countries!









						Matt Hancock confirms there IS a second wave 'rolling across Europe'
					

The Health Secretary said 'it's not just Spain'.




					metro.co.uk


----------



## zahir (Jul 30, 2020)

Badgers said:


>




The question for me is what evidence there is that people stop being infectious after 10 days, or after two weeks or whatever. Is this based on science or political expediency? Does the risk of being infectious really go away or is it just a judgement that the risk is low enough relative to the disruption and economic costs of people having to self-isolate?


----------



## elbows (Jul 30, 2020)

zahir said:


> The question for me is what evidence there is that people stop being infectious after 10 days, or after two weeks or whatever. Is this based on science or political expediency? Does the risk of being infectious really go away or is it just a judgement that the risk is low enough relative to the disruption and economic costs of people having to self-isolate?



The dreaded 'value judgement' according to Nick Triggle BBC analysis:









						Coronavirus: Virus isolation period extended from seven to 10 days
					

The change for those who test positive, or show symptoms, comes amid fears of a resurgence.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				






> Research suggests the most infectious period is just before symptoms start and for the first few days afterwards - that's what makes it such a difficult virus to contain.
> 
> But UK health officials say there is enough evidence now to point to a "low, but tangible" risk of transmission from seven to 10 days, even for those with mild to moderate illness.





> This is a decision that could have been taken weeks, even months, ago in truth.
> 
> But officials are describing it as a "value judgement" based on a variety of reasons.
> 
> The availability of widespread testing means only those with a positively confirmed infection need to continue isolating - earlier in the pandemic the lack of testing meant a blanket approach had to be taken so anyone with symptoms was asked to isolate.



I understand the reasons why various stuff was compromised in order to be achievable with the shit resources and planning of the time, but waiting till late July to change it to a more appropriate timescale is so bloody late! But then they have felt the need to change the mood music again in the last few weeks, to a more alarming tune, so maybe that is part of the 'value judgement'.


----------



## zahir (Jul 30, 2020)

I’m now in week 7 of being ill. It isn’t actually that bad now, mostly tiredness, a blocked up nose, sneezing occasionally, sometimes a bit of shortness of breath. It comes and goes and some of the time I feel pretty much OK. I’m working on the assumption that I shouldn’t be infectious any more but I’m still not absolutely certain about this, and I’m not sure what the evidence behind it is.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jul 30, 2020)

Interesting piece in yesterday's Guardian about how the 'second wave; concept is probably misleading.

Not sure at all how sound it is scientifically, but I thought it was worth sharing.....



			
				Guardian headline said:
			
		

> * 'One big wave' – why the Covid-19 second wave may not exist *
> *With no evidence of seasonal variations, the WHO warns the initial coronavirus pandemic is continuing and accelerating*






			
				Peter Beaumont and Emma Graham-Harrison said:
			
		

> The Covid-19 pandemic is currently unfolding in “one big wave” with no evidence that it follows seasonal variations common to influenza and other coronaviruses, such as the common cold, the World Health Organization has warned.
> 
> Amid continued debates over what constitutes a second wave, a resurgence or seasonal return of the disease, Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson, insisted that these discussions are not a helpful way to understand the spread of the disease.



Other scientists also quoted  .......


----------



## LDC (Jul 30, 2020)

zahir said:


> I’m now in week 7 of being ill. It isn’t actually that bad now, mostly tiredness, a blocked up nose, sneezing occasionally, sometimes a bit of shortness of breath. It comes and goes and some of the time I feel pretty much OK. I’m working on the assumption that I shouldn’t be infectious any more but I’m still not absolutely certain about this, and I’m not sure what the evidence behind it is.



Did you get a test, I can't recall if you've said that already somewhere?


----------



## zahir (Jul 30, 2020)

I tested negative but took the test 16 days after the start of symptoms. So I’m assuming the negative result doesn’t say much either way. I’m not ruling out the possibility that I could have something other than Covid, but it doesn’t seem that likely.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Jul 30, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Interesting piece in yesterday's Guardian about how the 'second wave; concept is probably misleading.
> 
> Not sure at all how sound it is scientifically, but I thought it was worth sharing.....
> 
> ...



I thought they had a cheek publishing that, since they liberally and breathlessly use the phrase "has sparked fears of a second wave" in their live blog at least once a day. They never say _who's_ fearing the second wave either.


----------



## elbows (Jul 30, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Interesting piece in yesterday's Guardian about how the 'second wave; concept is probably misleading.
> 
> Not sure at all how sound it is scientifically, but I thought it was worth sharing.....
> 
> Other scientists also quoted  .......



My personal stance on this is that its largely quibbling over semantics, but thats mostly because the stakes are high with this pandemic and people and the media are paying attention in ways they usually dont, and some of the language and concepts are overused and then found to be quite inadequate.

I dont agree with those in the article that say this second wave thinking is faulty simply because we are applying the rules of flu to a new virus. Because some of the faulty thinking or inappropriate concepts are just as faulty when applied to flu pandemics too! As I've sid before, the first UK swine flu wave peak happened in July 2009, so where there is faulty thinking along seasonal lines with this coronavirus, the same faults would also have applied if they'd been said in regards to the flu in 2009. But back then the stakes were not so high, peoples interest waned, and those reporting on the ongoing pandemic waves were able to do so without much in the way of any controversary about whether subsequent peaks were really their own distinct waves.

Of course there has also been many decades of focus on the 1918 flu pandemic, a horrific example of a pandemic which has tended to dominate the popular impression of what a bad pandemic is like, but also gave birth to various pandemic cliches, partial truths and oversimplifications. And this very much applies to talk of a second wave, because the simple version of the 1918 pandemic includes rather prominently the idea that is that the 2nd wave was deadlier than the first. But this doesnt necessarily have any relevance for this current pandemic, and I would rather focus on the other reasons why a possible 2nd wave in this one is a big deal - the obvious stuff, the implications of having to bring back restrictions, the deaths, the healthcare system strains.

For those interested in more about past controversies about flu wave severity assumptions and the supposed lessons of 1918, this fairly short NHS piece from 2009 covers a paper from back then that was not impressed by some of the pandemic cliches that 1918 gave birth to:









						Pandemic waves
					

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association has questioned whether the prevailing belief that the current pandemic flu will return in a more dangerous




					www.nhs.uk
				




And heres a paper looking at 2009 in the UK and concluding that the 2nd wae of swine flu was deadlier, but thinks that this was because of changes in behaviour that followed after the 'initial high-profile period' ended. Back then they were entirely comfortable describing the two waves in very broad terms with a somewhat arbitrary utoff point between them:



> The end of the first wave was defined by the nadir of estimated cases between the two waves. The first wave lasted from 1 June 2009 to 30 August 2009, a period of 13 weeks. The second wave lasted from 31 August 2009 to 28 March 2010, a period of 30 weeks. Deaths were assigned to a wave based on date of symptom onset. When no date of symptom onset was available the earlier of two dates was used: either the date of hospital admission or the estimated date of symptom onset (date of death minus median time from symptom onset to death).





			https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4117246FA300BD95EA6035A3BEE536D9/S0950268811001968a.pdf/mortality_due_to_pandemic_h1n1_2009_influenza_in_england_a_comparison_of_the_first_and_second_waves.pdf
		


Its still inevitable I will end up talking in terms of a second wave at times because that is the language so many others are using, but I should try harder to speak a little differently on this when I can. I'd rather talk about specific peaks - eg another rise and peak in cases, deaths, hospital admissions etc. Thats what I think matters, thats why the stakes are high, not whether something technically counts as a new wave in epidemiological terms. As someone in the article mentions, our perception of what viruses are doing is not the whole and accurate story of the virus, its a story of the viruses implications for humanity at various times and places.

The UK government certainly experimented with terminology a bit on this front in the recent past. For a while a month or 3 ago they were using 'second spike'. And I did find myself using the term resurgence the other day, and I now note that some experts are going with that one too.

If we stick to and grasp the underlying details then limitations and flaws with this basic terminology dont really matter so much, its a bit of a side-show.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 30, 2020)

'among'


----------



## Numbers (Jul 30, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 224360
> 
> 
> 'among'


Exemplar.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jul 30, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> *I thought they had a cheek publishing that*, since they liberally and breathlessly use the phrase "has sparked fears of a second wave" in their live blog at least once a day. They never say _who's_ fearing the second wave either.



Fair enough-- I  do agree that The Guardian (and almost all other media!) has banged on about 'second wave' too much at the expense of being all that informative when they do talk like that.
But the particular article I quoted was at least thought-provoking on its own, surely?

elbows : Thank you very much for your post -- I was hoping you might respond, because I simply had no idea how useful or not was that ultra-brief Guardian piece that I linked to .....

Will check the links you posted when I have more time, but getting educated is always good


----------



## Badgers (Jul 30, 2020)

Pubs still open


----------



## clicker (Jul 30, 2020)

On Mondays, Tuesday's and Wednesday's they can all meet up in McDonald's for half price nuggets.


----------



## zahir (Jul 31, 2020)

It seems dogs can get it.









						Exclusive: Buddy, first dog to test positive for COVID-19 in the U.S., has died
					

Even though the German shepherd likely had cancer, his health records show how little we know about animals and the coronavirus.




					www.nationalgeographic.com


----------



## zahir (Jul 31, 2020)

.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

zahir said:


> It seems dogs can get it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So, that's dogs, cats & mink.   









						A million mink culled in Netherlands and Spain amid Covid-19 fur farming havoc
					

Agriculture minister says origins of outbreak unclear after seven farm workers – and 87% of the mink – test positive




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

You can continue going to the pub, and into your workplace on a bus, but you can’t have one mate round to yours for the cup final on Saturday. 

You can go out for tea with them though. Be sure to use the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. But also, remember you’re all still obese so cycle to McDonald's.


----------



## Numbers (Jul 31, 2020)

One of our family are having a BBQ tomorrow to celebrate our nieces graduation.

Problem is it’s 4 households between 10/12 people. We bubbled up with 1 of our family households, have seen them 3 times now. I’m not happy about the plan for tomorrow so am probably gonna give it a swerve.

It’d probably be safe but personally not comfortable with it and if I understand the guidelines it’s not technically allowed?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Numbers said:


> One of our family are having a BBQ tomorrow to celebrate our nieces graduation.
> 
> Problem is it’s 4 households between 10/12 people. We bubbled up with 1 of our family households, have seen them 3 times now. I’m not happy about the plan for tomorrow so am probably gonna give it a swerve.
> 
> It’d probably be safe but personally not comfortable with it and *if I understand the guidelines it’s not technically allowed?*



Looks like you are right.



> *2.2 How many people am I allowed to meet with outdoors?*
> 
> You can meet in groups of up to six people who you do not live with or who are not in your support bubble.
> 
> ...











						National lockdown: Stay at Home
					

Coronavirus cases are rising rapidly across the country. Find out what you can and cannot do.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## Boudicca (Jul 31, 2020)

But it's ridiculous, isn't it? You can sit all night in a pub with 50 people without masks but you can't have more than 6 people at a
 picnic?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Boudicca said:


> But it's ridiculous, isn't it? You can sit all night in a pub with 50 people without masks but you can't have more than 6 people at a
> picnic?


Ridiculous is a polite way of describing this situation


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)




----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Whilst some of the rules seem absurd I can see what the Government is trying to with regard to the new regulations in the North and limiting people in the home.  Estimates I've seen is something like 60% to 70% of transmissions are familial (in the home).  If you have a lot of people living in few houses and then more people are coming round for socialising they than take that back to their homes etc.  You can see how it will spread like a wild fire.

I'm not saying pubs & gyms etc should have been opened the way they have but the fact that the rise in cases is not being mirrored across England clearly suggests there is something else going on as well.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jul 31, 2020)

zahir said:


> It seems dogs can get it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...






			
				cupid_stunt said:
			
		

> So, that's dogs, cats & mink.



Are not these cat and dog** stories highly exceptional though?

**Don't know about mink! 

My impression was  that they were stand-out rare and exceptional cases?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Are not these cat and dog** stories highly exceptional though?
> 
> **Don't know about mink!
> 
> My impression was  that they were stand-out rare and exceptional cases?



Yes, I think they are highly exceptional then again who's actually testing pets?  Its been hard enough for humans to get a test let alone one for Fido.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Jul 31, 2020)

So a couple of weeks ago it was Leicester and the general view seemed to be that the culprit was poor working conditions in some very sketchy workplaces. And where there have been specific outbreaks identified these have often also been workplace related. I wonder then how they're apparently so convinced the issue here is transmission in the home?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> So a couple of weeks ago it was Leicester and the general view seemed to be that the culprit was poor working conditions in some very sketchy workplaces. And where there have been specific outbreaks identified these have often also been workplace related. I wonder then how they're apparently so convinced the issue here is transmission in the home?



Because it always has been the single biggest means of transmission from day one.  A lot of the stuff in Leicester was likely related to the living conditions as well not just the sweat shops themselves.  Same with that outbreak on the fruit picking farm, workers were not contracting it out in the fields it was the overcrowded living conditions provided for seasonal workers.

Poorer people live in crowded homes.  They also live in areas of poor air quality and are far more likely to have existing respiratory conditions.  This should be undisputed and the government has to act to protect people.  I'm not going to go into bat for the government on this but I do understand why they have done it.


----------



## strung out (Jul 31, 2020)

It's Eid today, and many of the places going back into semi lockdown have high proportions of Muslim populations. Hancock says it's nothing to do with that of course...


----------



## prunus (Jul 31, 2020)

Boudicca said:


> But it's ridiculous, isn't it? You can sit all night in a pub with 50 people without masks but you can't have more than 6 people at a
> picnic?



It is about the risk/benefit - eg it is presumably considered that the ancillary benefits to the economy of allowing in your example the pub to be able to continue operating is worth the increased risk of transmission (which definitely exists and is not not being taken into account), versus the as you imply probably smaller transmission risk of you having say 20 people over for a barbecue, which adds little to the overall economic recovery (all relative of course - it will add a bit, the odd extra bottle of Prosecco sold at the co-op for instance, but the co-op isn’t at risk currently in the same way as the pub is).

We can’t do everything, so we try to do those things that give the greatest economic benefit per unit of increased transmission risk. Whether the calculations are being done correctly no one knows, but one has to assume that they are trying.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

strung out said:


> It's Eid today, and many of the places going back into semi lockdown have high proportions of Muslim populations. Hancock says it's nothing to do with that of course...



Of course it's to do with Eid, of course he is lying.  But we need to be careful about implying its just racism or Islamophobia or whatever.  Its really easy to see the fear with Eid and the Government have panicked.  Its probably better than just shrugging their shoulders like they did back in February and March.


----------



## prunus (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> You can continue going to the pub, and into your workplace on a bus, but you can’t have one mate round to yours for the cup final on Saturday.
> 
> You can go out for tea with them though. Be sure to use the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. But also, remember you’re all still obese so cycle to McDonald's.



Just for accuracy, in the places where you’re not allowed to have other households over for the cup final now you are also now not supposed to go out to restaurants etc with other households; it is at least consistent in that regard.   You’re also not supposed to meet in private gardens etc - ie back to those rules of a month or more ago, despite it being widely reported as ‘indoors’ - I suspect because Hancock tweeted it incompletely.  I despair of the communications ‘strategy’ of this fucking shitshower of a government. 









						Local restriction tiers: what you need to know
					

Sets out the local restriction tier system that will be in place from Wednesday 2 December, including what you can and cannot do in each tier.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## LDC (Jul 31, 2020)

strung out said:


> It's Eid today, and many of the places going back into semi lockdown have high proportions of Muslim populations. Hancock says it's nothing to do with that of course...



You not very subtly hinting he's timed these local restrictions to disrupt Eid?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> You not very subtly hinting he's timed these local restrictions to disrupt Eid?



I think he has but not for the reasons that are being hinted at.


----------



## LDC (Jul 31, 2020)

The recent research shows households, especially multi-generational ones, are a much bigger source of cross-infection than workplaces and social things like pubs.


----------



## strung out (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> You not very subtly hinting he's timed these local restrictions to disrupt Eid?


No, I'm hinting that they are scared of potential of potential family transmission during Eid celebrations but doesn't want to say so. Although announcing it on Twitter at 10pm the day before Eid is about as competently communicated as everything else the government has done so far.


----------



## LDC (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I think he has but not for the reasons that are being hinted at.



OK yeah that was what I thought someone else was suggesting. I think they brought it in as soon as it became clear they needed to, although I think bringing it in just before an event where there was going to inevitably be some infection increase from is necessary and also somewhat shit for people it affects.

If it hadn't been announced as soon as possible it then risked people being further down their planning for Eid, so announcing last night means it got the news first thing this morning.


----------



## brogdale (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> The recent research shows households, especially multi-generational ones, are a much bigger source of cross-infection than workplaces and social things like pubs.


That would have to be very recent research, given that the pubs etc. have only just started to reopen in the last few weeks?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> You not very subtly hinting he's timed these local restrictions to disrupt Eid?


It would hardly be a surprise from this racist and incompetent disgraced government would it? 

I want to be safe but the actions of the disgraced government and more so Cummings have told the public to make up their own rules. If anyone is fined for breaching a poorly communicated lockdown they win any appeal with ease due to the blatant failings, shocking examples and negligence of our disgraced government.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> risked people being further down their planning for Eid


The pubs are being shut too I assume? The 50% 'food stamps' will be withdrawn from that area of course?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

brogdale said:


> That would have to be very recent research, given that the pubs etc. have only just started to reopen in the last few weeks?



Pubs and bars are bad we know that but its long been known for a long time that by far and away the biggest single form of transmission is in the house.  I remember reading various articles about it back in March.


----------



## brogdale (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Pubs and bars are bad we know that but its long been known for a long time that by far and away the biggest single form of transmission is in the house.  I remember reading various articles about it back in March.


I see; established research.

I suppose the key difference in the two sub-sets of risk is that for physiological need we have to be in houses...whereas...


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> The pubs are being shut too I assume? The 50% 'food stamps' will be withdrawn from that area of course?



This is where the problem is.  They adopted a blanket approach in Leicester but now seem to be more targeted.  This of course does open up the inevitable accusations of racism and prioritisng industry over health.   

Are blanket bans better even if you have good evidence that transmission is primarily occurring in a certain way?  I don't know the answer to that.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

brogdale said:


> I see; established research.
> 
> I suppose the key difference in the two sub-sets of risk is that for physiological need we have to be in houses...whereas...



I'm not arguing that the pubs shouldn't be shut I'm just pointing out that its obvious that the house will always be the riskiest place for transmission.  The  more people you have living in a house and the more people that come to visit etc etc.  Its not hard to work out and the stats speak for themselves.

Some places in England have rates of 80 in 100,000 yet others are 2 or 3.  Where I live in London is very low yet all the pubs are open and busy.  There is clearly something else going on and ignoring that would just needlessly kill more people. 

Perhaps they should just blanket lock down?  Perhaps that is fairer?  But attempting to limit the familial transmission is absolutely the right thing to do.


----------



## strung out (Jul 31, 2020)

Also worth pointing out that this opens up another source of racial tension whereby the usual knuckle draggers will point to any breaking of the guidelines as proof that these communities are a big source of the problem, when you can bet that if something like this was announced at 10pm on Christmas Eve, there would be uproar.

See this from Tory MP Craig Whittaker


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

strung out said:


> when you can bet that if something like this was announced at 10pm on Christmas Eve, there would be uproar.


Our cunt government would never do that even it it killed thousands.


----------



## brogdale (Jul 31, 2020)

This week's blame sponge.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

It seems to me that its basically a lose lose situation.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

brogdale said:


> This week's blame sponge.


So far this week it has been European countries and BAME communities  

Shocking but hardly surprising display by a disgraced government


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> It seems to me that its basically a lose lose situation.


Welcome to Tory Britain


----------



## brogdale (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> So far this week it has been European countries and BAME communities
> 
> Shocking but hardly surprising display by a disgraced government


Hmm...2 sponges in a week? Things must be getting really bad.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

strung out said:


> No, I'm hinting that they are scared of potential of potential family transmission during Eid celebrations but doesn't want to say so.



There's plenty of reports that a lot of the new cases in the latest affected areas are from Asian backgrounds, because a high percentage work in high risk jobs such as health & care, taxi drivers & in warehouses, combined with them often living in multi-generational and often over crowded houses.  

That's the fact, but something the government is clearly trying to play down, because racist twats will take the opportunity to blame the community because of their ethic background, rather than the real reasons. 



> British Asians fear they are increasingly being blamed for the spread of coronavirus which is fuelling a rise in racist abuse.
> 
> After outbreaks in towns with high populations of people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds – such as Blackburn, Leicester, Blackburn, Oldham and Rochdale – Asian communities say they feel they are being ‘scapegoated’.
> 
> They argue that the spread of coronavirus is being blamed on race and religion, which ignores that people in those towns often live in the most deprived areas in terraced streets and are the ‘victims of circumstance’.











						British Asians fear racist attacks during Eid due to high infection rates
					

Leicester, Oldham and Bradford have seen recent outbreaks peaking among Asians, often living in the most deprived neighbourhoods.




					metro.co.uk


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Can I ask what people think the Government should be doing with regard to localsied problems as we're seeing now?  Clearly a better t&t system and one that is multi-lingual and has a better understanding of community dynamics.  But what else?  Blanket local lockdowns?  National lockdowns?  

What should they be doing in places like Blackburn, Oldham and Bradford?


----------



## blameless77 (Jul 31, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> You not very subtly hinting he's timed these local restrictions to disrupt Eid?



given that Muslim leaders in Ireland have requested permission for 500 people to gather and celebrate Eid in Croke Park, perhaps the government doesn’t trust them to be sensible?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

blameless77 said:


> given that Muslim leaders in Ireland have requested permission for 500 people to gather and celebrate Eid in Croke Park, perhaps the government doesn’t trust them to be sensible?



Croke Park being outdoors of course.


----------



## blameless77 (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Croke Park being outdoors of course.



so 500 people gathering isn’t a problem?


----------



## two sheds (Jul 31, 2020)

People going out to work/in public presumably have the risk of catching covid and coming back home to crowded conditions would spread it through the family so it's a combined risk of spread.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Jul 31, 2020)

blameless77 said:


> given that Muslim leaders in Ireland have requested permission for 500 people to gather and celebrate Eid in Croke Park, perhaps the government doesn’t trust them to be sensible?



So because some Muslims somewhere have requested permission for a gathering, presumably with a plan for distancing and the recognition that if it's declined it won't happen, some other Muslims somewhere else can't be trusted?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

blameless77 said:


> so 500 people gathering isn’t a problem?



Ireland will have its own guidelines and rules.  Every country makes different political decisions.  Personally I'm very risk averse and I don't think gatherings of 500 people are a good idea.  The point is though the risk of transmission outside compared to inside is trivial regardless of the ethnicity of those involved and how much the government "trusts" (your word) them.

Note the UK government has not changed the rules about meeting people outside with the restrictions its placed on certain Northern areas.  Its just in the house where the majority of transmission takes place and where the greatest risk to life is.


----------



## blameless77 (Jul 31, 2020)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> So because some Muslims somewhere have requested permission for a gathering, presumably with a plan for distancing and the recognition that if it's declined it won't happen, some other Muslims somewhere else can't be trusted?



that’s not what I’m suggesting, but well done on the dog whistle. I do think that the timing is a consideration though. It is Eid, and therefore people will gather if they’re not given information about whether it’s putting them at risk.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

blameless77 said:


> I do think that the timing is a consideration though. It is Eid, and therefore people will gather if they’re not given information about whether it’s putting them at risk.



I agree with you on that and the messaging as been as rubbish as it has throughout.  They've panicked and its still frustratingly reactive instead of proactive.  The situation is as it is though and I do think action needed to be taken.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I agree with you on that and the messaging as been as rubbish as it has throughout.  They've panicked and its still frustratingly reactive instead of proactive.  The situation is as it is though and I do think action needed to be taken.


Did the situation change drastically in 24-48-72 hours or could the 'reporting' have given some warning? Given people and businesses some time to plan? 

Perhaps the government saw the numbers rising and chose to ignore them as they have done most the warnings throughout the shitshow?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Its just in the house where the majority of transmission takes place and where the greatest risk to life is.


Where does the virus come from to enter the house?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Did the situation change drastically in 24-48-72 hours or could the 'reporting' have given some warning? Given people and businesses some time to plan?
> 
> Perhaps the government saw the numbers rising and chose to ignore them as they have done most the warnings throughout the shitshow?



cupid_stunt posted numbers up to 19th July on the UK lockdown thread it also states what they were previously.  Most places are going up as you would expect but some places are going up fast.  Personally I have no doubt this is about EId hence the panicked 10pm announcement.  

Should they have acted earlier?  Most likely but as I say they've been horribly reactive throughout.  The data I mention though is pretty damning and doing nothing would have been as criminal as it was back in early March.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Should they have acted earlier?
Should they be stripped of their roles?
Should the government be removed completely?
Should they be going to prison?


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Where does the virus come from to enter the house?



Asymptomatic carriers will e a lot of it also working age adults who work in high risk and poorly paid jobs I would guess is the most likely.  

We know a lot of people, especially younger people can have the virus without knowing.  We also know regardless of ethnicity that younger people (teens & 20's) are not very good at the whole social distancing thing etc.    They're out and about mixing and passing the virus around and then they bring it back into the house.  This is a major problem if gran and gramps live in the family house.  Also the thing about existing respiratory conditions due to living in polluted areas.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Asymptomatic carriers will e a lot of it also working age adults who work in high risk and poorly paid jobs I would guess is the most likely.
> 
> We know a lot of people, especially younger people can have the virus without knowing.  We also know regardless of ethnicity that younger people (teens & 20's) are not very good at the whole social distancing thing etc.    They're out and about mixing and passing the virus around and then they bring it back into the house.  This is a major problem if gran and gramps live in the family house.  Also the thing about existing respiratory conditions due to living in polluted areas.


So the house is a secondary issue?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson: 



> We have to explain things clearly. That's why it's 'hands, face, space' and get a test.



'clearly'


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

I would never call multi-generational household stuff a secondary issue in this pandemic, its up there with all the other important factors. And these angles are not going away so we may as well get used to talking about them and appreciating the full context of the various local measures as they happen.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

*Boris Johnson delays lockdown easing measures in England by two weeks*



> After lockdown measures were tightened in parts of the north of England, the prime minister announced that the August 1 target to open some businesses, such as casinos and skating rinks, have been put back by at least two weeks


.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

elbows said:


> I would never call multi-generational household stuff a secondary issue in this pandemic, its up there with all the other important factors. And these angles are not going away so we may as well get used to talking about them and appreciating the full context of the various local measures as they happen.



I remember reading when it first took off in Italy that multi-generational households were a particular issue in the spread, so it should come as no surprise it's the same here.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

elbows said:


> I would never call multi-generational household stuff a secondary issue in this pandemic, its up there with all the other important factors. And these angles are not going away so we may as well get used to talking about them and appreciating the full context of the various local measures as they happen.


For some communities multi-generational households are a norm. A late lockdown and mismanagement of the crisis by our disgraced government put us all at risk. Blaming peoples 'living habits' is inexcusable. I know 'we are where we are' but the late lockdown and appalling travel sanctions have caused this. If there needs to be more lock-downs they HAVE to be better communicated and managed. 

Doubt that Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson or Death Secretary ManCock were even away of the issue until the last minute. Too busy looking after their own and their friends wealth.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> For some communities multi-generational households are a norm. A late lockdown and mismanagement of the crisis by our disgraced government put us all at risk. Blaming peoples 'living habits' is inexcusable. I know 'we are where we are' but the late lockdown and appalling travel sanctions have caused this. If there needs to be more lock-downs they HAVE to be better communicated and managed.



Of course, the late lockdown & other cock-ups caused it to be so much worst, but that has little to do with the current spikes we are seeing in certain areas, there's very specific reasons for that, and it includes multi-generational households.

I've not seen any examples of anyone blaming people for their 'living habits' as such, it's just a factor in these spikes.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> there's very specific reasons for that, and it includes multi-generational households


Yes. It is their fault.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Yes. It is their fault.



No, it's not, it's just a factor, and needs to be noted, for the benefit of the communities concerned, because of the risk to the older generations living in those homes.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> No, it's not, it's just a factor, and needs to be noted, for the benefit of the communities concerned, because of the risk to the older generations living in those homes.


What about young people in house shares who have no chance of buying or renting a home?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

May 2020: Hancock: “Our app will be up and running by mid-May”
Johnson: “We’ll have a world-beating track and trace system by 1 June”
July 2020: “Hands, face, space, something... I dunno... you’re on your own”

But those bloody 'multi-generational households'


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> No, it's not, it's just a factor, and needs to be noted, for the benefit of the communities concerned, because of the risk to the older generations living in those homes.


What about warehouse/factory workers who have to carpool or take the bus to work?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What about young people in house shares who have no chance of buying or renting a home?



I am struggling to see a connection here, young people are at lower risk, but, clearly no one should be blamed for their living situation. 

It would be like blaming people in high risk jobs, for working in those jobs, if they catch it.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> I am struggling to see a connection here, young people are at lower risk, but, clearly no one should be blamed for their living situation.


Currently house shares are not the reserve of the 'low risk' young as I am sure you well aware.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

It is just disgusting that multi-generational people share a house and they should know better


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> It is just disgusting that multi-generational people share a house and they should know better



I think the heat has got to you, mate.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> I think the heat has got to you, mate.


No. It is the disgraced governments failings that get to me.


----------



## Supine (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> What about warehouse/factory workers who have to carpool or take the bus to work?



What about us?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Look at all those multi-generational people sharing a beach


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Supine said:


> What about us?


It seems to some you are the problem


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Look at all those multi-generational people sharing a beach



Luckily we haven't seen any spikes from crowded beaches, nor from the BLM protests, and it's widely excepted that the risk of transmission outdoors is low.

Household transmission, however, is very high.


----------



## Supine (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> It seems to some you are the problem



Well I'm stuck standing up on a hot train in a mask; surrounded by teenagers who are maskless shouty sweary twats. If anyone cares to tell me I'm the problem to my face I'll f ckin lamp them one. And I'm a pacifist in normal circumstances


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Supine said:


> Well I'm stuck standing up on a hot train in a mask; surrounded by teenagers who are maskless shouty sweary twats. If anyone cares to tell me I'm the problem to my face I'll f ckin lamp them one. And I'm a pacifist in normal circumstances


You would have more than just cause


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Household transmission, however, is very high.


Stats and links please


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

'Absolute nonsense': Police federation slams government's West Yorkshire lockdown announcement
					

The West Yorkshire Police Federation has slammed the government's "haphazard" announcement of the West Yorkshire lockdown restrictions.




					www.yorkshirepost.co.uk


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Stats and links please



Have you not been following the whole story of how Covid spreads?   



> SARS-CoV-2 transmission appears to mainly be spread via droplets and close contact with infected symptomatic cases.  In an analysis of 75,465 COVID-19 cases in China, 78-85% of clusters occurred within household settings, suggesting that transmission occurs during close and prolonged contact._(_6_)_  A study of the first patients in the Republic of Korea showed that 9 of 13 secondary cases occurred among household contacts._(_70_)_ Outside of the household setting, those who had close physical contact, shared meals, or were in enclosed spaces for approximately one hour or more with symptomatic cases, such as in places of worship, gyms, or the workplace, were also at increased risk of infection._(_7_, _42_, _71_, _72_)_ Other reports have supported this with similar findings of secondary transmission within families in other countries._(_73_, _74_)_











						Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: implications for infection prevention precautions
					

Scientific Brief




					www.who.int


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Have you not been following the whole story of how Covid spreads?


no 

I have been ignoring it


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Stats and links please



Come on mate.  All the info is out there if you want to find it, just google covid-19 transmission indoors v outdoors.   It also just follows to reason.  Outdoors is significantly safer than indoors.

Its just very unfortunate that this virus thrives when people are in close proximity indoors.  The virus is probably prevalent in a lot of houses without those inside knowing but most people get tested when they get ill and you are more likely to get ill from it if you're old and / or have certain existing conditions.

When I got it the only other person in my house was my partner who promptly got it.  Both of our sets of parents live miles away.  My mum is very high risk but she lives in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere not in the bedroom next door, using the same living room, kitchen etc.

It is the government's fault that we are in this situation and they must own the blame but there is a difference between recognising risk and apportioning blame.  Multi-generational living to my mind is most often a cultural thing which originated in countries without much of a welfare state.  Family is all important and and every generation has its role to play.  That is not always the case for white western families.

As I say its just very unfortunate that the virus exploits this situation to a massive degree.  Of course the government is racist, of course they are Islamophobic, of course Johnson is unashamedly and openly both but pointing out the virus exploits certain living arrangements is not in-itself racist or deflecting blame.  Its just something that has to be dealt with and urgently to stop even more people dying needlessly and pointlessly.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 31, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Come on mate.  All the info is out there if you want to find it, just google covid-19 transmission indoors v outdoors.   It also just follows to reason.  Outdoors is significantly safer than indoors.
> 
> Its just very unfortunate that this virus thrives when people are in close proximity indoors.  The virus is probably prevalent in a lot of houses without those inside knowing but most people get tested when they get ill and you are more likely to get ill from it if you're old and / or have certain existing conditions.
> 
> ...





Badgers said:


> You can continue going to the pub, and into your workplace on a bus, but you can’t have one mate round to yours for the cup final on Saturday.
> 
> You can go out for tea with them though. Be sure to use the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. But also, remember you’re all still obese so cycle to McDonald's.


----------



## Teaboy (Jul 31, 2020)

OK, that's just whataboutery though and doesn't contradict anything I've been saying.  I'm with you on the opening of pubs and the silliness of half-price McDonalds.

ETA: I get that you're absolutely furious with the government and rightly so but the data doesn't lie.  The top 4 areas where infection rate is highest is Blackburn, Bradford, Oldham and Leicester.  Something is going on in these areas that isn't happening elsewhere in England despite the rules being the same (well not anymore I guess).


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers said:


> For some communities multi-generational households are a norm. A late lockdown and mismanagement of the crisis by our disgraced government put us all at risk. Blaming peoples 'living habits' is inexcusable. I know 'we are where we are' but the late lockdown and appalling travel sanctions have caused this. If there needs to be more lock-downs they HAVE to be better communicated and managed.
> 
> Doubt that Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson or Death Secretary ManCock were even away of the issue until the last minute. Too busy looking after their own and their friends wealth.



I'm not that interested in blame right now, given that I was using up my energy blaming the goernment for various things before most people had even noticed that this country was in a very bad pandemic position and heading for woe as a result of a large collection of failings both recent and long-term.

I am interested in controlling the virus. This means identifying all the ways in which it is spreading, and dealing with those. If people insist on seeing it through the narrow prism of blame then I will just have to ignore them just like I ignore those who think we cannot talk about anything that could also be a potential dog whistle. We can do better than that, and not reduce everything to this level of cynicism and suspicion.


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

But on occasions where I do find some energy to cast blame, I will always blame those who have created the conditions that leave certain groups and communities far more vulnerable than others. And this isnt a distant issue for me, I have been happily living in the part of Nuneaton where the muslim community are largely located for the last 20 years, and the mosque is just doors away from me. And sadly it was no suprise at all that when very local figures for infections came out, it was this ward which had the most positive cases over the course of this pandemic so far. I see it as another indicator of the need to deliver suitable support, and long-term change in the direction of equality, than blame or acrimony.


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

Its also still early days for me and probably plenty of other people in figuring out the most appropriate aspects in this sort of conversation. It was possible to dodge some of the detail before and thats not looking sustainable now so we'll have to work through this.

So far all I think I have settled on is to make sure to describe whichever group is being discussed as being especially vulnerable to the virus, and then reeling off a bunch of reasons why, all of which should increase understanding and empathy towards that group rather than direct hideous blame in their direction.


----------



## LDC (Jul 31, 2020)

Badgers is so furious at the government (mostly rightly) that some of the criticisms and issues he raises are a bit all over the place and sometimes incorrect, and often are coming from an emotional position rather than a factual one.


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

Well I dont want to put anyone off their fury, but I will try to redirect it at times.

I looked at some of my pandemic posts from the early months recently and there seem to have been times where I was much closer to making statements that stood the test of time when I was getting angry and ranting than when I was trying to be overly balanced and reasonable about every possibility at that moment. And a lot of the shit the pandemic has revealed isnt really new shit at all, its shit we've long known about and suffered but the amounts of energy including the energy of anger to deal with those issues in the past were not sufficient to overcome the forces that sustained the status quo. So I would not want to put anyone off finding a new degree of anger and motivation on any of those fronts as a result of the government handling of the pandemic so far.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2020)

elbows have you seen this paper on Swine Flu? It says that deaths from the pandemic were >10 times higher than what was confirmed by the WHO. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean anything to do with the current pandemic as testing was very limited then compared to now. 









						Global Mortality Estimates for the 2009 Influenza Pandemic from the GLaMOR Project: A Modeling Study
					

Lone Simonsen and colleagues use a two-stage statistical modeling approach to estimate the global mortality burden of the 2009 influenza pandemic from mortality data obtained from multiple countries. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary




					journals.plos.org


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> elbows have you seen this paper on Swine Flu? It says that deaths from the pandemic were >10 times higher than what was confirmed by the WHO. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean anything to do with the current pandemic as testing was very limited then compared to now.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



No, there are some very large gaps in my swine flu knowledge because it was hard to sustain my own interest in that pandemic once most other peoples interest had waned. And because the levels of death involved were modest, it was not possible to get a pretty clear picture from the most obvious excess mortality data in the way we've been able to with the current pandemic.

There arent necessarily all that many lessons from 2009 that are useful in this pandemic. I've used it in the past to demonstrate what our governments default approach to a pandemic would be, what role schools can play in transmission, why its not a good idea to think seasonal aspects apply very strongly to novel viruses in their initial pandemic phase. But I could also use it as an example of the attitudes towards getting the balance of doing too much/too little right in a pandemic and how events from just over a decade ago could have factored in. Because at the time, once it became clear that the number of deaths would be limited, there were plenty of wankers complaining that the government overreacted and did too much. I consider this to be a load of shit because our response mostly consisted of early clinical studies, a very limited testing campaign that was not designed to continue once a big wave arrived, chucking a shitload of tamiflu at the problem, a fairly vigorous public health information campaign, and eventually a vaccination programme. I considered that the bare minimum they should have done then (although the tamiflu was a bit pointless the way they used it to try to smother outbreaks) and it was no surprise that they tried to get away with a variation of that plan with this current pandemic and were forced to change plans by mid March because it was nowhere near enough and their timing was also crap due to poor surveillance and generally ending up behind the reality curve. I dont recall there being any dramatic examples in 2009 of the government of being so overtly inadequate and behind the curve in a manner obvious to the public, not like we had this time with the obvious u-turn, idiotic statements about being 4 weeks behind Italy when we were 2 weeks behind, comments about 20,000 deaths being a good result and then the icing of the cake of members of that team such as Johnson and Whitty testing positive within weeks because their own distancing behaviours were also behind the curve.

Anyway the reason for that rant paragraph was because that paper you link to, in the section that explains why the study was done, mentions this context:



> *Why Was This Study Done?*
> The modest number of laboratory-confirmed H1N1pdm09 deaths has caused commentators to wonder whether the public health response to H1N1pdm09 was excessive. However, as is the case with all influenza epidemics, the true mortality (death) burden from H1N1pdm09 is substantially higher than these figures indicate because only a minority of influenza-related deaths are definitively diagnosed by being confirmed in laboratory.


----------



## elbows (Jul 31, 2020)

Oops I forgot to say why else there were only limited lessons from 2009 to help with this pandemic.

I have every reason to think that due to the crap testing capacity and other planning details of the time, if the 2009 pandemic had affected older people much then the same hospital infections and care home outrage that happened in 2020 would have happened then too. But the pandemic 2009 virus turns out to have had enough similarities to a strain of influenza that older people had tended to meet earlier in their lives, that they had some immunity and so the whole thing panned out very differently. Certainly no thanks to the plan of the time, and as that bullet was dodged back then it left those lessons unlearned/deliberately overlooked.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jul 31, 2020)

tory central office BBC news this morning were grilling andy burnham as if it's his fault that the guidance put out by government is bollocks and he didn't understand some of it...


----------



## zahir (Jul 31, 2020)

Nisreen A Alwan: What exactly is mild covid-19?  - The BMJ
					

We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure It is the morning after. I went out for a [...]More...




					blogs.bmj.com
				





> It seems common in many countries that anyone with symptoms, but not hospitalised is counted as a “mild” case, but the degree of covid-19 severity must be defined by the duration of ill health, not just the need for hospital admission. If symptoms last for more than a month and are debilitating to usual activities, it is unreasonable to call this a “mild” case.





> As a public health doctor and epidemiologist, I strongly think we must now clearly define and measure “recovery” from covid-19. This way we can quantify non-death health outcomes and monitor long-term implications of the virus. The definition needs to be more sophisticated than just hospital discharge or testing negative for the virus. It must take into account symptom duration, fluctuation, overall functionality and quality of life in comparison to before infection. If we do not have enough information to define “mild” at this stage, then let us not use the term loosely, otherwise it is detrimental to pandemic control.





> What is now becoming clear is that mortality is not the only adverse outcome of this infection and our surveillance systems must keep up and reflect that. I am advocating for precise case definitions for covid-19 morbidity that reflect the degree of severity of infection and allow us to measure moderate and long term health and wellbeing outcomes. At this stage of the pandemic, it is vital that we accurately measure and count all degrees of infection, not only in research cohorts, but as part of population-based routine surveillance systems. This includes people like me who were not tested at the time of their initial infection. Death is not the only thing to count in this pandemic, we must count lives changed. We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2020)

Claims that Muslims caused Leicester’s Covid-19 outbreak are baseless - Full Fact
					

It is still too early to give a definitive explanation for why Leicester’s outbreak happened.




					fullfact.org


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2020)

Cunt


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Aug 1, 2020)

He really does deserve a punch to the throat.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 1, 2020)

More and more reasons to avoid right wing twats. They're infectious in more ways than one.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2020)

Mr.Bishie said:


> He really does deserve a punch to the throat.


----------



## zahir (Aug 2, 2020)

Long term symptoms.




__





						AAAS
					






					www.sciencemag.org


----------



## Badgers (Aug 2, 2020)




----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 2, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 224772


I agree. We won't bankrupt ourselves to save her sorry arse


----------



## existentialist (Aug 2, 2020)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 224772


Good. Off you fuck, then.


----------



## zahir (Aug 2, 2020)

Airborne transmission and the importance of ventilation.








						We Need to Talk About Ventilation
					

How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission?




					www.theatlantic.com


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2020)




----------



## Sasaferrato (Aug 3, 2020)

Huge demonstration in Berlin today, on 17 Juni Strasse.















						Berlin protests against coronavirus rules divide German leaders
					

Up to 20,000 demonstrated against restrictions, raising fears of a rise in infections




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## crossthebreeze (Aug 4, 2020)

I'm getting the horrible sense this week that a significant number of people don't understand the rationale of lockdown rules, and are starting to completely disregard things. Over the last few days:

Someone in a locally-based facebook group said that their socially-distanced garden party (of close mates) went well at the weekend, so they are going to have a garden party at the end of August and everyone in the group is invited (we would only meet up as a group a couple of times a year under normal circumstances, we aren't all people who have been seeing each other anyway, and there's a lot more than 6 of us).  Then there was talk about music, and camping overnight, and other things which would mean social distancing less likely to happen.  Then it got a bit nasty when it became clear that some of the group thought it was a bad idea.

At the charity I work at I've had a few people - including one of the local councillors - asking me to set up the gardening and litterpicking groups and events again, and not understanding why I don't think this is a good idea.

Several friends on facebook posting pictures of meals or drinks out where they are social distancing from other customers, but not from their mates sitting on the same table (and sitting indoors with people from several households).

The local mutual aid group is putting on an outdoor event with stalls and a "free shop", and craft workshops and talks and sports - yes it'll all be socially distanced but still encouraging people who wouldn't usually meet up to mix.

I saw two seperate religious groups had events in the local park - giving out food with megaphone proselyting and scripture being handed out - mostly wearing masks but very little social distancing.

I was in the car, and there was an amazing sunset over the river, so we stopped in a pub carpark to take photos.  We were thinking about getting a drink in the beer garden - but decided not too because there seemed to be no table service - it bar service (with screens) in the pub and there wasn't very good social distancing inside.  Walking back to the car it started raining and we could see half the people in the beer garden walking into the pub - making it really crowded.

Like this isn't people deciding to not socially-distance with loved ones, or to meet up in slightly larger numbers than allowed as family or friends who all see each other anyway, its people getting back to almost-normal with people they don't usually see, even if they go through the motion of social distancing and being outside at least until it becomes inconvenient.

On the other hand, I know people who have been shielding or who are paid carers/PAs/support workers for people at very high risk, who have only seen one person at social distance (outside of work for the paid carers), and who are still avoiding shops and eating out and public transport.

Sorry for the long post!


----------



## William of Walworth (Aug 4, 2020)

crossthebreeze said:


> we stopped in a pub carpark to take photos.  We were thinking about getting a drink in the beer garden - but decided not too because there seemed to be no table service - it bar service (with screens) in the pub and there wasn't very good social distancing inside.  Walking back to the car it started raining and we could see half the people in the beer garden walking into the pub - making it really crowded.



This is probably more something for the 'pubs reopening' thread, so my apologies.

But my impression is that one of the biggest problems with pubs re-opening is the huge levels of _inconsistency of approach_, between different pubs.

Both from what some friends have told me and from what I've seen myself, some pubs are managing the thing pretty well, with plenty of distancing enforced, insistance that anyone coming in uses the hand-sanitiser dispensers, requiring people to sit down both when they stay outside and go inside, but with a much-reduced number of interior tables, with big gaps between them..

Table service-only is frequent in many pubs.

But if bar service _is_ allowed, only under very strict conditions -- one only at a time, not beyond a certain point, sometimes transparent screens in front of the bar, etc.

But if the pub you describe above lets a large garden crowd back into the pub when the rain falls, there surely wouldn't be enough tables for them, and then they'd be standing, some no doubt too close to the bar.

Which is surely rule-breaking or very close to it!!


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 5, 2020)

I went to a pub last night (sat outside) and the setup really didn't inspire confidence unfortunately. The one I went to a few weeks ago was great though.


----------



## LDC (Aug 5, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I went to a pub last night (sat outside) and the setup really didn't inspire confidence unfortunately. The one I went to a few weeks ago was great though.



I had the opposite, went to a pub on Sunday for the first time since this thing started. Sat outside, tables far apart, all cleaned before you sat down. They'd moved the drinks and food menu online, you looked at that on your phone then ordered at the door, card payments only. When they brought the food and drinks out they held them using bar cloths, and lots more other stuff besides. Had really clearly been carefully thought through.

Chatted to one of the staff and they said the owners had been really good with them in the last months, and have told them they have to feel and be safe as they can be. Really inspired confidence, and I expect they'll do well from it.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 5, 2020)

__





						Manchester coronavirus lockdown warning to 'white middle class'
					

Middle class white communities have been warned not to be complacent in thinking the virus won't affect them



					metro.co.uk
				




Concerning


----------



## Roadkill (Aug 6, 2020)

Badgers said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



In some ways the fact it's being reported thus is no bad thing.  There's been far too much comment - mainly online but I've heard it in real life too - suggesting that Covid is now mainly a problem in poor, overcrowded inner city areas, and among minorities who either don't understand or won't follow the rules.  The fact there's a nasty outbreak in an area like Trafford should shake people out of that complacency and more or less implicit racism.


----------



## 8ball (Aug 6, 2020)

Bloody white people again.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 6, 2020)

Roadkill said:


> In some ways the fact it's being reported thus is no bad thing.  There's been far too much comment - mainly online but I've heard it in real life too - suggesting that Covid is now mainly a problem in poor, overcrowded inner city areas, and among minorities who either don't understand or won't follow the rules.  The fact there's a nasty outbreak in an area like Trafford should shake people out of that complacency and more or less implicit racism.



Yes, its one thing to acknowledge that the impact is hitting harder in certain communities (particularly South Asian origin in North England) but its another thing entirely to start saying its because they don't follow the rules.  There is a whole blame problem here.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 6, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I went to a pub last night (sat outside) and the setup really didn't inspire confidence unfortunately. The one I went to a few weeks ago was great though.



I remember during lockdown and before the pubs reopened urbs basically agreeing that any place that didn't take its responsibilities seriously should be given a wide berth.  I've noticed a couple round my way and sounds like you have found one as well.  Fuck em, I reckon.


----------



## LDC (Aug 6, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Yes, its one thing to acknowledge that the impact is hitting harder in certain communities (particularly South Asian origin in North England) but its another thing entirely to start saying its because they don't follow the rules.  There is a whole blame problem here.



For sure, but it's also possible to say some groups/communities/whatever people don't follow rules so well due to things that aren't their fault, such as poor communication by the State, lack of language ability, worse access to services etc., which I think is partly what's happening around where I live.


----------



## William of Walworth (Aug 7, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I remember during lockdown and before the pubs reopened urbs basically agreeing that *any place that didn't take its responsibilities seriously should be given a wide berth*.  I've noticed a couple round my way and sounds like you have found one as well.  Fuck em, I reckon.



Exactly. In most areas it's not too difficult at all to find a pub that has good hygiene and distancing and serving protocol 
(And a garden or outside seating yard, ideally!  )


----------



## Numbers (Aug 7, 2020)

Day off today so we’re going out, first time since early March 😱

We’re off to Victoria Park, gonna chill close to the Park Tavern so we can order takeaway food and drinks (if (when) we get through our ice bag wine).  Blanket, Minirig, hip flask of 21 year old Rum, Woodbine.

Can’t wait, in fact am really excited.  Just need to negotiate a small bit of London transport to get there.

Any local Urbs in the area you know what we look like so...


----------



## Numbers (Aug 8, 2020)

^^^^

Cracking day out, transport wasn’t too bad, pub had a good system for takeaways - one way system, mandatory hand sanitiser before entering.  Wouldn’t have liked to be eating/drinking in there tho’ as nobody had a mask.

5 hours lying in the park getting slowly toasted


----------



## William of Walworth (Aug 9, 2020)

Was in Cardiff most of today.

Several pubs that I like were closed -- I love both the Cambrian and City Armses (great guest beer choice/range!). 
But both were shut 

Both are owned by Brains, and it seems that *ALL* Brains pubs are remaining closed for now 

Otherwise, most places I visited had quite strict protocol about everything, but the staff everywhere were universally friendly and helpful.

Beer being quality helped a lot too


----------



## Bollox (Aug 9, 2020)

I went for a ride in Wentwood Forest, a bit cooler  and anti-social distancing easily achieved.
Car park seemed to have a become a picnic area, just what makes sheeple drive to a beautifull woodland area then spend their time encamped in the parking area just baffles me.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 10, 2020)

if we don't send kids back to school during a plague how are they going to learn that society puts no value on their lives?


----------



## Badgers (Aug 10, 2020)

Seems reasonable 



> Britain, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus, reported more than 1,000 new COVID-19 infections on Sunday, its highest daily increase since June, taking the total number of cases past 310,000.











						UK COVID-19 daily death count could be scrapped - Telegraph
					

The UK's official COVID-19 daily death count could be scrapped following an investigation into Public Health England's method of counting the toll, The Telegraph newspaper reported.




					uk.mobile.reuters.com


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 10, 2020)

Lol seems legit


----------



## two sheds (Aug 10, 2020)

> Academics in a blog post had warned that the way the government health agency calculated the figures was skewed as patients who tested positive for coronavirus, but are successfully treated, will still be counted as dying from the virus "even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later".
> 
> England's death figures vary substantially from day to day due to this reason, the academics had argued.
> 
> In contrast, the other parts of the United Kingdom do not follow the same approach. There is a cut-off threshold of 28 days in Scotland after a positive test, after which a patient is not automatically considered to have died from the virus.



Sooooooooooooooooo rather than counting them as Scotland does, which would seem the sensible way, we'll scrap the daily count altogether. Which means we lose up to a week's worth of early warning of increases. What bollocks, I wonder what the real reason is .....


----------



## Supine (Aug 10, 2020)

Things really haven’t changed much since the Spanish flu. Virtually the same advice as now.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 10, 2020)

Highest number of cases for six weeks reported 

Still...


----------



## Badgers (Aug 10, 2020)

Great idea for kids


----------



## existentialist (Aug 10, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Great idea for kids



Not just body-shaming, but *institutional* body-shaming. What could possibly go wrong?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 10, 2020)

two sheds said:


> Sooooooooooooooooo rather than counting them as Scotland does, which would seem the sensible way, we'll scrap the daily count altogether. Which means we lose up to a week's worth of early warning of increases. What bollocks, I wonder what the real reason is .....



Given that we know covid can cause heart problems it's not inconceivable that they could 'die of a heart attack 3 months later'


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 10, 2020)

It's so fucking stupid 'I could test positive and be hit by a bus' is there any example where this has happened


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 10, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Great idea for kids




That's horrible in so many ways.  My sister is a primary school teacher and having a conversation with a parent of a really overweight child is a conversation she hates.  Its apparently very tricky and you have to be very careful with every word used.

Just shaming a child in front of their class?  Fuck off.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 10, 2020)

Yes that's insane, much better alternative:



> For years, the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin increased its booming tourist industry without any worries at all. Alas, as is often the case, this was an act of utter stupidity, as it led to a colossal cumulative erosion problem. Of course, what else could one expect with ten billion tourists per annum? Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.


----------



## Thora (Aug 10, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> That's horrible in so many ways.  My sister is a primary school teacher and having a conversation with a parent of a really overweight child is a conversation she hates.  Its apparently very tricky and you have to be very careful with every word used.
> 
> Just shaming a child in front of their class?  Fuck off.


When they weigh children in reception & year 6 it’s not done in front of the class and the child isn’t told the results.

All the obese children are just withdrawn by their parents anyway...


----------



## Badgers (Aug 11, 2020)

Meanwhile another island manages the virus


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Aug 11, 2020)

Oh poor New Zealand.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 11, 2020)

No


----------



## William of Walworth (Aug 12, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> Oh poor New Zealand.



Still far-better-off-than-UK New Zealand??? 

( return of caleb  )


----------



## return of caleb (Aug 12, 2020)

New Zealand looking at freight as the source, which made sense to me, until I read that they believe that the virus was present in a refrigerated unit one of the infected family members work in; we know the virus survives on surfaces, and in those conditions, but it seems strange to me the assume it would be at an infectious level.

But then, coronavirus has proven itself to be bloody strange.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 12, 2020)

return of caleb said:


> New Zealand looking at freight as the source, which made sense to me, until I read that they believe that the virus was present in a refrigerated unit one of the infected family members work in; we know the virus survives on surfaces, and in those conditions, but it seems strange to me the assume it would be at an infectious level.
> 
> But then, coronavirus has proven itself to be bloody strange.



Have they found any more infected patients?


----------



## return of caleb (Aug 12, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Have they found any more infected patients?



I don't believe so, yet. But they're only testing close contacts atm, I believe.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 12, 2020)

return of caleb said:


> I don't believe so, yet. But they're only testing close contacts atm, I believe.






I really hope they can find the source of the infection. Do they have quarantine rules around freight ships etc?


----------



## Chilli.s (Aug 12, 2020)

This has been known for some time:

"WU ZUNYOU, CHIEF EPIDEMIOLOGIST OF CHINA’S CENTER FOR DISEASES PREVENTION AND CONTROL:
Wu told state media over the weekend that the virus can survive on the surface of frozen food for up to three months ."

But working in a refrigerated container handling food (butchered meat?) for extended periods does seem to be a risky area.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 12, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I really hope they can find the source of the infection. Do they have quarantine rules around freight ships etc?



Whatever else happens in NZ, their approach is going to be best for learning about how the infection is passed on.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 12, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> Oh poor New Zealand.


At least they are acting quickly and effectively. Unlike some island's


----------



## Badgers (Aug 12, 2020)

#worldbeating


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Aug 12, 2020)

return of caleb said:


> New Zealand looking at freight as the source, which made sense to me, until I read that they believe that the virus was present in a refrigerated unit one of the infected family members work in; we know the virus survives on surfaces, and in those conditions, but it seems strange to me the assume it would be at an infectious level.
> 
> But then, coronavirus has proven itself to be bloody strange.



This is the presumed cause of the Dalian outbreak and the Beijing outbreak in China too. Seems crazy, I know. Like, it makes me imagine people at the other end coughing and phlegming all over the packaged fish before they send it off, but apparently this is a thing.  China tests all incoming cold imports now, and found some infected stuff just today.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Aug 12, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> coughing and phlegming


Or just breathing.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Aug 12, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Or just breathing.



Right. Obviously they're not phlegming on the fish. _Obviously_. But it does seem amazing that breathing on cold stuff at one end would infect people on the other end.


----------



## zora (Aug 12, 2020)

Yes, it does seem wild! And wouldn't there be even more infections everywhere if this was a route of transmission? But maybe the risk is tiny, so tiny that it wouldn't register in countries (like all European ones) with significant community transmission, but will register if the literally one-in-a-million thing happens in a country/region where the virus is otherwise eliminated?


----------



## LDC (Aug 12, 2020)

Early on in the pandemic I chatted to a consultant doctor (unsurprisingly he wasn't one in infectious diseases...) who was convinced it all was being transmitted through new mobile phones that were made and shipped from China, and then opened in the rest of the world.

Just to prove yet again that you can be clever and well educated, and yet still an idiot.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Aug 12, 2020)

zora said:


> Yes, it does seem wild! And wouldn't there be even more infections everywhere if this was a route of transmission? But maybe the risk is tiny, so tiny that it wouldn't register in countries (like all European ones) with significant community transmission, but will register if the literally one-in-a-million thing happens in a country/region where the virus is otherwise eliminated?



That is a really good point. 

I really hope this is the transmission route, because if it is, they can test the imports and hopefully it'll stop happening. I think China now also routinely tests those working with the incoming cold stuff too, just in case.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 12, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Early on in the pandemic I chatted to a consultant doctor (unsurprisingly he wasn't one in infectious diseases...) who was convinced it all was being transmitted through new mobile phones that were made and shipped from China, and then opened in the rest of the world.
> 
> Just to prove yet again that you can be clever and well educated, and  still an idiot.


It's because we've got rid of all the telephone sanitizing engineers  Once again the Adams in his futurist role puts Nostradamus to shame.



> A notation in the Guide about Golgafrincham after the departure of the B Ark states that the entire remaining population subsequently died from a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 12, 2020)

77 deaths and 1009 new cases today according to the disgraced governments website.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 12, 2020)

Badgers said:


> 77 deaths and 1009 new cases today according to the disgraced governments website.



Trying to stay positive, both those numbers are down on yesterday.

And, remember reported deaths on Tue & Wed are always higher, because of the lag in weekend reporting, reported on Sun &  Mon.


----------



## 8ball (Aug 12, 2020)

Supine said:


> Things really haven’t changed much since the Spanish flu. Virtually the same advice as now.View attachment 225901



Cheerfully obey  (nice Douglas Adams ring to it).


----------



## planetgeli (Aug 12, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Early on in the pandemic I chatted to a consultant doctor (unsurprisingly he wasn't one in infectious diseases...) who was convinced it all was being transmitted through new mobile phones that were made and shipped from China, and then opened in the rest of the world.
> 
> Just to prove yet again that you can be clever and well educated, and yet still an idiot.



That's actually a little scary. I'm not stupid enough to believe every doctor is a genius* but that's quite out there and smacks a little of some sort of political or racial prejudice to come out with shit like that.

*My best mate's daughter just became a GP. She's really not that 'clever' (though she wouldn't stoop to that kind of BS) - she simply has some sort of photographic memory.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 12, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Trying to stay positive, both those numbers are down on yesterday.
> 
> And, remember reported deaths on Tue & Wed are always higher, because of the lag in weekend reporting, reported on Sun &  Mon.


That's the spirit


----------



## return of caleb (Aug 13, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> This is the presumed cause of the Dalian outbreak and the Beijing outbreak in China too. Seems crazy, I know. Like, it makes me imagine people at the other end coughing and phlegming all over the packaged fish before they send it off, but apparently this is a thing.  China tests all incoming cold imports now, and found some infected stuff just today.





zora said:


> Yes, it does seem wild! And wouldn't there be even more infections everywhere if this was a route of transmission? But maybe the risk is tiny, so tiny that it wouldn't register in countries (like all European ones) with significant community transmission, but will register if the literally one-in-a-million thing happens in a country/region where the virus is otherwise eliminated?



This is my thinking as well, and I'm a bit silly about sanitising things from the supermarket from time to time, but surely if that _was_ a source of transmission we'd have many millions more cases, well, _every_where given the nature of global supply chains. I think one epidemiologist explained it as one of those things which is absolutely theoretically possible, but there are so many things that would have to link up in a highly unlikely way to make it a reality - if that makes sense?

And then there's the fact that freighting _is _a high-risk industry in the same way abattoirs, etc. are. It seems like it's a hopeful thought that maybe it was imported that way - rather than workers spreading it to each other, and there being an actual source of infection in the community.

We'll have to wait and see.


----------



## return of caleb (Aug 13, 2020)

Update: NZ Director-General of Health saying it was most likely person to person transmission, rather than from a surface.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 13, 2020)

#worldbeating


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

return of caleb said:


> Update: NZ Director-General of Health saying it was most likely person to person transmission, rather than from a surface.


He's also now said that anyone testing positive will now have to quarantine for 14 days in a Government Quarantine facility. And so the madness begins.


----------



## zora (Aug 13, 2020)

What is mad about that?


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

Its what I would do if I were in their position.

Even England made a big show of doing that in the early days when repatriating people from the most obviously affected areas, back when it was possible to maintain an illusion that this virus was not in general circulation in the UK. There were too many other holes in the system to make it much more than being about being seen to be doing something, and not many people were included in the quarantine so it was absurd in many ways, but if done with the right scope at the right time in the right situation it can be a vital tool.


----------



## spitfire (Aug 13, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> This is the presumed cause of the Dalian outbreak and the Beijing outbreak in China too. Seems crazy, I know. Like, it makes me imagine people at the other end coughing and phlegming all over the packaged fish before they send it off, but apparently this is a thing.  China tests all incoming cold imports now, and found some infected stuff just today.



I appreciate you aren't in the UK but just going to latch onto this post for some input.

I manufacture food for a living and get the Food Standards Agency emails that recall (potentially) dodgy food. I haven't seen any that have been recalled because they are COVID infected. Normally they recall food just on the _off chance_ it is contaminated or has foreign bodies in it. If it was going through the food supply chain we'd be surely looking at many times the magnitude of cases we currently have?

Just been sent this which is also interesting. It refers to small cafes etc. but the principle is the same.









						FSA launches campaign to help food sector adapt to the 'new normal'
					

The Here to Help campaign provides a practical guide for food businesses on how to register, re-open and adapt to the way they trade safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.




					www.food.gov.uk
				




"Our advice is clear that it remains very unlikely that people can catch COVID-19 from food. COVID-19 is a respiratory illness and not known to be transmitted by exposure to food or food packaging. We are continuing to work closely with industry and other partners to ensure the UK food supply remains safe."

But I am very open to any other information if anyone has it and do not present this as case closed.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> He's also now said that anyone testing positive will now have to quarantine for 14 days in a Government Quarantine facility. And so the madness begins.



Given the Melbourne / Victoria outbreak seems to have been at least partly caused by people not self-quarantining this seems eminently sensible.  To be honest, this together with your postings on another thread is making you sound a bit like a _plandemic_ type.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Given the Melbourne / Victoria outbreak seems to have been at least partly caused by people not self-quarantining this seems eminently sensible.  To be honest, this together with your postings on another thread is making you sound a bit like a _plandemic_ type.



The  Melbourne outbreak started from local government hotel quarantine facilities not being secured properly.



> Premier Daniel Andrews has pinpointed the origin of many infections to workers overseeing hotel quarantines breaking the rules. More than 20,000 travellers have gone through 14-day quarantine in the state.
> 
> A report which traced Covid-19's mutation in Victoria found that hotel staff cases were the "ancestors" of ones found later in suburban homes.



If it's tiny numbers, as in NZ, it seems sensible to force self-quarantining, backed with full pay during the period, regular spot checks & massive fines for breaching quarantine, rather than packing people into hotels, where leaking can occur via staff.


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## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> Its what I would do if I were in their position.
> 
> Even England made a big show of doing that in the early days when repatriating people from the most obviously affected areas, back when it was possible to maintain an illusion that this virus was not in general circulation in the UK. There were too many other holes in the system to make it much more than being about being seen to be doing something, and not many people were included in the quarantine so it was absurd in many ways, but if done with the right scope at the right time in the right situation it can be a vital tool.


They are putting people who test positive into quarantine centres. This is not the same as quarantining people on arrival. So, they are forcing people to self isolate in a government centre.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> They are putting people who test positive into quarantine centres. This is not the same as quarantining people on arrival. So, they are forcing people to self isolate in a government centre.



Good. As I already said, I agree with them doing this.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Given the Melbourne / Victoria outbreak seems to have been at least partly caused by people not self-quarantining this seems eminently sensible.  To be honest, this together with your postings on another thread is making you sound a bit like a _plandemic_ type.


So you'd be happy to have yourself or a family member removed to a quarantine centre if you tested positive? Your son, daughter etc... for 14 days?


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

Yes, if I was in a country such as New Zealand that had prevented widespread outbreaks so far, it would be reckless and selfish to do anything less.

The circumstances that I would not agree with it would be if the numbers involved had grown so large that it wasnt practical, and where it was clear the horse had already bolted.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

Its pretty clear that eradication is never going to work. There will just be a series of new lock downs and economic fall out, with people removed to quarantine centres when they test positive - irrespective of whether they are ill or not. Absurd, but it seems everyone likes the absurd.


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

Well in the first months of the pandemic I repeatedly cautioned that countries that had made early gains and kept the situation well under control would not necessarily be able to maintain those gains. And when the new virus was first announced, I didnt consider it at all likely that the world would really do everything to stop it.

But given how much success New Zealand had and for how long, I do think it would be absurd not to keep trying that strategy. There is a point at which they should give up on that approach, but I dont think its now. Especially not in winter, and not unless the numbers indicate such widespread community transmission that its a futile quest.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

So, its likely that they will give up that strategy in the long term. But in the meantime, people will be forcibly quarantined and new lockdowns imposed. Seems an absolute mess. Its important to note that they locked down and forced quarantine over 14 new cases. Australia seems even worse. I guess we have it all to come in the UK - again.


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

General lockdowns arent avoided just because you give up that approach though. Countries that are going for a strategy that involves suppression and limiting numbers but not total elimination still have lockdowns in their stated arsenal. And stricter measures targeting infected individuals should be to prevent the need for more far-reaching draconian measures that affect the general population as a whole.

In the longterm the various available options on this front are only going to go away when we replace them with vaccination campaigns. Or if other virus factors lead to a similar situation with regards number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths as we would have seen under mass vaccination scenarios.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

Or if the cases dont cause hospitilisations then we can all just adop the common sense Swedish approach. I suspect everyone will eventually, but only after they have trashed their economies first. You couldn't possibly admit that eradication was a pipe dream after being so draconian in approach to lockdown. Unfortunately I suspect that is the mess that most countries are now finding themselves in. A case of having to continue down a failing approach due to an inability to lose face and admit the strategy was flawed. Lockdown until a vaccine is found now seems the only approach allowed.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

.


----------



## magneze (Aug 13, 2020)

Detaining in a quarantine centre for people who haven't broken self quarantine is a step too far IMHO. As a result of breaching self quarantine it's understandable but not like this. A line crossed.


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

In Milan they put some people into hotels (and paid them) iirc.


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Or if the cases dont cause hospitilisations then we can all just adop the common sense Swedish approach. I suspect everyone will eventually, but only after they have trashed their economies first. You couldn't possibly admit that eradication was a pipe dream after being so draconian in approach to lockdown. Unfortunately I suspect that is the mess that most countries are now finding themselves in. A case of having to continue down a failing approach due to an inability to lose face and admit the strategy was flawed. Lockdown until a vaccine is found now seems the only approach allowed.



The UK government never committed to eradication and the lockdowns were weak in various ways, so only draconian in a pretty superficial way in many cases. Official UK government scientific advisors have not set themselves up for the 'pipe dream' stuff you mention because they often said that total eradication wasnt really an option, and their words on this did not suddenly change once UK abandoned its especially crappy plan A, a plan which by the sounds of it would have been more to your taste. And their positions havent moved much since then either, they still talk about us having to find ways to cope until vaccination is available, and dont mention eradication as a possibility. Lockdowns arent only for eradication, they can be used for suppression and pushing down on the curve stuff, which is mostly why we ended up with them, not with the expectation that the virus would be eliminated. The Imperial College papers that influenced thinking were not looking at one lockdown that lasted from the start till vaccination, but they knew the situation would not require just one single initial lockdown. Their original suggestion was to switch the lockdown on and off in response to intensive care data, but this evolved into the localised measures we see mentioned and done at the moment. They will try to avoid another national lockdown but they arent going to rule it out completely with winter looming in the distance.

Its somewhat hard to judge the effectiveness of many lockdowns because they were done rather late and failed to avoid a lot of the initial exposure of the vulnerable to the virus. But its clear that governments are mostly going to be proactive now and not make the same mistakes most of them made in the first months. So they will be cautious, which is the right approach. If at some point hospitalisations and deaths remained low in a situation where there were an absolutely huge number of infections taking place, then of course the equation will change and governments will change approach again.


----------



## Cerv (Aug 13, 2020)

magneze said:


> Detaining in a quarantine centre for people who haven't broken self quarantine is a step too far IMHO. As a result of breaching self quarantine it's understandable but not like this. A line crossed.


detaining people in a quarantine centre who have broken home self-quarantine is a bit bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted though.

it's a lose-lose proposition either way.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> The UK government never committed to eradication and the lockdowns were weak in various ways, so only draconian in a pretty superficial way in many cases. Official UK government scientific advisors have not set themselves up for the 'pipe dream' stuff you mention because they often said that total eradication wasnt really an option, and that did not suddenly change once UK abandoned its especially crappy plan A, a plan which by the sounds of it would have been more to your taste.
> 
> Its somewhat hard to judge the effectiveness of many lockdowns because they were done rather late and failed to avoid a lot of the initial exposure of the vulnerable to the virus. But its clear that governments are mostly going to be proactive now and not make the same mistakes most of them made in the first months. So they will be cautious, which is the right approach. If at some point hospitalisations and deaths remained low in a situation where there were an absolutely huge number of infections taking place, then of course the equation will change and governments will change approach again.


But yet, Sweden continues to record low death rates - after the initial high rates in care homes (like everywhere). So deaths and hospitilisations have been, and continue to be, very low with zero lockdown.


----------



## magneze (Aug 13, 2020)

I can't find information on this new Zealand thing. Is it true?


----------



## Supine (Aug 13, 2020)

Cerv said:


> detaining people in a quarantine centre who have broken home self-quarantine is a bit bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted though.
> 
> it's a lose-lose proposition either way.



I think it's more of a reigning the horse in measure. Before it goes on more of a rampage.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Its pretty clear that eradication is never going to work. There will just be a series of new lock downs and economic fall out, with people removed to quarantine centres when they test positive - irrespective of whether they are ill or not. Absurd, but it seems everyone likes the absurd.


They're all marching out of step, except you


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> But yet, Sweden continues to record low death rates - after the initial high rates in care homes (like everywhere). So deaths and hospitilisations have been, and continue to be, very low with zero lockdown.



lol i am no fan of the swedish strategy but you need to learn what you are talking about. they have stricter restrictions than we do now. they banned gatherings of more than 50 (which are still banned iirc) when we were hosting hundreds of thousands of people at cheltenham and stereophonics concerts.
except they never did a lockdown because their comparatively mild restrictions were supposed to be maintained indefinitely until either a vaccine or natural immunity was achieved - up to a number of years if necessary.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

magneze said:


> I can't find information on this new Zealand thing. Is it true?


Yes its true.









						Focus Live: 13 new Covid cases in Auckland - all will go into quarantine - NZ Herald
					

There are 13 new Covid cases in Auckland and they all will now go into quarantine. All of the 13 cases are linked to the original four confirmed cases from the new outbreak in South Auckland. Video / Chris Tarpey




					www.nzherald.co.nz


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> lol i am no fan of the swedish strategy but you need to learn what you are talking about. they have stricter restrictions than we do now. they banned gatherings of more than 50 (which are still banned iirc) when we were hosting hundreds of thousands of people at cheltenham and stereophonics concerts.
> except they never did a lockdown because their comparatively mild restrictions were supposed to be maintained indefinitely until either a vaccine or natural immunity was achieved - up to a number of years if necessary.


A much more sustainable and balanced approach.


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

I'm interested in what you think we should do if things get worse in terms of hospital admissions and deaths as we get into winter. Because its not hard to make all sorts of cases for different sorts of responses with the situation as it is right now, but when the going gets real tough the options shrink and I am left not understanding the logic and rationale of certain proposals when applied to such situations.

I'm also interested in what you think Sweden will do if things get bad for them this winter. I dont think they have ruled out draconian stuff if they think circumstances demand it.


----------



## Hyperdark (Aug 13, 2020)

All gone rather quiet on the previously 'big upped'  UK vaccine front.
methinks too many in charge of the coffers are that thick they can't tell the difference between genuine progress and a bunch of post-grads telling porkies to secure next years grants
I'll wager the ongoing trials are throwing a bit of reality into the mix and its being surpressed


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> A much more sustainable and balanced approach.



don't know whether they still do this but they've shut bars that have more than 50 people in them. during march and april they banned all but essential travel between the regions. reading your posts i get the idea you wouldn't be impressed at this.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> But yet, Sweden continues to record low death rates - after the initial high rates in care homes (like everywhere). So deaths and hospitilisations have been, and continue to be, very low with zero lockdown.



International comparisons are always difficult, for all-sorts of reasons, you certainly can't compare Sweden to the likes of the UK, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc.

It's fairer to compare them with their neighbours, so lets look at the deaths per million in the Nordic countries - Norway 47, Finland 60, Denmark 107, Sweden 571.

If you seriously think Sweden has been successful, with one of the highest death rates in Europe, and off the scale compared to its neighbours, and their anti-lock down policy has worked, you frankly need therapy.


----------



## Supine (Aug 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> All gone rather quiet on the previously 'big upped'  UK vaccine front.
> methinks too many in charge of the coffers are that thick they can't tell the difference between genuine progress and a bunch of post-grads telling porkies to secure next years grants
> I'll wager the ongoing trials are throwing a bit of reality into the mix and its being surpressed



Are you trying to start a conspiracy theory with little knowledge of what's actually going on? We have a thread for that elsewhere.


----------



## LDC (Aug 13, 2020)

Supine said:


> Are you trying to start a conspiracy theory with little knowledge of what's actually going on? We have a thread for that elsewhere.



Yeah, suddenly 2 people on here that clearly have no clue. Where's that ignore button...


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> All gone rather quiet on the previously 'big upped'  UK vaccine front.
> methinks too many in charge of the coffers are that thick they can't tell the difference between genuine progress and a bunch of post-grads telling porkies to secure next years grants
> I'll wager the ongoing trials are throwing a bit of reality into the mix and its being surpressed



And, you are talking complete bollocks, please fuck off.


----------



## Hyperdark (Aug 13, 2020)

Thanks for that well argued point


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> Thanks for that well argued point



1 - It hasn't 'all gone rather quiet on [the Oxford vaccine]', see THIS POST, for example.

2 - I did say 'please'.


----------



## magneze (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Yes its true.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Sorry where are enforced quarantine centres mentioned?


----------



## two sheds (Aug 13, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, suddenly 2 people on here that clearly have no clue. Where's that ignore button...



three but at least I'm trying to keep my mouth shut


----------



## Hyperdark (Aug 13, 2020)

Thankyou for the update, Though a report on them argueing amongst themselves is hardly progress now is it?
I have one underlying medical condition and signed up last week for the trial, havn't heard anything yet and this explains why.
I remain of the belief that its been way way way over sold,  to keep people's chins up
Its ok you have a different opinion, though a bit sad you can't express it in a more mature manner.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> Thankyou for the update, Though a report on them argueing amongst themselves is hardly progress now is it?
> I have one underlying medical condition and signed up last week for the trial, havn't heard anything yet and this explains why.
> I remain of the belief that its been way way way over sold,  to keep people's chins up
> Its ok you have a different opinion, though a bit sad you can't express it in a more mature manner.



Sorry, but I don;t have much time for uneducated potatoes that clearly haven't got a clue what they are talking about.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> International comparisons are always difficult, for all-sorts of reasons, you certainly can't compare Sweden to the likes of the UK, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc.
> 
> It's fairer to compare them with their neighbours, so lets look at the deaths per million in the Nordic countries - Norway 47, Finland 60, Denmark 107, Sweden 571.
> 
> If you seriously think Sweden has been successful, with one of the highest death rates in Europe, and off the scale compared to its neighbours, and their anti-lock down policy has worked, you frankly need therapy.


They really dont have a high death rate - especially not in terms of community. And not when comapring population denisty - Stockholm is very dense. Any of their neighbours have an equivelent?


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> I'm interested in what you think we should do if things get worse in terms of hospital admissions and deaths as we get into winter. Because its not hard to make all sorts of cases for different sorts of responses with the situation as it is right now, but when the going gets real tough the options shrink and I am left not understanding the logic and rationale of certain proposals when applied to such situations.
> 
> I'm also interested in what you think Sweden will do if things get bad for them this winter. I dont think they have ruled out draconian stuff if they think circumstances demand it.


Well there are those unused, still empty Nightingale hospitals for a start. Remember when they were built and the cost of building them.


----------



## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Well there are those unused, still empty Nightingale hospitals for a start. Remember when they were built and the cost of building them.



They arent terribly useful without a load of the right staff appearing out of thin air to operate them. You can use them for morale and propaganda purposes and to give people a sense that they are doing something, and to avoid hideous scenes of people lying on the floor of hospital corridors. And there are some ways you can actually use them to care for people, but they dont suddenly give us a huge amount of new capacity to treat people, because of the aforementioned staffing issues. They are not an alternative to having to lockdown society to save healthcare system from collapse, they are a measure that can be used as part of handling surges but they are not a solution on their own. I'd be in favour of using them as part of a system that tried to segregate covid cases from the rest of the hospital population, but that is easier said than done too, and massive staffing issues remain.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

magneze said:


> Sorry where are enforced quarantine centres mentioned?


Here:









						Coronavirus: All New Zealand's confirmed COVID-19 cases to be put in quarantine facilities from now on
					

The Director-General of Health says it shows how seriously they're taking the outbreak.




					www.newshub.co.nz


----------



## Supine (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Well there are those unused, still empty Nightingale hospitals for a start. Remember when they were built and the cost of building them.



so you’d prefer people to be in nightingale hospitals rather than quarantine?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> They really dont have a high death rate



No? Currently in the 8th position worldwide, or 6th if you ignore the micro-nations.





> Stockholm is very dense



And, so are you.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

Yeah doing better than the likes of the UK and Spain really isnt a compliment. Their official numbers are worse per capita than the US.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> No? Currently in the 8th position worldwide, or 6th if you ignore the micro-nations.
> 
> View attachment 226456
> 
> ...


So done better than UK, Italy and Spain - all of whom have completely trashed their economies. 20% contraction in the UK. And you call me dense! Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

Supine said:


> so you’d prefer people to be in nightingale hospitals rather than quarantine?


Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> So done better than UK, Italy and Spain - all of whom have completely trashed their economies. 20% contraction in the UK. And you call me dense! *Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.*



My word, urban is blessed with someone who has a crystal ball.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

There are parts of sweden where hardly anyone has had it. The swedish public health authority has a dashboard where they publish rates of positive cases throughout the country.


----------



## magneze (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Here:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Thanks. Could backfire spectacularly if people stop getting tested as a result. Is there a Liberty or similar in NZ? Would be interested in their take.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

__





						Experience
					






					experience.arcgis.com
				




Swedens covid dashboard (from the public health authority). If you scroll through the sections it has a map of sweden with the positivity rate.


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.



IIRC NZ pays people during this period. I could be wrong though.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.



This is not a fact. It might resemble the picture for a period but cannot be at all sure it will last, we have to wait for winter to judge that.

It is a possibility that I will not completely exclude because of gaps in our understanding of immunity and vulnerability, but I will wait for it to be tested in the fullness of time, and it is not the scenario that governments can afford to assume is a likely one. I dont think its the one their expert advisors will tell them is likely either. They certainly have to plan for a winter that involves a large second wave of death, because it would be totally negligent not to plan for that scenario. You have the luxury of assuming that your preferred scenario of no repeated wave of death is the one that will happen, they dont.

I am still waiting for details along that front to be tested by reality, because resurgences in various countries so far are not enough of a conclusive test. This is because in most of the resurgences I've seen so far, lots of death is mostly seen in the specific regions/cities/states etc that did not have a full large wave of death the first time round. So I cannot just look at the USAs daily totals for the entire country and draw all the conclusions I need, that wont happen unless somewhere like New York shows a big resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths.

In the meantime, I know which assumptions authorities have to make and they are mostly the opposite of yours for bloody good reasons.


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## Supine (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.



Why don’t you go and read about asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers. If you can’t understand the danger they pose...


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> This is not a fact. It might resemble the picture for a period but cannot be at all sure it will last, we have to wait for winter to judge that.
> 
> It is a possibility that I will not completely exclude because of gaps in our understanding of immunity and vulnerability, but I will wait for it to be tested in the fullness of time, and it is not the scenario that governments can afford to assume is a likely one. I dont think its the one their expert advisors will tell them is likely either. They certainly have to plan for a winter that involves a large second wave of death, because it would be totally negligent not to plan for that scenario. You have the luxury of assuming that your preferred scenario of no repeated wave of death is the one that will happen, they dont.
> 
> ...



New York hasn't fully reopened yet either tbf. And I imagine many people there are being pretty bloody careful right now.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> New York hasn't fully reopened yet either tbf. And I imagine many people there are being pretty bloody careful right now.



Yes, and ideally I would not like any country to do things which enable a second wave of death to be observed in full by someone like me so that I can draw full conclusions. So it will be a good while yet before I can have a better stab at figuring out the reality of the next year with the virus.

When I speak of a big second wave of death, its not that I am predicting one to happen here in full. Because a lot of the work done so far means that even somewhere like the UK should be in a position to spot the signs more comprehensively and sooner than they did the first time, so they will be able to take action sooner and achieve a different degree of suppression of serious cases. All the same even if we have many great successes, I would expect that a situation where the big death wave was looming would still offer enough signs that this really was the situation at the time, there will still be some rise in serious cases and deaths, just nowhere close to how many there would be without all the actions. Not that I am complacent about that either though as scenarios still exist where it can all go really horribly wrong again, but I wont really expand on that unless there are very strong signs we are heading in that direction.

The dismal stains that like to promote the idea of going back to a far higher degree of normality unless such a death picture reemerges, are inviting us to squander what we have learnt the hard way before. If you downplay case numbers by pointing to the death rate as being all that matters, then thats exactly what you are inviting, a fresh catastrophe. Because by the time you get a notable death spike its too late, because lots of deaths is a sign that there are so many more infections at levels that will take many weeks to suppress. And most authorities arent going to risk letting that scenario develop too far, so these idiots are wasting their time with their appeals.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

As for the idea that it used to be about deaths and now its all about overreacting to cases, this only covers a few narrow perspectives, the priorities of societies and specific forces within them, etc.

When it comes to actually managing infectious diseases and the epidemiology, its always been about cases and it always will be. Just because we were shit about trying to find all cases in the first months, and that due to rubbish testing capacity people like me had to use the death figures as a proxy for estimating total number of infections, doesnt mean that case numbers were not a highly relevant part of what proper epidemiology would have looked like at the time. They were key to understanding the situation, and large gaps in this area are one of the big reasons our timing was all wrong. Its easy to find government scientific advisor quotes from the first 13 days of March where they expected the peak was months away in the summer, because their understanding of the situation at the time was wrong, because they didnt have a real handle on case numbers at all. Now they also mentioned summer because their original strategy involved a lot less suppression and they thought they'd get the peak to build slowly, but they still fundamentally failed to recognise the stage our epidemic was at back then. Its not just number of cases either, its what you can then do with that data, such as estimate how long its taking the number of infections to double, which is another key bit of data for getting your suppression timing right.


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

And there are all the other complications people can get such as fatigue, scarring of the lungs, increased risk of strokes and so on.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

Plus I dont feel like letting some talk about NHS capacity pass without mentioning that part of the UK approach to stopping the healthcare system from collapsing involved changing the standards for who was admitted to hospital for a time, and inviting lots of people to deteriorate and die at home, which plenty did.


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## waterloowelshy (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> As for the idea that it used to be about deaths and now its all about overreacting to cases, this only covers a few narrow perspectives, the priorities of societies and specific forces within them, etc.
> 
> When it comes to actually managing infectious diseases and the epidemiology, its always been about cases and it always will be. Just because we were shit about trying to find all cases in the first months, and that due to rubbish testing capacity people like me had to use the death figures as a proxy for estimating total number of infections, doesnt mean that case numbers were not a highly relevant part of what proper epidemiology would have looked like at the time. They were key to understanding the situation, and large gaps in this area are one of the big reasons our timing was all wrong. Its easy to find government scientific advisor quotes from the first 13 days of March where they expected the peak was months away in the summer, because their understanding of the situation at the time was wrong, because they didnt have a real handle on case numbers at all. Now they also mentioned summer because their original strategy involved a lot less suppression and they thought they'd get the peak to build slowly, but they still fundamentally failed to recognise the stage our epidemic was at back then. Its not just number of cases either, its what you can then do with that data, such as estimate how long its taking the number of infections to double, which is another key bit of data for getting your suppression timing right.


If thats the case, then why do we not treat all infectious diseases in the same manner? And as for estimates, they were wildly innacurate (and high) because the infection rate was massively over estimated in the same way the mortality rate for case positivity was massively over estimated. Thats been accepted now, but we now we find ourselves panicking over case increases that aren't leading to increases in illness any longer.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

elbows said:


> I am still waiting for details along that front to be tested by reality, because resurgences in various countries so far are not enough of a conclusive test. This is because in most of the resurgences I've seen so far, lots of death is mostly seen in the specific regions/cities/states etc that did not have a full large wave of death the first time round. So I cannot just look at the USAs daily totals for the entire country and draw all the conclusions I need, that wont happen unless somewhere like New York shows a big resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths.



Oh I just realised that I havent attempted to check Irans figures on a regional level to see if any of their death resurgences happened in places that were also badly affected in their initial wave. I'm not sure I am up for the challenge of trying to find regional death data for Iran over time.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> If thats the case, then why do we not treat all infectious diseases in the same manner? And as for estimates, they were wildly innacurate (and high) because the infection rate was massively over estimated in the same way the mortality rate for case positivity was massively over estimated. Thats been accepted now, but we now we find ourselves panicking over case increases that aren't leading to increases in illness any longer.



No idea what you are talking about in regard infection rate overestimations.

What exactly are you saying has been accepted now?


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

Sure, Florida, Texas, Brazil, Peru etc all well on the way to herd immunity arent they with the economy stronger than ever


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## frogwoman (Aug 13, 2020)

What was that Bolsonaro said, 'I'm sorry about the deaths but we all need to get on with life'. While the infection shows very little sign of slowing down whatsoever and deaths have been at over 1100 per day for months.


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## elbows (Aug 13, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> If thats the case, then why do we not treat all infectious diseases in the same manner?



Because the burden of different diseases on humanity varies. Whenever it is considered relevant to intervene, then special attention will be paid to case numbers and reducing transmission, but outside these scenarios the numbers are still of interest.

Infectious diseases that are novel to humans and where no specific prior population immunity to the disease exists tend to provoke a very different reaction and get their own label, pandemic, to reflect the different magnitude of implications that result when such novel diseases manage to spread far and wide. Eventually the picture does change, and the disease ends up getting treated differently because the burden has become different. Expecting that change to happen at this stage of this pandemic is stupid though, it will not happen until it is demonstrated that the susceptibility and death burden from the virus has changed. The end of first waves doesnt prove that at all, and in pandemic terms it is still early days.


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## return of caleb (Aug 13, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Given the Melbourne / Victoria outbreak seems to have been at least partly caused by people not self-quarantining this seems eminently sensible.  To be honest, this together with your postings on another thread is making you sound a bit like a _plandemic_ type.



Yeah, this isn't true. The outbreak was caused by the state government palming off the quarantine scheme to private security firms, then spread to industry and business which was never locked down or properly regulated to begin with. The stuff about people not self-quarantining properly has been a red herring from the state government - they haven't actually provided any more context or data regarding this. It's presumed that a large number of these people would have been precarious workers not covered by any sick leave were they to isolate, which has now sort of been resolved.


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## Dogsauce (Aug 14, 2020)

“Dragged into quarantine” ffs. Jacinda’s gestapo kicking the door down, throwing you in the local ‘Bangkok Hilton’.  Not what’s happening is it? Perfectly reasonable to accept mandatory quarantine for the ‘common good’, where such concepts still exist, which fortunately is much of the world.


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## Roadkill (Aug 15, 2020)

Article in The Conversation suggesting that social distancing and so on are basically good things and the pandemic is an opportunity to 'change our health behaviours for good.'  

Of course the pandemic will cause long-term changes in behaviour, some probably for the better.  But the implication we should actually embrace a world of home-working, masks and sanitisers, and avoiding gatherings and close human contact is pretty fucking bleak IMO.


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## Badgers (Aug 15, 2020)

Roadkill said:


> Article in The Conversation suggesting that social distancing and so on are basically good things and the pandemic is an opportunity to 'change our health behaviours for good.'
> 
> Of course the pandemic will cause long-term changes in behaviour, some probably for the better.  But the implication we should actually embrace a world of home-working, masks and sanitisers, and avoiding gatherings and close human contact is pretty fucking bleak IMO.


Masks will be around for a while yet. Use is already sporadic but expect them to remain a thing throughout autumn and winter. 

Frankly the sanitiser is not a bad habit imo. Hardly depressing to sanitise in/out of shops or if around kids etc is it?

Homeworking is (again imo) a big positive for those that can do it. Commuting can do one and most people I speak have been eating better, walking more and getting more done. 

Public gatherings will return when safe to do so.


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## Roadkill (Aug 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Masks will be around for a while yet. Use is already sporadic but expect them to remain a thing throughout autumn and winter.
> 
> Frankly the sanitiser is not a bad habit imo. Hardly depressing to sanitise in/out of shops or if around kids etc is it?
> 
> ...



Personally I agree with most of that, except for the home-working bit, which is fine for some but not others. But they seem to be implying it'd be a good thing for people to avoid gatherings, maintain social distancing and so on, and accept these as normal behaviour in the long term rather than as a specific response to an emergency. I find that pretty depressing tbh.


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## Badgers (Aug 15, 2020)

Roadkill said:


> Personally I agree with most of that, except for the home-working bit, which is fine for some but not others. But they seem to be implying it'd be a good thing for people to avoid gatherings, maintain social distancing and so on, and accept these as normal behaviour rather than a specific response to an emergency. I find that pretty depressing tbh.


I do miss the getting up at 06:30 to get on a packed train to the office. Spending £5k (post tax) on a season ticket and waiting in the rain/cold for delayed trains. 

Listening to colleagues witterting away. Sitting in pointless meetings that could have been sorted on phone/zoom/email. Trekking across town or further to meet with other companies in pointlessly expensive cafes to sort things out that could have been sorted on phone/zoom/email. 

Getting home after 7pm, tired and feeling like going to bed after dinner five nights a week. Cramming everything else into the two day weekend and wondering why I am not seeing my family enough. 

#greattimes


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## Hyperdark (Aug 15, 2020)

Some reading 


Coronavirus drugmakers' latest tactics: Science by press release

New Data on the Oxford/AZ Vaccine

I'm a doctor and this is the hard-to-swallow truth about the coronavirus vaccine

A Key To Understanding The Race For A Covid-19 Vaccine


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## Roadkill (Aug 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> I do miss the getting up at 06:30 to get on a packed train to the office. Spending £5k (post tax) on a season ticket and waiting in the rain/cold for delayed trains.
> 
> Listening to colleagues witterting away. Sitting in pointless meetings that could have been sorted on phone/zoom/email. Trekking across town or further to meet with other companies in pointlessly expensive cafes to sort things out that could have been sorted on phone/zoom/email.
> 
> ...



Harsh, but probably describes the situation pretty well for someone working in the corporate sector in London.  But my job can't be done nearly as well online as it can face to face, and personally I miss the interaction with other people, and I walk to work. The only real advantage of WFH for me is that I spend a bit less on lunch and coffee.


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## Badgers (Aug 15, 2020)

140,000 Brits rushing back to avoid quarantine, how many are being tested at ports & airports.....

Virtual none, so what's the fucking point?


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## Buddy Bradley (Aug 15, 2020)

Badgers said:


> 140,000 Brits rushing back to avoid quarantine, how many are being tested at ports & airports.....
> 
> Virtual none, so what's the fucking point?


Exactly. Arbitrary deadline is arbitrary.


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## Hyperdark (Aug 15, 2020)

As of yesterday in the whole of the UK a grand total of 10 people have been fined for breaking quarantine since the rule came about in June 8th


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## Hyperdark (Aug 15, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> If thats the case, then why do we not treat all infectious diseases in the same manner? And as for estimates, they were wildly innacurate (and high) because the infection rate was massively over estimated in the same way the mortality rate for case positivity was massively over estimated. Thats been accepted now, but we now we find ourselves panicking over case increases that aren't leading to increases in illness any longer.



Regarding your last point, I think this is mainly because firstly their has been more testing so more asymptomatic cases are being picked up and secondly the  infection has become more widespread in the young who are now largely ignoring social distancing etc 
whereas oldies are still scared and keeping to themselves, both these factors will result in a lower death/seriousness illness to infection ratio


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## Cloo (Aug 15, 2020)

It does piss me off that some people are all 'Oh, isn't it awful how quickly we've got used to face masks and social distancing?!' - it isn't awful, it's great. It goes to show human beings' flexibility and consideration for others. No one _likes _it, no one wants it to go on forever, but it's great we can get used to it without being traumatised and psychologically scarred (on the whole) and get on with our lives while keeping everyone safer. And no it doesn't mean people are 'being made more receptive to government control' either - people complying are actually making their own decisions and often complying even if they're not convinced by the evidence, but don't see any reason not to.


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## ddraig (Aug 15, 2020)

elbows said:


> Because the burden of different diseases on humanity varies. Whenever it is considered relevant to intervene, then special attention will be paid to case numbers and reducing transmission, but outside these scenarios the numbers are still of interest.
> 
> Infectious diseases that are novel to humans and where no specific prior population immunity to the disease exists tend to provoke a very different reaction and get their own label, pandemic, to reflect the different magnitude of implications that result when such novel diseases manage to spread far and wide. Eventually the picture does change, and the disease ends up getting treated differently because the burden has become different. Expecting that change to happen at this stage of this pandemic is stupid though, it will not happen until it is demonstrated that the susceptibility and death burden from the virus has changed. The end of first waves doesnt prove that at all, and in pandemic terms it is still early days.


Don't waste your time on them, honestly


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## Dogsauce (Aug 16, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Masks will be around for a while yet. Use is already sporadic but expect them to remain a thing throughout autumn and winter.
> 
> Frankly the sanitiser is not a bad habit imo. Hardly depressing to sanitise in/out of shops or if around kids etc is it?
> 
> Homeworking is (again imo) a big positive for those that can do it. Commuting can do one and most people I speak have been eating better, walking more and getting more done.



I actually miss proper commuting, on my previous job I’d cycle nearly 100 miles a week, usually as fast as I could, so it kept me fit. There’s berks who drive to work then spend more of their time and money going to gyms which makes no sense to me (though conversely they might not see the benefit in occasionally getting clattered over by an inattentive Fiesta driver). I can’t actually do much of my new job from home and current commute is a six minute walk or two minutes on the bike, no fun to be had.


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## Cloo (Aug 18, 2020)

My employers are looking into reopening office - buildings still closed until end of September at the moment. Apparently it will cost £2500 a day to open the London office and they say they can only get 48 people (rather than the usual 200 or so) into it at a time. They're also going to consult with us about what aspect of physically working together people need/want. I might be up for going in once a month for some kind of meaningful interaction I suppose.


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## Badgers (Aug 18, 2020)

Dogsauce said:


> I actually miss proper commuting, on my previous job I’d cycle nearly 100 miles a week, usually as fast as I could, so it kept me fit. There’s berks who drive to work then spend more of their time and money going to gyms which makes no sense to me (though conversely they might not see the benefit in occasionally getting clattered over by an inattentive Fiesta driver). I can’t actually do much of my new job from home and current commute is a six minute walk or two minutes on the bike, no fun to be had.


Can see this. Thing is that now I am not commuting by train I have a lot more free time for walking/cycling etc.


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## pesh (Aug 18, 2020)

Dogsauce said:


> I actually miss proper commuting, on my previous job I’d cycle nearly 100 miles a week, usually as fast as I could, so it kept me fit. There’s berks who drive to work then spend more of their time and money going to gyms which makes no sense to me (though conversely they might not see the benefit in occasionally getting clattered over by an inattentive Fiesta driver). I can’t actually do much of my new job from home and current commute is a six minute walk or two minutes on the bike, no fun to be had.


move further away, or just cycle in the wrong direction for the first 10 miles each day


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## 8ball (Aug 18, 2020)

Just noticed there is nothing on BBC2, and they are just showing the news channel.

Don’t recall this being normal before the virus. 

(it’s just for a couple of hours but still seems unusual)


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## Buddy Bradley (Aug 18, 2020)

Cloo said:


> My employers are looking into reopening office - buildings still closed until end of September at the moment. Apparently it will cost £2500 a day to open the London office and they say they can only get 48 people (rather than the usual 200 or so) into it at a time. They're also going to consult with us about what aspect of physically working together people need/want. I might be up for going in once a month for some kind of meaningful interaction I suppose.


While I can definitely see the attraction of a change of scenery, I think it's the little things that would end up being super annoying. Like queuing for thirty minutes to use the lift one person at a time, or mandated coffee machine visit times.


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## Cloo (Aug 18, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> While I can definitely see the attraction of a change of scenery, I think it's the little things that would end up being super annoying. Like queuing for thirty minutes to use the lift one person at a time, or mandated coffee machine visit times.


Yeah, though we're only 5 storeys (and most of us are in the first 3) so that's not too much of an issue. And I don't drink coffee  

That's weird 8ball - but I so hardly watch telly I would never had noticed that!


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## xenon (Aug 18, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Masks will be around for a while yet. Use is already sporadic but expect them to remain a thing throughout autumn and winter.
> 
> Frankly the sanitiser is not a bad habit imo. Hardly depressing to sanitise in/out of shops or if around kids etc is it?
> 
> ...



I don't like wearing masks, (who does,) so will be glad the day, the mandatory mass wearing of them can be dispensed with. 

Have been using hand sanatiser since swine flu and the realisation many pubs, other places that sell food, often don't have soap, or you're afraid to touch anything in the bog anyway. Always like to have some on me.

WFH for the foreseeable and don't mind so far.

Public gatherings concerns me. From the point of view music industry, gigs, realistically could become a thing of the past without proper and continuing financial support.


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## frogwoman (Aug 18, 2020)

Frankly I don't mind wearing masks and I'll be delighted if it becomes a thing during flu season and so on, I have been really sick in the past with flu and colds so hope this carries on. I can get weird facial ticks and talk to myself a lot   so selfishly feel more confident walking around wearing a mask as well.

Hand sanitizer is a bit of a pain and I'm not sure what environmental impact that large quantities of it will have long term. It would be a shame if mass gatherings disappeared but I don't think they will tbh.

I've been working from home since 2018 and frankly prefer it, saves a fortune in commuter costs. Appreciate that it's not like that in every job tho.


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## xenon (Aug 18, 2020)

I actually quite like hand sanitiser. I'm mildly OCD, cleaning hands, always going back into my flat to check I've turned the oven off etc (even when I haven't used it that day,)  Well I mean, not if I'm a mile away but just at the main entrance...  Nearly bought 5 litres of it online yesterday, might still do. 

Fortunately don't get too many colds, well apart from back end of last and early this year. Pretty sure it wasn't covid but had a horrible cough and crackly breathing for ages that went away and back for a couple of months. Shoulda probably seen a doc but when appointments are 2 weeks away, you kinda think I'll be over it by then.


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## xenon (Aug 18, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Frankly I don't mind wearing masks and I'll be delighted if it becomes a thing during flu season and so on, I have been really sick in the past with flu and colds so hope this carries on. I can get weird facial ticks and talk to myself a lot   so selfishly feel more confident walking around wearing a mask as well.
> 
> Hand sanitizer is a bit of a pain and I'm not sure what environmental impact that large quantities of it will have long term. It would be a shame if mass gatherings disappeared but I don't think they will tbh.
> 
> I've been working from home since 2018 and frankly prefer it, saves a fortune in commuter costs. Appreciate that it's not like that in every job tho.



Just guessing here really but I think apart from the packaging the chemicals in alcohol based hand sanitiser are fairly benign as it just evaporates. The rest is some vitemine e, water and leaf extract to make it smell nicer.


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## 8ball (Aug 18, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Frankly I don't mind wearing masks and I'll be delighted if it becomes a thing during flu season and so on, I have been really sick in the past with flu and colds so hope this carries on. I can get weird facial ticks and talk to myself a lot   so selfishly feel more confident walking around wearing a mask as well.



I think the virus will be around to at least some degree for some time yet, and even if masks don’t  become a big thing over flu season, some will be wearing masks and it will def seem less odd than in previous years.


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## Johnny Doe (Aug 18, 2020)

Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere


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## 8ball (Aug 18, 2020)

Cloo said:


> That's weird 8ball - but I so hardly watch telly I would never had noticed that!



Me neither - I have a day off and it came on as I was firing up the PlayStation.


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## Cloo (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere


Not me, and not really same thing,  but my sister and her husband (with 9yo kid) sold their place in Crouch End,  just spent a month living on an airbnb houseboat, and are completing on a house in the Chilterns on Friday! Nothing to do with lockdown, they were doing it anyway - accepted offer on their place just before lockdown, it all trundle on & now they're moving. She has been wfh for last 4 years anyway.


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## 8ball (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere



Really interesting idea...


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## Teaboy (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere



I have heard of it though it wouldn't work for me and my partner as our jobs are tied to the city we live in.  A couple I know have temporarily decamped to rural Ireland (where she originally comes from) for a few months whilst still working.  Before the virus they already had a mind to sort of splitting their time between London and Ireland so this has been a good opportunity for a trial run.  

I think if you have somewhere to go and live it'd be a goer but we could yet be called back to offices at short notice its not really viable to get a rental contract.  I suppose you could air b&b but you'd then be paying for two places.


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## Johnny Doe (Aug 18, 2020)

8ball said:


> Really interesting idea...



Considering how expensive it is to live in London, through rent or owning somewhere, with many of the things London offers not open or subject to off-putting restrictions. I wonder how many people who came to London for work, might continue those jobs from somewhere different


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## Johnny Doe (Aug 18, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I have heard of it though it wouldn't work for me and my partner as our jobs are tied to the city we live in.  A couple I know have temporarily decamped to rural Ireland (where she originally comes from) for a few months whilst still working.  Before the virus they already had a mind to sort of splitting their time between London and Ireland so this has been a good opportunity for a trial run.
> 
> I think if you have somewhere to go and live it'd be a goer but we could yet be called back to offices at short notice its not really viable to get a rental contract.  I suppose you could air b&b but you'd then be paying for two places.



Devil's in the detail of course, but there's bound to people that could make it work. If I didn't have kids, I definitely could.


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## LDC (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere



Someone I know went to Greece for a few months and 'WFH' there. I think they were going anyway for a trip, and they decided to extend it a while when WFH came in.


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## Teaboy (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Devil's in the detail of course, but there's bound to people that could make it work. If I didn't have kids, I definitely could.



We normally get pretty decent summers in the South East (no exception this year) so I never go away this time of year anyway.  Now, winter time that would be tempting. Just there will be no need because our reliable and trustworthy leader has already told us it will be all normal by Christmas.


----------



## Numbers (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Considering how expensive it is to live in London, through rent or owning somewhere, with many of the things London offers not open or subject to off-putting restrictions. I wonder how many people who came to London for work, might continue those jobs from somewhere different


We're, well.. will be, moving to the coast (to a bungalow or cottage by the sea is the dream/preference).  
It was a 3 year plan but we're now thinking of doing so next year instead.
The commute in to London every day was one of the key topics and that's no longer the case so fuck it.


----------



## marshall (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Considering how expensive it is to live in London, through rent or owning somewhere, with many of the things London offers not open or subject to off-putting restrictions. I wonder how many people who came to London for work, might continue those jobs from somewhere different



Quite a few, if the estate agents in North Norfolk are to be believed.


----------



## Raheem (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere


Now there's a feature the Guardian haven't got round to yet.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere


No, but I quite often change the background on my Zoom calls to a beach picture


----------



## two sheds (Aug 18, 2020)

Yep work freelance so I've just moved to Cornwall get further out into the Styx.

Ah no it was 20 years ago now. Was a shame to have left friends behind but never regretted the move for a second.


----------



## Ted Striker (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere



I'm off to Ibiza for a month this weekend  WFHing for some of it, and spending the rest writing my Masters dissertation in an isolated-ish villa


----------



## Sue (Aug 18, 2020)

Harry Smiles said:


> Not an option for me due to kids and school locations, but has anyone on U75 who is working from home, changed home to somewhere cheaper and sunny? Were I younger and childless, I would have worked the last 5 months from a beach somewhere


Few people I work with are doing this but the they're typically visiting family. One person's been in Turkey for the last few months, someone else is in Portugal and another's 'accidentally' stuck in New Zealand.  Someone in my team's coming back from Ireland tomorrow -- he'd been there for about six weeks or so.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 18, 2020)

It's kind of chilling reading some of the early posts in this forum tbh. Did anyone imagine it would get as bad as 22 million cases and 782 thousand deaths back in January?


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Aug 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> It's kind of chilling reading some of the early posts in this forum tbh. Did anyone imagine it would get as bad as 22 million cases and 782 thousand deaths back in January?



No.  The idea that this would become global really didn't cross my mind. Especially because early on, with the repatriation flights from Wuhan and the subsequent quarantines of those on the flights, it looked like the rest of the world intended to keep it out.


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 19, 2020)

I got into a debate on another site with some individuals who truly believe their freedoms are being taken away from them because the government has asked that certain restrictions be brought back til mid Sept. 
These people were frothing at the mouth because indoor games are restricted to 6 people and outdoors to 15.
Because they were advised to work from home and not use public transport unless absolutely necessary
One of them said they thought if they refused the vaccine that they'd be put in a camp. 
Nuts. 

They clearly had no understanding of the words "temporary measures ". I was told to shut up and let them live their life whatever way they wanted...and "we only have today"... I pointed out that the virus doesnt actually care about that and was rounded on.

One of them was clearly losing the plot saying he wouldnt let the government put him into a prison in his own home. 

When I pointed out that we only have 465 ICU beds in the entire country I was laughed at and told that was a lie. 

What is wrong with these very vocal people? 
Genuinely confused at how self centred some people are.


----------



## William of Walworth (Aug 19, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:
			
		

> I got into a debate on another site with some individuals who truly believe their freedoms are being taken away from them because the government has asked that certain restrictions be brought back til mid Sept.
> These people were frothing at the mouth because indoor games are restricted to 6 people and outdoors to 15.
> Because they were advised to work from home and not use public transport unless absolutely necessary
> *One of them said they thought if they refused the vaccine that they'd be put in a camp*.
> Nuts.


Do those individuals actually dominate that site , are are there other, more sensible people there?

If the former, definitely time to abandon the place, I'd say!!


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> It's kind of chilling reading some of the early posts in this forum tbh. Did anyone imagine it would get as bad as 22 million cases and 782 thousand deaths back in January?



Not in January, no.  I do however, remember saying in April I think that this is going to kill millions.  In that respect its actually not as bad thus far but lets face it there are loads more deaths out there from covid that have not been counted for various reasons.


----------



## LDC (Aug 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> It's kind of chilling reading some of the early posts in this forum tbh. Did anyone imagine it would get as bad as 22 million cases and 782 thousand deaths back in January?



Yeah totally, I sometimes see this post from 31st January as the first post in the 'Coronavirus in the UK' sub-forum and have a moment...



Sasaferrato said:


> There have been two positives in the Newcastle area.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## LDC (Aug 19, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> One of them said they thought if they refused the vaccine that they'd be put in a camp.
> Nuts.



That's appropriate, as the only people I'd happily put in a camp are those that think they'd be put in a camp for refusing a vaccine.


----------



## LDC (Aug 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> It's kind of chilling reading some of the early posts in this forum tbh. Did anyone imagine it would get as bad as 22 million cases and 782 thousand deaths back in January?



I was stressed in January and February as was reading the WHO reports and warnings and none of them were very good news, and hardly anyone at work had really heard of it, let alone people taking it seriously. I relaxed a bit when it started to be talked about and things changed, but until then I felt a bit like a madman telling people about it.

I was at a class in early March and when we were hanging about before I was chatting to people and I said that I thought this would be the last class for a while, and a few people laughed, and a few people were like 'Huh, why?' I saw one of them last week and they said they thought I was being totally bonkers then.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 19, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> That's appropriate, as the only people I'd happily put in a camp are those that think they'd be put in a camp for refusing a vaccine.



Send them to a Pontins camp, that will teach them.


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 19, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> Do those individuals actually dominate that site , are are there other, more sensible people there?
> 
> If the former, definitely time to abandon the place, I'd say!!



Yep. I've left it. They roundes on me last night and I was told that "everybody dies and I would die anyway". They know I am in the extremely vulnerable category. And still this was the reply.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Aug 19, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> That's appropriate, as the only people I'd happily put in a camp are those that think they'd be put in a camp for refusing a vaccine.



Yeah just go for it I reckon. They get to be right and the rest of us get rid of them, everyone's happy.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 19, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> Yep. I've left it. They roundes on me last night and I was told that "everybody dies and I would die anyway". They know I am in the extremely vulnerable category. And still this was the reply.



Sadly there's a very vocal minority of covidiots, they are best ignored, so you've done the right thing.


----------



## LDC (Aug 19, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Send them to a Pontins camp, that will teach them.



Sentenced to 3 years hard science.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 19, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Not in January, no.  I do however, remember saying in April I think that this is going to kill millions.  In that respect its actually not bad as bad thus far but lets face it there are loads more deaths out there from covid that have not been counted for various reasons.



Yeah looking at excess deaths its almost certainly killed more than 782 thousand and probably at least a million 

LynnDoyleCooper i went to synagogue for a Jewish festival about March 10th, and some people were kinda making jokes about it, the rest didn't really know that much or thought lockdowns etc weren't going to happen (including me tbh) . It was only because my mum knew people in Italy that I was that aware of it at the time. Remember going to a pilates class the week Italy locked down where people were rubbing anti bac gel on the mats and complaining that it was a fuss over nothing


----------



## LDC (Aug 19, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah looking at excess deaths its almost certainly killed more than 782 thousand and probably at least a million
> 
> LynnDoyleCooper i went to synagogue for a Jewish festival about March 10th, and some people were kinda making jokes about it, the rest didn't really know that much or thought lockdowns etc weren't going to happen (including me tbh) . It was only because my mum knew people in Italy that I was that aware of it at the time. Remember going to a pilates class the week Italy locked down where people were rubbing anti bac gel on the mats and complaining that it was a fuss over nothing



Yeah, in late February (maybe, sometime before lockdown anyway but when it was clear it was going to be bad) a friend of mine was debating whether to cancel an April holiday until they talked to a friend in Northern Italy who gave a hollow laugh and said something like don't worry, in a few weeks you won't be going to the other side of town, let alone on holiday.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 19, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, in late February (maybe, sometime before lockdown anyway but when it was clear it was going to be bad) a friend of mine was debating whether to cancel an April holiday until they talked to a friend in Northern Italy who gave a hollow laugh and said something like don't worry, in a few weeks you won't be going to the other side of town, let alone on holiday.


My sisters mate went skiing in Italy and came back the day before the lockdown, and was surprised and a bit hurt than she didn't want to meet her for a drink


----------



## Numbers (Aug 19, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah totally, I sometimes see this post from 31st January as the first post in the 'Coronavirus in the UK' sub-forum and have a moment...


I remember this post from weltweit which may have been the first about it in the world politics forum.



weltweit said:


> New China virus: Cases triple as infection spreads to Beijing and Shanghai
> 
> 
> This comes as China confirms that a new strain of coronavirus can pass from person to person.
> ...


----------



## Numbers (Aug 19, 2020)

Ea2: it's the first post in the worldwide breaking news thread.


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 20, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Sorry, but I don;t have much time for uneducated potatoes that clearly haven't got a clue what they are talking about.


If we had a pop at everyone who didn't have a clue we'd have much more fun here


----------



## two sheds (Aug 20, 2020)

.


----------



## Numbers (Aug 20, 2020)

two sheds said:


> .


That’s a very good point.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 20, 2020)

and well made I thought


----------



## Numbers (Aug 20, 2020)

two sheds said:


> and well made I thought


A fine example for sure.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Coronavirus: Why Spain is seeing second wave
					

Spain has Europe's fastest-rising caseload two months after it lifted one of the strictest lockdowns.



					www.bbc.com
				




Wow. Even the fear mongering BBC are now actually acknowldging that the rise in cases in Europe is not leading to increases in hospitalisations or deaths.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Coronavirus: Why Spain is seeing second wave
> 
> 
> Spain has Europe's fastest-rising caseload two months after it lifted one of the strictest lockdowns.
> ...



It is interesting isn't it?  The idea that the virus may be becoming less potent is tantalizing.  The problem is there is a major correlation / causation thing going on here and in and itself it doesn't really tell us anything at this stage.  Just because we want it to be true doesn't mean it is and drawing conclusions from at it this stage is a fools errand.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Coronavirus: Why Spain is seeing second wave
> 
> 
> Spain has Europe's fastest-rising caseload two months after it lifted one of the strictest lockdowns.
> ...


And?


----------



## magneze (Aug 21, 2020)

elbows had some analysis of Spain here: Coronavirus - worldwide breaking news, discussion, stats, updates and more


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> It is interesting isn't it?  The idea that the virus may be becoming less potent is tantalizing.  The problem is there is a major correlation / causation thing going on here and in and itself it doesn't really tell us anything at this stage.  Just because we want it to be true doesn't mean it is and drawing conclusions from at it this stage is a fools errand.


There are now huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that the positive test cases are nothing to be concerned about. Very interestingly, Proffesor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University has been providing consistent updated on Twitter that the PCR test being used for testing is meaningless and that the only pointers to be concerned about are hospitalisation rates and deaths - neither of which seem to be increasing in any areas where cases have increased again. So, a second wave of cases doesn't spell a second 'wave' per say. Despite this, places have locked down again just off the back of increases in positive cases - that truly is baffling.


----------



## LDC (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Despite this, places have locked down again just off the back of increases in positive cases - that truly is baffling.



Tens of thousands in the UK dead from the infection, and no clear evidence that the virus is less dangerous, and now cases are increasing.

Yes, _utterly baffling _why places are locking down again. (Edited to take out insult, feeling generous of spirit this afternoon...).

Oh, and btw there is _not_ 'huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that positive cases are nothing to be concerned about'.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> There are now huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that the positive test cases are nothing to be concerned about. Very interestingly, Proffesor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University has been providing consistent updated on Twitter that the PCR test being used for testing is meaningless and that the only pointers to be concerned about are hospitalisation rates and deaths - neither of which seem to be increasing in any areas where cases have increased again. So, a second wave of cases doesn't spell a second 'wave' per say. Despite this, places have locked down again just off the back of increases in positive cases - that truly is baffling.



Sure.  The thing is though in most places people who are considered high risk will be taking action to protect themselves.  It follows to reason that the more the virus spreads in a population the harder it will be for those people to remain protected.

As I say, it is potentially good news but the consequences for backing the wrong horse are grave so to my mind caution with optimism has to be the sensible approach?  I don't think its fair or right to roll the dice with such limited information.  That's my opinion anyway and not that it matters anyway, its the government's call and I didn't vote for this shower.  Vote circus get clowns.


----------



## elbows (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Coronavirus: Why Spain is seeing second wave
> 
> 
> Spain has Europe's fastest-rising caseload two months after it lifted one of the strictest lockdowns.
> ...



They dont say that. They say things that involve comparing the number of deaths now to the death rate at the first peak, and how the current rate of death is way lower than at the first peak. They dont say anything about whether deaths have risen recently in Spain. Deaths have risen recently in Spain, back to the sort of level last seen in the first half of June.

eg:



			https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/alertasActual/nCov-China/documentos/Actualizacion_189_COVID-19.pdf


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Tens of thousands in the UK dead from the infection, and no clear evidence that the virus is less dangerous, and now cases are increasing.
> 
> Yes, _utterly baffling _why places are locking down again. You fucking idiot.
> 
> Oh, and btw there is _not_ 'huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that positive cases are nothing to be concerned about'.


There really is. Are you able to argue without insulting people? How pathetic. There is a huge amount of information out there suggesting exactly that. Including the Proffesor that I quoted.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

elbows said:


> They dont say that. They say things that involve comparing the number of deaths now to the death rate at the first peak, and how the current rate of death is way lower than at the first peak. They dont say anything about whether deaths have risen recently in Spain. Deaths have risen recently in Spain, back to the sort of level last seen in the first half of June.
> 
> eg:
> 
> ...


The article quotes this:


Spain's government admits the numbers are "not what we want to see", but points to key differences compared to the spring.

Only around 3% of current cases require hospital treatment, less than 0.5% need intensive care and the current death rate is as low as 0.3%.

"Mortality is very low, as is the hospitalisation rate. Something has changed big time, although the rise is still worrying," says Ildefonso Hernández, a professor in public health from Miguel Hernández University in Alicante.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

And some further positive news. Which doesnt appear to be allowed.









						Singapore scientists find coronavirus variant with milder infections
					

Researchers in Singapore have discovered a new variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus that causes milder infections, according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal this week.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## Yossarian (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> And some further positive news. Which doesnt appear to be allowed.



Yeah, this entire forum is just people sharing entirely negative news because they love lockdown and want it to go on forever. Knobhead.


----------



## LDC (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> There really is. Are you able to argue without insulting people? How pathetic. There is a huge amount of information out there suggesting exactly that. Including the Proffesor that I quoted.



The occasional person (even a Professor) saying something to a newspaper or on Twitter is not 'huge amounts of scientific evidence'.


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

I think you are missing a logical step here. If hospitalisation is lower it could be because it's the younger generation who are currently spreading. That is something to worry about because younger people meet older people and they eventually get more serious issues when infected. 

We haven't got into what could be seen as the 'busy period' for respiratory diseases. It'd be best to enter autumn with as few cases as possible but youth spreading and increased blase attitude in general isn't helping that.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 21, 2020)

And are people being caught earlier for example and treated outside hospital?


----------



## existentialist (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> There are now huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that the positive test cases are nothing to be concerned about. Very interestingly, Proffesor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University has been providing consistent updated on Twitter that the PCR test being used for testing is meaningless and that the only pointers to be concerned about are hospitalisation rates and deaths - neither of which seem to be increasing in any areas where cases have increased again. So, a second wave of cases doesn't spell a second 'wave' per say. Despite this, places have locked down again just off the back of increases in positive cases - that truly is baffling.


I would be interested to see a link to support your claim that there are "huge amounts of scientific evidence suggesting that the positive test cases are nothing to be concerned about". Not least because that is not the sort of conclusion scientists draw from their evidence - if such evidence exists, it will be being "taken to suggest, etc..." by people who aren't scientists. Which isn't quite the same thing


----------



## existentialist (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> And some further positive news. Which doesnt appear to be allowed.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


You're getting very close to "fuck off, waterloowelshy" with your snide assertions about the motives of this place.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Yossarian said:


> Yeah, this entire forum is just people sharing entirely negative news because they love lockdown and want it to go on forever. Knobhead.


So no comment on the positive news then? Just another insult because it says something positive. Amazing.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

existentialist said:


> You're getting very close to "fuck off, waterloowelshy" with your snide assertions about the motives of this place.


I'm just amazed at the negativity. I really am. There is lots of emerging evidence that things might not be as bad as first thought / feared. But it seems that view can't be shared here.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 21, 2020)

No  welshy - people have shared a lot of positive news, but it's been backed up with references.  (and it would help if you don't throw insults when people disagree)

For your first link, see elbows reply



elbows said:


> They dont say that. They say things that involve comparing the number of deaths now to the death rate at the first peak, and how the current rate of death is way lower than at the first peak. They dont say anything about whether deaths have risen recently in Spain. Deaths have risen recently in Spain, back to the sort of level last seen in the first half of June.
> 
> eg:
> 
> ...


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> And are people being caught earlier for example and treated outside hospital?


The overriding message from the BBC article, and elsewhere, seems to be suggesting that the majority of positive cases are now asymptomati and therefore not requiring any treatment as not even experiencing any symptoms.


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> The overriding message from the BBC article, and elsewhere, seems to be suggesting that the majority of positive cases are now asymptomati and therefore not requiring any treatment as not even experiencing any symptoms.



I don't rate invisible covid as good news. I don't think you should either.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> I'm just amazed at the negativity. I really am. There is lots of emerging evidence that things might not be as bad as first thought / feared. But it seems that view can't be shared here.



I think I've been pretty positive, I even used the word 'optimism' which is most unlike me.  

I think the problem lies in not necessarily what the reporting is saying but the conclusions you are drawing.  If you were here saying this is an interesting topic for discussion and I don't think its getting enough coverage then I'd say you're probably right.  It appears to me though that you are saying this is a fact and as such all local restrictions should be lifted and potentially the national ones as well.  Its this I have a problem with because I don't think the evidence is strong enough to come to that conclusion.

At some point we are going to have to accept a level of pain and suffering because there will be a stage where the actions the government may take are deadlier than the virus itself.  I'm not convinced we have enough information yet to say we are at that stage.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Supine said:


> I don't rate invisible covid as good news. I don't think you should either.


Of course its good news. If you are testing positive without even knowing you have it, then that implies that the disease is reducing in strength. As per the Reuters article with evidence from Singapore in terms of the mutation of the virus - and it losing strength as it mutates. That is really good news.


----------



## 2hats (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> If you are testing positive without even knowing you have it, then that implies that the disease is reducing in strength.





> As per the Reuters article with evidence from Singapore in terms of the mutation of the virus - and it losing strength as it mutates.


----------



## Spandex (Aug 21, 2020)

There's a few things that could be happening to explain the current high infection rate/low death rate we're seeing at the moment. It could be:

1. Covid has mutated to a less deadly form - this has been suggested as a possible end point since C-19 first appeared. If it is this, great.

2. Young people, having noted the low personal risk to themselves, are doing stuff that older people aren't and are spreading it around people who are low risk. If it is this,  it's not good as it keeps the virus in circulation and could kick off a higher death rate later on when higher risk groups catch it from them.

3. Covid is a seasonal virus like other Coronaviruses - this was also suggested from the beginning and we might just be fooling ourselves into a false sense of security over the summer lull before it kicks off again in the autumn. If it is this, things could get really bad by the end of the year.

4. Something else

It might be one of these or some of these or all of these. We don't know for sure yet. We do need to be careful of putting our faith in one study supporting our favourite view. It takes numerous studies replicating results to get any sense of certainty. At the moment every researcher in a relevant area wants to be the first to have a game changing result and in the rush to publish mistakes can be made. Best to wait until subsequent studies support any findings.

At the moment I'm keeping an open mind, hoping for 1. and fearing 3. Only time will tell us what is actually going on.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> I'm just amazed at the negativity. I really am. There is lots of emerging evidence that things might not be as bad as first thought / feared. But it seems that view can't be shared here.


More precisely, it CAN be shared...because you shared it. But you will find that this site is highly - and vocally - sceptical of people who appear from nowhere, and then start posting to a very specific agenda, as you clearly appear to be doing. It may also not be your fault, but you happen to be one of a number of people who have suddenly appeared on the site and are all posting in a very similar way, in support of a very similar line of argument. That kind of thing makes people suspicious.


----------



## LDC (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> The overriding message from the BBC article, and elsewhere, seems to be suggesting that the majority of positive cases are now asymptomati and therefore not requiring any treatment as not even experiencing any symptoms.



But as has already been pointed out, that's not the whole story, and as we're in the middle of it still there's sense to being cautious, so continuing with proven actions like lockdowns is far from 'baffling' as you said, for example, but sensible. It seems very like you've decided something and are seeking 'evidence' to prove that.


----------



## LDC (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Of course its good news. If you are testing positive without even knowing you have it, then that implies that the disease is reducing in strength. As per the Reuters article with evidence from Singapore in terms of the mutation of the virus - and it losing strength as it mutates. That is really good news.



You quite clearly have very little understanding of this from your posts, and the above is a prime example, so you with your posts on something you both seem so certain about, yet have so little understanding of, are obviously going to be treated with a raised eyebrow, at the very least...


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 21, 2020)

0.3 is still not great is it. And that 0.3% can go way way higher if hospitals are swamped and people stay at home without getting treated.

Plus its been known there are asymptomatic spreaders since the start.


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Of course its good news. If you are testing positive without even knowing you have it, then that implies that the disease is reducing in strength.



It implies no such thing. Show me actual peer reviewed scientific evidence that mutation is causing it to weaken and I promise to be over the fucking moon with joy. Until then speculation is just that. And significantly flawed from what I've read about mutations so far.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

existentialist said:


> More precisely, it CAN be shared...because you shared it. But you will find that this site is highly - and vocally - sceptical of people who appear from nowhere, and then start posting to a very specific agenda, as you clearly appear to be doing. It may also not be your fault, but you happen to be one of a number of people who have suddenly appeared on the site and are all posting in a very similar way, in support of a very similar line of argument. That kind of thing makes people suspicious.


fair point. I started posting as I find it genuinely interesting. And yes, I admit I think the evidence is now suggesting that lockdown has no positive impact whatsoever. At the outset I was 100% in favour of lockdown, but the more research undertaken and the more I have reviewed the stats (mortality / age / underlying health issues) the more I am convinced that this has been blown out of all proportion. The fact that its so emotive to challenge the lockdown view, as evidenced on here, pretty much demonstrates the fear that has been drummed in to everyone over the last few months.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> 0.3 is still not great is it. And that 0.3% can go way way higher if hospitals are swamped and people stay at home without getting treated.
> 
> Plus its been known there are asymptomatic spreaders since the start.


But it now seems to be the case that asymptomatic spreaders are not spreading it because they are.... healthy. And therefore not walking around sneezing and coughing over people. So, even this position on asymptomatic spread has changed recently.


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Supine said:


> It implies no such thing. Show me actual peer reviewed scientific evidence that mutation is causing it to weaken and I promise to be over the fucking moon with joy. Until then speculation is just that. And significantly flawed from what I've read about mutations so far.


This article referenes the Lancet study of this week.









						Singapore scientists find coronavirus variant with milder infections
					

Researchers in Singapore have discovered a new variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus that causes milder infections, according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal this week.




					www.reuters.com


----------



## waterloowelshy (Aug 21, 2020)

Supine said:


> It implies no such thing. Show me actual peer reviewed scientific evidence that mutation is causing it to weaken and I promise to be over the fucking moon with joy. Until then speculation is just that. And significantly flawed from what I've read about mutations so far.


Lancet journal in full. 



			https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31757-8/fulltext
		


*Interpretation*
The ∆382 variant of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be associated with a milder infection. The observed clinical effects of deletions in ORF8 could have implications for the development of treatments and vaccines.


----------



## Roadkill (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> And some further positive news. Which doesnt appear to be allowed.



No-one's threatened you with a ban, have they?

This persecution complex is extremely tedious.


----------



## two sheds (Aug 21, 2020)

existentialist said:


> More precisely, it CAN be shared...because you shared it. But you will find that this site is highly - and vocally - sceptical of people who appear from nowhere, and then start posting to a very specific agenda, as you clearly appear to be doing. It may also not be your fault, but you happen to be one of a number of people who have suddenly appeared on the site and are all posting in a very similar way, in support of a very similar line of argument. That kind of thing makes people suspicious.



indeed, suddenly in  2003 🇭🇲

where did that McDonald Islands flag come from?? I've been looking at that for a while.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 21, 2020)

If there's really a variant associated with mild infections, that's great news. Viruses mutate all the time though and it does not necessarily mean every time someone catches covid that it will mutate into that form, or for that matter mutate back. It seems a bit of a dangerous thing to rely on tbh.


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> Lancet journal in full.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So from a quick read...

This mutation was in Singapore. The study data was from Jan to March. There is no indication this mutation has become more prevalent over others. Has it even spread to the west? Questions questions.

Sample size of <300... Percentages tend to vary widely with low numbers.

Edit to add: I kept reading, this variant wasn't seen again after March!


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

The nextstrain website is really good for tracking mutations btw. This is a link to their August report. It's designed to be read by people who don't have phd's in genetics which is handy. 





__





						auspice
					






					nextstrain.org


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 21, 2020)

I think its always useful to remind ourselves what sort of site this is.  A message board by it's nature is quite an old fashioned version of social media and as such people who use it tend towards a higher age demographic.  Also and again due to its very nature there are members here who are more house bound than others for varying reasons. People who will be considered to be in a higher risk group.

Whilst I'm not saying that people shouldn't speak their mind or we should shy away from difficult topics I do think we need to be mindful of the audience.  With something like the virus its very easy to get blase with statistics and yes the and the hospitalisation and death rates are encouraging (as anything can be in this whole shit show) but that's not much comfort to those who are still understandably worried and scared.  Letting the virus rip through society will possibly (likely?) mean some people here getting ill. 

I dunno, does this sound patronising?  Apologies if it does.


----------



## Supine (Aug 21, 2020)

Maybe some people are house bound. I'm sitting on a packed train full of tourist wankers going on holiday though. Always enjoy a good chat about covid in this situation!

I think the main point is you need to back up statements on urban with fairly good sources because there is an expected quality level. Just saying something is true with no evidence ain't gonna work


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 21, 2020)

Supine said:


> I think the main point is you need to back up statements on urban with fairly good sources because there is an expected quality level. Just saying something is true with no evidence ain't gonna work



1st rule of urban.  No matter how obscure the topic of conversation it will be someone here's job or passion.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> fair point. I started posting as I find it genuinely interesting. And yes, *I admit I think the evidence is now suggesting that lockdown has no positive impact whatsoever.* At the outset I was 100% in favour of lockdown, but the more research undertaken and the more I have reviewed the stats (mortality / age / underlying health issues) the more I am convinced that this has been blown out of all proportion. The fact that its so emotive to challenge the lockdown view, as evidenced on here, pretty much demonstrates the fear that has been drummed in to everyone over the last few months.



And, there goes any last bit of credibility you had.


----------



## elbows (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> fair point. I started posting as I find it genuinely interesting. And yes, I admit I think the evidence is now suggesting that lockdown has no positive impact whatsoever. At the outset I was 100% in favour of lockdown, but the more research undertaken and the more I have reviewed the stats (mortality / age / underlying health issues) the more I am convinced that this has been blown out of all proportion. The fact that its so emotive to challenge the lockdown view, as evidenced on here, pretty much demonstrates the fear that has been drummed in to everyone over the last few months.



Do the 65000 excess deaths you are sweeping under the carpet with that ridiculous attitude not leave rather a bulge?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 21, 2020)

Plenty of people have underlying health issues, many of whom won't actually know until it is diagnosed.


----------



## elbows (Aug 21, 2020)

Spandex said:


> There's a few things that could be happening to explain the current high infection rate/low death rate we're seeing at the moment. It could be:
> 
> 1. Covid has mutated to a less deadly form - this has been suggested as a possible end point since C-19 first appeared. If it is this, great.
> 
> ...



I think you missed one of the more obvious options:

Due to lockdowns etc the number of people infected fell to a very low level.
With restrictions eased, levels of infection have started to increase in various countries.
Cases, especially mild or asymptomatic cases, are far more likely to actually be counted now because testing capacity etc changed a lot compared to the first wave.
So, even though cases are rising, they are still a very small number of cases at any one time compared to the actual number of people that were infected at any one time during the peak of the first wave.
And this low number of current infections is reflected in hospitalisation and death stats.
If numbers infected, and demographics involved, go back up beyond a certain level, rises in hospitalisations and deaths will be expected to rise too.
But due to changes in testing etc, we would not expect to see the ratio of positive cases:deaths to be the same as the first time around.

So if in March there were 5000 cases detected on a particular day and 500 deaths that day, and then in September we see a day with 5000 cases detected but only 15 deaths, I do not need to look far for explanations (these are made up numbers for illustration only). Because I do not make the mistake of thinking that because these were both days with 5000 detected cases, that the wave of infections was actually at a similar level on both those occasions. So I wouldnt expect the death rates to resemble each other either.

Anyway thats the sort of scenario I use as a foundation, and then various other possibilities can be tacked on top if some evidence emerges to suggest that there is more going on.

There are also moments where other factors can kick in which act as death amplifiers. During peaks in hospitalisations, even if system breaking point is not reached, there is a strain which can result in less admissions, worse treatment and more deaths. We are currently at the opposite end of things to that, far away from such a threshold.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 21, 2020)

two sheds said:


> indeed, suddenly in  2003 🇭🇲
> 
> where did that McDonald Islands flag come from?? I've been looking at that for a while.


I was careful how I phrased it - I said "appear from nowhere" rather than "joined the site". It comes to much the same thing, in practice - a previously silent poster suddenly pops up on the controversial subject du jour, posts various bits of wackiness, and then starts slagging off the site and its inhabitants for daring to confuse them with facts. The only real difference with this one is that he signed up way before he started posting all that nonsense...


----------



## iona (Aug 21, 2020)

waterloowelshy said:


> But it now seems to be the case that asymptomatic spreaders are not spreading it because they are.... healthy. And therefore not walking around sneezing and coughing over people. So, even this position on asymptomatic spread has changed recently.


 Has there been any actual research suggesting this?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 21, 2020)

iona said:


> Has there been any actual research suggesting this?



No.

Plenty of evidence suggesting asymptomatic people do indeed infect others.

waterloowelshy is a covidiot.


----------



## elbows (Aug 21, 2020)

Yes, the asymptomatic stuff has been a hot topic from the start. Early on there wasnt even much consensus about how many asymptomatic cases there were, let alone their role in infecting others. In the first month or so I probably spent quite a lot of my words here keeping an eye on that stuff and expressing skepticism about some of the messages and dominant beliefs, whilst not actually knowing the full truth of the matter myself (still dont, these things arent easy for science to get a grip on quickly or else we would have had all this knowledge sewn up long before this pandemic emerged).

One simplistic way to describe some changes in attitude and belief on this front over time would be to say that various authorities slowly came to terms with the idea, and the implications of it. If I am remembering properly then the rise in acceptance that asymptomatic cases may play a significant role was after all one of the main justifications used by the UK government for changing its masks policy from no masks for the public to masks in a bunch of settings. That may in part have been a convenient excuse for why they had to change to a mask policy that they had previously been quite vocally opposed to, but if so it was still an excuse that had some actual weight to it, it was not an excuse without substance.

It also featured in a way in a bunch of other policy decisions and health messages from the start, albeit in a different, somewhat related form. The reason why whole households were told to self-isolate if one of them had symptoms, rather than just the person who had symptoms being told to isolate, was because of concerns that people were infectious well before they actually showed symptoms. So they already had the idea of transmission without symptoms in their sights, and by focussing on the 'pre-symptomatic' cases which there was no doubt existed, any controversy and non-acknowledgement of the size of and role of people who remained permanently asymptomatic could be somewhat sidestepped.

These days we have a much better idea, demonstrated all over the world, of the very large number of asymptomatic cases that are out there if we actually look for them via testing in very large numbers. So some early errors about that stuff (such as those promoted by the WHOs China Report in late February) are long since gone. Questions about their exact role in transmission are more complicated and its the sort of angle that can be well explored by doing certain kinds of analysis on all the data that track & trace teams will be generating at this stage.


----------



## iona (Aug 21, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> No.
> 
> Plenty of evidence suggesting asymptomatic people do indeed infect others.
> 
> waterloowelshy is a covidiot.


Well, yeah. I was mainly wondering if they'd read & misinterpreted something, or if it was just their own skewed logic that _coughing and spreads infection, so no coughs or sneezes = no infection_


----------



## elbows (Aug 21, 2020)

iona said:


> Well, yeah. I was mainly wondering if they'd read & misinterpreted something, or if it was just their own skewed logic that _coughing and spreads infection, so no coughs or sneezes = no infection_



Yes, and I had a lot more sympathy for that level of understanding 7 months ago than I have now that we've had this extended period of learning. A period which should have laid waste to many of the oversimplifications, including plenty that various governments, health authorities etc were also more likely to cling to in the early months but have long since moved on from.


----------



## elbows (Aug 22, 2020)

Challenge trials: The volunteers offering to be infected with coronavirus
					

BBC medical editor Fergus Walsh speaks to people volunteering to be infected with coronavirus to help find a vaccine.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Aug 22, 2020)

Our village is having a yard sale today. Place is full of people, no masks, wandering in and out of each others' driveways/gardens to lean over and/or touch all the stuff.


----------



## Spandex (Aug 22, 2020)

elbows said:


> I think you missed one of the more obvious options


That was 4. Something else 



elbows said:


> Due to lockdowns etc the number of people infected fell to a very low level.
> With restrictions eased, levels of infection have started to increase in various countries.
> Cases, especially mild or asymptomatic cases, are far more likely to actually be counted now because testing capacity etc changed a lot compared to the first wave.
> So, even though cases are rising, they are still a very small number of cases at any one time compared to the actual number of people that were infected at any one time during the peak of the first wave.
> ...


I think that's probably most likely.

/Grabs back of fag packet and hits the ONS site to look at the figures/

There's currently about 1,000 cases per day being reported.

The current numbers of deaths is not completely clear - the official daily figure has been between 2 and 16 this week, but we know the ONS figure will be higher. Let's guess at around an average of 15 deaths per day.

That's about 67 infections per death every day.

During the peak week in April an average of around 1,300 per day were dying.

There are, of course, no figures for infections during the peak as the government gave up testing outside hospitals when things were really taking off (partly because they didn't have the capacity and partly because herd immunity). But if the ratio has remained constant that would mean a jaw dropping 87,100 people were being infected every day at the peak.

Can that be right?

Well, according to an Imperial College study "slightly under 6% of the population may have antibodies for the virus by the end of June – an estimated 3.4 million people." For all those people to have been infected in the 5 months from February to June, there would be an average infection rate of around 22,333 people per day. That infection rate wouldn't be constant - not many would be getting infected at the beginning of February, loads would be getting infected in mid-March and the numbers would drop significantly after lockdown. That means the 87,100 infections per day figure, or one even higher, at the peak is quite believable.

So yeah, if I haven't completely fucked up my maths (and I did get a U in my maths A-level) it looks like the numbers do support your theory.


----------



## elbows (Aug 22, 2020)

Thanks for doing some calculations!

I suppose there is also further wiggle room in those sorts of calculations because we would probably expect a difference in the level of death at times when the virus is sweeping in a big way through vulnerable populations such as care home residents and already hospitalised patients.


----------



## elbows (Aug 23, 2020)

I am displeased to see stories like this one:









						'Coronavirus getting less angry' says Mids doctor
					

Dr Ron Daniels is an intensivist based at Good Hope Hospital




					www.coventrytelegraph.net
				




Because of claims like this:



> "What we have seen in France and Spain, and they saw an uptick in cases two weeks before the UK did because they were testing earlier, is there’s not been any increase in hospital admissions.
> 
> "There’s not been an increase in deaths – this is not a second wave, it is just we are testing more people and finding more cases."



Data from Spain shows an increase in hospitalisations and deaths. So it really pisses me off when doctors claim otherwise. I havent gotten around to looking at data from France yet, but I will.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 24, 2020)

Blimey, the Isle of Man doesn't mess around when it comes to covid quarantine rules, returning travellers must self-isolate for 14 days or face a fine of up to £10,000 or three months in prison. .



> *Three people have been jailed this week for failing to quarantine after returning to the Isle of Man from the UK. *
> On Monday 64-year-old Paul Dowd received a six-week jail sentence after going to the pub twice when he should have been in quarantine.
> 
> And on Tuesday a woman from Northern Ireland was jailed for a month after breaking quarantine rules. Fraser Nolan had been given special permission to visit to take care of her late mother’s estate but was caught by police after travelling by bus to a locksmith.
> ...



But, as they haven't had any new cases of covid since 20 May, it's understandable they want to protect the 'Manx bubble'.  









						Three jailed on Isle of Man for breaking Covid quarantine rules
					

Sentences handed to travellers returning from UK who failed to self-isolate for 14 days




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 24, 2020)

Just by Newington green there's a garden sporting a British army and royal navy flags. For weeks there was a rainbow flag in the garden with a union jack with NHS on. But I think someone told them the rainbow meant something rather different from what they thought!


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 24, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Blimey, the Isle of Man doesn't mess around when it comes to covid quarantine rules, returning travellers must self-isolate for 14 days or face a fine of up to £10,000 or three months in prison. .
> 
> 
> 
> ...


No one's seen a Manx bubble since 1937


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 24, 2020)

elbows said:


> I am displeased to see stories like this one:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Doctors are the same as the rest of us, there are 'loons and innumerate larrikins among them.


----------



## elbows (Aug 24, 2020)

Pickman's model said:


> Doctors are the same as the rest of us, there are 'loons and innumerate larrikins among them.



At least it has motivated me to zoom in on data and spend hours hunched over a spreadsheet.

I am now tracking regional hospital data for Spain, France and Italy, as well as the UK.

So far some places dont have rises in such data, some have tentative rises that I wouldnt highlight unless they carry on in the same direction for another week or so, while certain regions of Spain show increases that are more worthy of reporting on at this stage.

I'm not talking about levels that are comparable to what happened during the first peak, but rather rises that are still obvious compared to the summer trough. I'm hoping that by studying them in detail I will have a better sense of what early signs I should look for in UK data. eg knowing when it is safe to report a genuine and sustained rise as opposed to going off half-cocked over a blip.


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 24, 2020)

elbows said:


> At least it has motivated me to zoom in on data and spend hours hunched over a spreadsheet.
> 
> I am now tracking regional hospital data for Spain, France and Italy, as well as the UK.
> 
> ...


there are three things in life which are certain, death, taxes, and the johnson administration's lamentable ability to fuck this up.


----------



## elbows (Aug 24, 2020)

Pickman's model said:


> there are three things in life which are certain, death, taxes, and the johnson administration's lamentable ability to fuck this up.



For the last week or so the fucking Daily Mail has gone into the same mode over Johnsons education failings as they did in the John Major era when they were having trouble coming to terms with the loss of Thatcher.

Complete with terrible cartoon where the cartoonist doesnt have the benefit of blaming pandemic education disruption for their crap output.


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 24, 2020)

elbows said:


> For the last week or so the fucking Daily Mail has gone into the same mode over Johnsons education failings as they did in the John Major era when they were having trouble coming to terms with the loss of Thatcher.
> 
> Complete with terrible cartoon where the cartoonist doesnt have the benefit of blaming pandemic education disruption for their crap output.
> 
> View attachment 227705


i rest my case. no matter what the government does, you can be sure they'll cock it up.

education - health - brexit etc etc ad nauseam, they'll cock it all up


----------



## LDC (Aug 25, 2020)

Been in six places for a drink or meal now in the last few weeks. Not a single one either mentioned test and trace, or made any effort to make sure it was clear with obvious posters.

How much fucking effort is it to mention it when you're ordering, or to have a card on the table reminding you?! Just a joke.


----------



## Numbers (Aug 25, 2020)

The pub we were in twice over the weekend had a pretty good process and it felt really safe.  You had to check in on arrival, i.e. text a number with your contact details so they are confirmed straight away.  

We sat in the garden and it was 2 metres or more even between tables, and was then table service only.  There was a one way system for the loo and hand sanitiser everywhere, the staff all wore masks at all times.

Felt good to be out and feel comfortable doing so.


----------



## iona (Aug 25, 2020)

Going to see my cousin today. I've been putting it off but she's really struggling with various crap and I've sorted a route that avoids the tube and won't be staying overnight like I usually would.

Am I being ridiculously paranoid if I wear a mask the entire time I'm in her house and bring disinfectant wipes to clean stuff before/after touching it? She has five kids, brother & partner living there and going out to work at separate places, two household members have had appts at different hospitals in the last week, one kid's just got back from holiday with their dad & his (not cohabiting) partner, and tbh I doubt any of them have been sticking to social distancing / other measures all that closely. I'd rather be over- than undercautious but got a feeling it might cause issues with them, and it's hard to keep a hold of actual vs perceived risk and what is sensible when everyone's reactions are so varied.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 25, 2020)

iona said:


> Going to see my cousin today. I've been putting it off but she's really struggling with various crap and I've sorted a route that avoids the tube and won't be staying overnight like I usually would.
> 
> Am I being ridiculously paranoid if I wear a mask the entire time I'm in her house and bring disinfectant wipes to clean stuff before/after touching it? She has five kids, brother & partner living there and going out to work at separate places, two household members have had appts at different hospitals in the last week, one kid's just got back from holiday with their dad & his (not cohabiting) partner, and tbh I doubt any of them have been sticking to social distancing / other measures all that closely. I'd rather be over- than undercautious but got a feeling it might cause issues with them, and it's hard to keep a hold of actual vs perceived risk and what is sensible when everyone's reactions are so varied.



Is there any chance you can mostly be outside?  That would solve a lot of potential problems.

In general though I think there is certainly a danger that wet wiping stuff down in their house could cause offence.  I would just try and spend as much time as possible in very well ventilated spaces (outside ideally) and just be careful with what you touch and regularly wash your hands.  Maybe tell them in advance where you're current level of comfort is at.


----------



## iona (Aug 25, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Is there any chance you can mostly be outside? That would solve a lot of potential problems.


Yeah I'd planned to just stay out in the garden when I first said I'd visit but no way she'll be up for that in this weather.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 25, 2020)

I went to my grandmas house the other week and she got offended when I wore a mask in her house and insisted I take it off.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 25, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I went to my grandmas house the other week and she got offended when I wore a mask in her house and insisted I take it off.



Yeah, back at the end of June I met up with some friends in a park.  They had brought a picnic which I wasn't expecting and it became a bit awkward when I politely declined to sit on their blanket.  Unfortunately there is a real clash between what people perceive as manners and how people perceive risk from the virus.  

The poor level of health literacy in the country really shows at a time like this, as if we should just all trust each other to not have the virus because its something that happens to other people or something.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 25, 2020)

iona said:


> Yeah I'd planned to just stay out in the garden when I first said I'd visit but no way she'll be up for that in this weather.



Dunno where you're visiting but the forecast looks OK for the South East.  I understand raining but if its just not sunshine dig some jumpers out.  I think this is what I mean with communicating in advance about what you are happy with.  If you're making the effort to go and see them it seems only reasonable that they respect the level of risk you are comfortable with.


----------



## Anju (Aug 25, 2020)

Haven't seen this yet but sounds like it could be worth watching.

From Ai Weiwei, a Portrait of Wuhan’s Draconian Covid Lockdown

Not sure if it's available for free anywhere yet and £5 to stream seems excessive unless the money is going to the people who did the filming rather than the artist.


----------



## Jay Park (Aug 29, 2020)

South Korea just gone to stage 2.5 - 3 being total lockdown and 2 being no more than 50 people congregating in indoor spaces. This after 441 people (or so) testing + on Thursday. If only we had those numbers in the West.


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Aug 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Blimey, the Isle of Man doesn't mess around when it comes to covid quarantine rules, returning travellers must self-isolate for 14 days or face a fine of up to £10,000 or three months in prison. .
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Good... Blimey this pandemic is really bringing out the authoritarian in me! But there needs to be enforcement. The reason why there's boat loads of twats wandering around these Isles, mask less and without a care in the world is because there is no enforcement.


----------



## Hellsbells (Aug 31, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> Blimey, the Isle of Man doesn't mess around when it comes to covid quarantine rules, returning travellers must self-isolate for 14 days or face a fine of up to £10,000 or three months in prison. .
> 
> 
> 
> ...


😂 I live on the Isle of man & am currently self isolating. Not ventured further than the front garden in 10 days. Wouldn't risk it!


----------



## ska invita (Sep 1, 2020)

"
2h ago 16:22

A person on a poorly ventilated Chinese bus infected nearly two dozen other passengers with coronavirus even though many weren’t sitting close by, according to research that offers fresh evidence the disease can spread in the air.



I'm getting really scared of autumn/winter


----------



## Badgers (Sep 1, 2020)

Might have already been posted here or elsewhere but I like this page:









						UK Coronavirus Tracker
					

Current and historical data of the Coronavirus outbreak in the UK. Includes breakdowns by region, maps, charts, and more!




					www.travellingtabby.com


----------



## zahir (Sep 1, 2020)

An instructive twitter thread on the importance of ventilation.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Sep 1, 2020)

ska invita said:


> "
> 2h ago 16:22
> 
> A person on a poorly ventilated Chinese bus infected nearly two dozen other passengers with coronavirus even though many weren’t sitting close by, according to research that offers fresh evidence the disease can spread in the air.
> ...



I don't really see what's new here? Has there been any suggestion for months (or ever) that it doesn't travel in the air?


----------



## ska invita (Sep 1, 2020)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> I don't really see what's new here? Has there been any suggestion for months (or ever) that it doesn't travel in the air?


what i perceive to be different here is its one thing if someone spits and sneezes on you at close quarters, and another if in a closed environment the disease will spread at a distance..........as it gets cold windows are going to close and our environments are about to get a lot more contained - and therefore potentially more prone to contagion


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 2, 2020)

ska invita said:


> what i perceive to be different here is its one thing if someone spits and sneezes on you at close quarters, and another if in a closed environment the disease will spread at a distance..........as it gets cold windows are going to close and our environments are about to get a lot more contained - and therefore potentially more prone to contagion


Wasn't there a story recently (South Korea, maybe?) about a woman sitting below the air conditioning that infected dozens of others in a cafe?


----------



## Cloo (Sep 2, 2020)

I do wonder if we might find out more about CFS/ME as a result of CV19, given many people are now suffering from similar symptoms and many cases of CFS/ME seem to be triggered by a virus.


----------



## Doodler (Sep 3, 2020)

Two people at my work now self-isolating after coming into contact with one of The Infected in circumstances that are not entirely clear. They await their test results.

Reassured to see head office respond quickly to the situation by telling everyone not to . . . discuss it on social media!


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 3, 2020)

Doodler said:


> Two people at my work now self-isolating after coming into contact with one of The Infected in circumstances that are not entirely clear. They await their test results.
> 
> Reassured to see head office respond quickly to the situation by telling everyone not to . . . discuss it on social media!



So, OK on here, being anti-social media.


----------



## Doodler (Sep 3, 2020)

cupid_stunt said:


> So, OK on here, being anti-social media.



Nice one, will use that for the tribunal


----------



## SpookyFrank (Sep 3, 2020)

ska invita said:


> "
> 2h ago 16:22
> 
> A person on a poorly ventilated Chinese bus infected nearly two dozen other passengers with coronavirus even though many weren’t sitting close by, according to research that offers fresh evidence the disease can spread in the air.
> ...



Buses in winter are perfect virus-spreading environments. Warm, humid, densely populated with folk getting on and off all the time. And in many places they're the only commuting option for those without private cars.


----------



## ska invita (Sep 3, 2020)

SpookyFrank said:


> Buses in winter are perfect virus-spreading environments. Warm, humid, densely populated with folk getting on and off all the time. And in many places they're the only commuting option for those without private cars.


this is my worry.
i go on two trains, one has windows that open, the other is sealed. 
the one that is sealed (a thameslink train) i don't know if air is recycled or fresh brought in - you'd expect fresh air really.
on the train with open windows, people will want those closed when its cold and i dont think there's any other ventilation after that
nothing has happened yet, but its been a warm year this year - cold conditions haven't been tested yet
however there havent been a lot of reports otherwise - planes/trains/busses - aside from this Chinese case I haven't heard anything


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 3, 2020)

At least on most buses you can open windows.  Only problem being a lot of people still don't really get the risk from the build up in unventilated places so will likely close the windows in the winter.


----------



## elbows (Sep 3, 2020)

ska invita said:


> however there havent been a lot of reports otherwise - planes/trains/busses - aside from this Chinese case I haven't heard anything



I'm not completely clear what areas thats supposed to mean but dead bus drivers certainly shouldnt be left out of the picture.



> The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has recently released figures suggesting that bus drivers in the UK were among workers with higher rates of death from COVID-19 than other staff.
> 
> Male bus and coach drivers were found to have a rate of 26.4 deaths per 100,000 compared to sales and retail assistants at a rate of 19.8.











						Coronavirus: Review ordered into London bus driver deaths - SHP - Health and Safety News, Legislation, PPE, CPD and Resources
					

Transport for London (TfL) has announced that an independent review is to look at coronavirus infections and deaths among the capital's bus workers.




					www.shponline.co.uk


----------



## Aladdin (Sep 5, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> I got into a debate on another site with some individuals who truly believe their freedoms are being taken away from them because the government has asked that certain restrictions be brought back til mid Sept.
> These people were frothing at the mouth because indoor games are restricted to 6 people and outdoors to 15.
> Because they were advised to work from home and not use public transport unless absolutely necessary
> One of them said they thought if they refused the vaccine that they'd be put in a camp.
> ...



Correction. Apparently Ireland has only 411 ICU beds 😳



			Redirect Notice
		


And the situation is going to get a lot worse. 🙁
"By the end of the year, it is forecast that Ireland would need 1,037 out of the 1,573 available hospital beds to treat virus patients. Some 454 ICU beds would be needed with only 53 available, and 433 ventilators would be required."








						Ireland may see 1,200 more Covid-19 deaths by 2021 if face mask use doesn't improve - US experts
					

Worst-case forecasts of 8,000 daily cases, ICU shortages and a ‘deadly December’




					www.irishtimes.com


----------



## Cloo (Sep 8, 2020)

Incidentally what's happening in China and the Far East at the moment? Are they having any general resurgence due to autumn/not being locked down or do they continue have it under control?


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 9, 2020)

Cloo said:


> Incidentally what's happening in China and the Far East at the moment? Are they having any general resurgence due to autumn/not being locked down or do they continue have it under control?











						China COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer
					

China Coronavirus update with statistics and graphs: total and new cases, deaths per day, mortality and recovery rates, current active cases, recoveries, trends and timeline.




					www.worldometers.info
				




Absolute flatline - no cases, no deaths. Whether that indicates a complete control of the virus, or a complete control of data being released to the general public, is anyone's guess.


----------



## Cloo (Sep 9, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> China COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer
> 
> 
> China Coronavirus update with statistics and graphs: total and new cases, deaths per day, mortality and recovery rates, current active cases, recoveries, trends and timeline.
> ...


Yes, there is always an aspect of   about their figures, although it's not like we can talk about government transparency either


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Sep 10, 2020)

So firstly, please let's not say "Far East", because it's outdated and absurdly vague for such a huge part of the world. There is East Asia and South East Asia, not just a mysterious lump where everyone eats dogs and uses chopsticks. What with East Asia and South East Asia being composed of various countries, they are actually having quite disparate experiences of the pandemic.

In China, since April we have had a local lockdown in Heilongjiang Province, a local lockdown in Jilin Province, a local lockdown in Beijing, a local lockdown in Dalian, and really, less than a fucking month ago, there was a lockdown in Xinjiang. None of which indicate secrecy or control of data do they, really?

So yeah, outbreaks are still being openly and publicly dealt with, but we are currently experiencing a rare streak where there's no known local transmission. It would be lovely if we never had an outbreak again, but we have to accept that this pattern of dynamic eradication is continuous, since it has been for several months now.


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 10, 2020)

Yu_Gi_Oh said:


> In China, since April we have had a local lockdown in Heilongjiang Province, a local lockdown in Jilin Province, a local lockdown in Beijing, a local lockdown in Dalian, and really, less than a fucking month ago, there was a lockdown in Xinjiang. None of which indicate secrecy or control of data do they, really?



After their mishandling and cover-ups in the early days of the pandemic, nobody's ever going to trust anything the Beijing regime says about it again, not that anything they say could have been trusted in the first place.


----------



## Cloo (Sep 11, 2020)

Just spoken to my parents who have been out at their place in Slovakia for the last two weeks - they are preparing to run their small classical music festival weekend as usual at the start of October.  There's been a slight rise of cases in Bratislava, no cases at all currently in their area of Eastern Slovakia (opposite end from B'slava). Masks are compulsory in shops, and in restaurants when not eating, but otherwise I think things are just carrying on, presumably with distancing. As my mum has pointed out, it's not a country where people move around from place to place much, certainly not in the fairly rural east. They are supposed to be coming back mid October, but my sister and I have now both said that they might just be better seeing out the winter there - they'll have much more freedom of movement, much lower likelihood of catching it and, if God forbid they did catch it and need hospitalising, almost certainly better healthcare where they'd intervene earlier than here (there's a hospital with A&E 500m from their house and a big regional hospital half an hour away).


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 12, 2020)

Apparently in Colombia, they broke out some medieval punishment methods for those caught breaking quarantine rules:









						Stocks - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## Hyperdark (Sep 13, 2020)

I was piled on by the resident keyboard warriors for suggesting this earlier, but in light of the recent problems with the Oxford Trials they might have a think before their next outburst
Many are blindly accepting what the Drug companies and University Research Departments tell them whilst forgetting they are all competitors doing their best to make financial and/or reputational gains
Inside Oxford’s Vaccine Saga: From Wild Hype to Sobering Reality

Linked to the above is news of proposals by the EU, USA and individual countries to plan a legal way to start vaccine delivery without the usual final approvals
Europe eyes loophole for early distribution of unlicensed coronavirus vaccine


----------



## existentialist (Sep 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> I was piled on by the resident keyboard warriors


Oh, fuck off, you big old drama queen. FWIW, I have no idea what you wrote after that, because I ignored it.

Get over yourself.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> I was piled on by the resident keyboard warriors for suggesting this earlier, but in light of the recent problems with the Oxford Trials they might have a think before their next outburst
> Many are blindly accepting what the Drug companies and University Research Departments tell them whilst forgetting they are all competitors doing their best to make financial and/or reputational gains
> Inside Oxford’s Vaccine Saga: From Wild Hype to Sobering Reality



That article is already out of date, as the trials of the Oxford vaccine are resuming.


----------



## Hyperdark (Sep 13, 2020)

existentialist said:


> Oh, fuck off, you big old drama queen.



Nah, Im half way through writing my paper on people withlow  self esteem who hide behind internet tough guy personas and this place is a gold mine


----------



## Supine (Sep 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> Nah, Im half way through writing my paper on people withlow  self esteem who hide behind internet tough guy personas and this place is a gold mine



Someone got out of bed on the wrong side this morning.


----------



## existentialist (Sep 13, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> Nah, Im half way through writing my paper on people withlow  self esteem who hide behind internet tough guy personas and this place is a gold mine


What a fine and excellently-researched piece of work I imagine that must be.


----------



## prunus (Sep 13, 2020)

existentialist said:


> What a fine and excellently-researched piece of work I imagine that must be.



They always say “write what you know”...


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 15, 2020)

Daughter #2 struggling with the first online lesson session today. Her college is using Microsoft Teams, which is some sort of communication tool - but the first group she tried to join failed to connect, and then she was told that you only get one chance to connect and the teacher can't reinvite her.  Absolute clusterfuck - do they not understand they are going to have technical issues, dropped connections, etc?


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 15, 2020)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Daughter #2 struggling with the first online lesson session today. Her college is using Microsoft Teams, which is some sort of communication tool - but the first group she tried to join failed to connect, and then she was told that you only get one chance to connect and the teacher can't reinvite her.  Absolute clusterfuck - do they not understand they are going to have technical issues, dropped connections, etc?



Teams is dead simple to use and its the go to system for a lot of business these days.  Logging in and back in if the signal drops is usually really easy and just a click of a button.  It sounds like the college has added some plug ins or something.  All very odd.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 15, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Teams is dead simple to use and its the go to system for a lot of business these days.  Logging in and back in if the signal drops is usually really easy and just a click of a button.  It sounds like the college has added some plug ins or something.  All very odd.


Yeah - it seems like they've set it up to only allow joining at the beginning, because the lesson vanished from her schedule after she failed to join it the first time, so she has no way to find her way back to it.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 17, 2020)

Is a skin rash a symptom of covid?


----------



## Thora (Sep 17, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Is a skin rash a symptom of covid?


Yes, particularly in children I think.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 17, 2020)

Thora said:


> Yes, particularly in children I think.


My mum's just got a weird rash on her hand. We have already had covid tho. Although you can get it twice I think, but I wouldn't have thought so quickly?


----------



## Thora (Sep 17, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> My mum's just got a weird rash on her hand. We have already had covid tho. Although you can get it twice I think, but I wouldn't have thought so quickly?


How recently did she have it?  I think it can last a while with symptoms coming and going.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 17, 2020)

Thora said:


> How recently did she have it?  I think it can last a while with symptoms coming and going.


We had it in March but she's been having issues with post viral fatigue etc.


----------



## Supine (Sep 17, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Is a skin rash a symptom of covid?



it's a symptom of lots of things


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 19, 2020)

existentialist said:


> What a fine and excellently-researched piece of work I imagine that must be.


No one likes to tread in his output


----------



## Cloo (Sep 19, 2020)

Was trying to think where we are compared to the begining in what we know:

Symptoms:

Loss of taste/smell
Toe/hand rash

Transmission:

Surface transmission is not a big issue, you don't have to wash everything coming into your house (Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time)
It's needs quite a lot droplets to infect you, not just a single one
It's hard to catch outdoors unless you're really crammed in with others
Under 12s (or is it under 11s, depending who you ask) don't seem to infect as many people or one another than much
They seem to have realised that people working in multiple care homes isn't a good idea, but I don't know how much they're doing about it

Reinfection:

Looks like it's possible but we still don't know if it's common or if reinfected people tend to have serious cases or be very infectious themselves (Some people can get the pandemic virus twice, a study suggests. That is no reason to panic
Some people seem to infect more than others, but no one knows why yet or how to find out whi they are (Super-spreaders: what are they and how are they transmitting coronavirus?

Treatment

Dexamethasone is looking good for reducing deaths (What drugs can help treat coronavirus?)
Interferon beta might be promising
Learned to intervene in different ways before going for ventilation

Testing:

Quicker turn around tests may be available
Group spit tests being trialled

What else?


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 20, 2020)

Cloo said:


> Surface transmission is not a big issue, you don't have to wash everything coming into your house (Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time)


Interesting article - has it been shared in the thread about washing your shopping yet?

You missed the stuff like Vitamin D deficiency correlating with worse outcomes. Not sure if there are others - aside from old age (which isn't really a health issue just a marker), obesity is the only other one I can think of that has been linked to having a worse time with Covid.


----------



## two sheds (Sep 20, 2020)

I've seen the increased prevalence with age being linked to T-Cell abundance, although that was a while ago, don't know if the thinking has changed.

I thought this was interesting from NY in the US: Almost Every Hospitalized Coronavirus Patient Has Another Underlying Health Issue, According to a Study of New York Patients

"Specific comorbidities of hospitalized patients with available EHR data, from most common to least: "

Hypertension (high blood pressure) 53%, obesity BMI >30 42%, diabetes 32%, morbid obesity BMI>35 19%, coronary artery disease 10%

What surprised me was that lung complaints asthma (8%) and COPD (5%) were relatively low on the list.


----------



## two sheds (Sep 20, 2020)

I've just realized that this ^^^ probably says more about the prevalence of those complaints in New York than it does about their susceptibility to coronavirus - one clue being in there being fewer people with morbid obesity than with obesity.


----------



## Doodler (Sep 23, 2020)

One of my younger workmates (in his 20s) was infected recently and had to self-isolate for a fortnight. He told me the illness felt like flu and put him to bed for about a week. He had aches and pains and no appetite and couldn't sleep at night, but dozed during the day.

He also said that doctors advised him that though he was now likely immune, it might still be the case that he could be re-infected at some point in the future, not suffer any symptoms, but be capable of infecting others.

Is this right? A kind of half-way house immunity which means you can pick up the virus again and spread it to others, while being asymptomatic yourself?


----------



## Thora (Sep 23, 2020)

As I understand it, they just really don't know yet if having it actually gives you immunity or how long it lasts for.

Many/most people seem to have it with no symptoms but still be infectious, so really anyone at any time could have it and spread it without knowing it.  It's not necessarily related to having had it before.  I'd guess the GP was just trying to tell him not to assume he is now immune forever, or that you will always have symptoms if you're infectious.


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 23, 2020)

Doodler said:


> One of my younger workmates (in his 20s) was infected recently and had to self-isolate for a fortnight. He told me the illness felt like flu and put him to bed for about a week. He had aches and pains and no appetite and couldn't sleep at night, but dozed during the day.
> 
> He also said that doctors advised him that though he was now likely immune, it might still be the case that he could be re-infected at some point in the future, not suffer any symptoms, but be capable of infecting others.
> 
> Is this right? A kind of half-way house immunity which means you can pick up the virus again and spread it to others, while being asymptomatic yourself?



It's largely in-line with everything I've read.  There would appear that some immunity can be gained from previous infection but there are a lot of variables which are not fully understood such as age and viral load (as in how much of it you were exposed to first time around).  It is also unclear how long any immunity will last and likely again to do with a lot of variables.

There has certainly been documented cases where people have got it twice though they appear to be quite rare, this could be because it only makes the news if they get it bad both times.  So in this regard there could be cases of unknown numbers out there where people have got it twice and are asymptomatic the second time around (or indeed both times) and are likely still infectious.

This is why its still really odd to see some people (including professionals like Senetra Gupta I think) still basically arguing a _let it rip_ line.  That being said she is infinitely more qualified in this regard than I am.


----------



## Mogden (Sep 23, 2020)

I need to vent about this. Ma Mogden this morning was persisting in her very vocal "He's doing the best he can. No one could have done better than he has in the circumstances" about Bozo. Then in the same breath "The best person to have dealt with this so far is the NZ PM"  So he's not doing the very best then 

I tried to point out the hypocrisy of him telling us this was all our fault having advocated that we eat out, drink out, work out and send the kids out. How Cummings had made a complete farce of things too. I barked about the Wetherspoons idiot Martin and his Tory donations, who she claims she has no idea of, and then she told me about the cold my niece brought back from school that my brother now has and I did point out that if she can bring cold germs home, there's other things she could be passing on too


----------



## Badgers (Sep 23, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I need to vent about this. Ma Mogden this morning was persisting in her very vocal "He's doing the best he can. No one could have done better than he has in the circumstances" about Bozo. Then in the same breath "The best person to have dealt with this so far is the NZ PM"  So he's not doing the very best then


Have just had this shit too 

DaddyBadgers missus has just left the family WhatsApp group because I am an 'extremist' and the left are as bad as the right. 

What pisses me off is that I am aware she is less political (or active or anything) than me so I have only shared frustrations and facts. So she wrote a shitty message to the whole family then left the chat. 

I know politics is tribal but she is not political and any decent human being knows this shit is not good. Even if you are right leaning surely you know this is the worst government in living history.


----------



## two sheds (Sep 23, 2020)

Mogden said:


> I need to vent about this. Ma Mogden this morning was persisting in her very vocal "He's doing the best he can.



That bit I think she does have right


----------



## Mogden (Sep 23, 2020)

two sheds said:


> That bit I think she does have right


Thank you. I think I'll make that point next call   

Ma Mogden is a weekend Daily Mail reader so I'm amazed she's not heard or read of the cretin Martin. She's also of that age that makes her tremendously susceptible to all sorts of nonsense. Her Facebook feed is full of shared missing dogs & people ads from 3 years ago, special offers and competitions to win toot for likes and read between the lines racist memes. I bloody hope I'm locked down here for Christmas cos I will not be able to face Bozo wars over mince pies and sprouts. I'm not sure what is dementia and what is general idiocy.


----------



## SovietArmy (Sep 23, 2020)

I confuse restaurants and pubs has to shut at 10 pm that is kind of clear to me,  yes lets say if customers came 8.30 need time to order food and cook and he or she not finished food until 10 pm the is problem or cutomer has to stop eating .


----------



## Thora (Sep 23, 2020)

My mum (who is actually a Labour party member though mostly joined because she hated Corbyn   ) also hates to hear criticism of Boris - lots of conversations where she says he's done the best he could in the circumstances/other countries are just as bad etc etc.
I think it's just fear, wanting to cling on to some faith in our leadership.  It's scary to think we're relying on incompetent dickheads in a crisis.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 23, 2020)

I think that I am just going to cut anyone who supports or 'gives this government a chance' out of my life completely. 

Easy with mates because none of them will side with, or give any leniency to Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson and his Disgraced Government. Family less easy but if people are so short sighted then I don't want to know them.


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 23, 2020)

SovietArmy said:


> I confuse restaurants and pubs has to shut at 10 pm that is kind of clear to me,  yes lets say if customers came 8.30 need time to order food and cook and he or she not finished food until 10 pm the is problem or cutomer has to stop eating .



Yes, its going to be difficult for restaurants to manage.  I guess they won't take any reservations after a certain time.   I can't see them kicking anyone out mid meal but I guess they will have to lock the doors.


----------



## miss direct (Sep 23, 2020)

My local is doing closing at 9 or 9:30  - presumably to give people time to drink up and get out.


----------



## William of Walworth (Sep 24, 2020)

It appears? that in Wales there may (??) be _some_ post-10 pm drinking up time allowed, but I've no idea of details (in pre-work rush right now) and I'm reluctant to rely on what the barman said last night! 

Our changes kick in today. I'm rarely at the pub as late as 10 pm anyway ......


----------



## Badgers (Sep 24, 2020)

Frankly the pubs closing at 10pm is the most minor inconvenience of this whole shit storm. The pubs not hosting live music, limited to table service and enforcing social distancing are the issues.

Pubs are open earlier and close a lot later these days but closing at 10pm is really not an issue is it? A table service pub with no live music or social interaction can shut at 8pm frankly.

It is going to cost jobs but they would (90%) be going if pubs stayed open all night under these restrictions.


----------



## William of Walworth (Sep 24, 2020)

Badgers : I'm not feeling _at all_ inconvenienced by pubs closing at 10 (just to clarify!  ) -- neither will most sensible people, even pub people , be too bothered I'm sure.

But it does seem somewhat pointless in the broader scheme of things -- we all know infection can spread as easily on a busy Saturday afternoon ina pub, as on a quiet Wednesday evening there.

Was merely quibbling about the details here in Wales, which might? apply a  little bit differently here than on England.

But yes, not too important.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 24, 2020)

William of Walworth said:


> But yes, not too important.


Barely worth posting about


----------



## William of Walworth (Sep 24, 2020)

Badgers said:


> Barely worth posting about


----------



## gosub (Sep 26, 2020)

Cloo said:


> Was trying to think where we are compared to the begining in what we know:
> 
> Symptoms:
> 
> ...


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 28, 2020)

I was speaking with someone who runs a small independent restaurant.  He told me they're having to run a reduced menu because the new closing rules mean that everyone turns up at the same time, 8pm.  This is also means they can really only do one sitting per table instead of the usual two or three.  Its all a bit tricky for them.


----------



## circleline (Sep 28, 2020)

My local Co-op seems to have misread the memo.  Apparently, they are not selling alcohol after 10pm, 'according to' something - ....


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 29, 2020)

circleline said:


> My local Co-op seems to have misread the memo.  Apparently, they are not selling alcohol after 10pm, 'according to' something - ....



Judging by today's news that's probably a decent policy.  If you're going to shut the pubs at 10pm it may have been an idea to coordinate it with other places that sell booze.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 29, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Judging by today's news that's probably a decent policy.  If you're going to shut the pubs at 10pm it may have been an idea to coordinate it with other places that sell booze.



Like Wales did.


----------



## editor (Sep 30, 2020)

Perhaps some of those anti-mask conspiracy theorists could pop along and visit these poor old folks for a chat. Obviously, they you wouldn't need to wear a mask because they keep telling us it's all a  hoax.  





















						Photographing a Nursing Home Where All Residents Are COVID Positive
					

At its core, photography allows us to tell the story of our history. Years from now, when we look back at images from 2020, our thoughts and feelings on




					petapixel.com


----------



## editor (Sep 30, 2020)

circleline said:


> My local Co-op seems to have misread the memo.  Apparently, they are not selling alcohol after 10pm, 'according to' something - ....


It was so strange last Friday with the pubs closed at 10pm but heaps of people piling into the offies and Sainsbury's for booze.


----------



## existentialist (Sep 30, 2020)

editor said:


> It was so strange last Friday with the pubs closed at 10pm but heaps of people piling into the offies and Sainsbury's for booze.


Obviously, it's not Darwinism on an individual level, but it's certainly Darwinism on a societal level.


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 2, 2020)




----------



## campanula (Oct 2, 2020)

For the last 3 weeks, I have been doing the ONS tests... which appears to be an inept shitshow. The first week, none of the barcodes were included in the test pack so were basically unidentified. 2nd week, I get a different person with a little stick on barcode...but who has my details wrong (name and email). This week, we go through the (inane) questions, only for none of it to save. The actual questions are conducted by agency workers with minimal training...and I swear, the 1st and most recent chap had even less clue how to use a mobile phone than I do. Also, the first test swab had no breakage point - had to use my secateurs to cut the plastic wand. Every single test kit has been different - either details on bottle, no  labelling at all and one with barely any liquid (just a little smear at the bottom of the tube).Second agency worker gives me an entirely different set of anwers regarding notification, claiming Accuvia will be writing to me. Today I am told results only go to GP and only if positive. Oh yeah, have had no vouchers either. And this is not taking into account the utter shambolic timekeeping. I get a phone call the night before a test, with a time... which still seems quite random. The one I had today had been to 2 other people and only just noticed none of the data had been saved from his previous testee (?)  (he was imputting wrong data on the barcode after failing to photograph it because his phone is an ancient dinosaur). He did say the agency were looking to recruit more testers and was a bit coy when I asked him what training he had had.
O, and neither of them have worn masks and invariably pat my dog.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 2, 2020)

Getting a bit exhausted by seeing things within an hour,  where one says '50% chance of vaccine by spring , 85% chance by second half of next year' and another saying 'Vaccine at least two years away - we'll be in and out of lockdown until then', both of which I saw this morning (didn't see more than headline)

It's like 'No one fucking knows! Stop getting my hopes up and/or bringing me right down about it!'


----------



## iona (Oct 2, 2020)

campanula said:


> For the last 3 weeks, I have been doing the ONS tests... which appears to be an inept shitshow. The first week, none of the barcodes were included in the test pack so were basically unidentified. 2nd week, I get a different person with a little stick on barcode...but who has my details wrong (name and email). This week, we go through the (inane) questions, only for none of it to save. The actual questions are conducted by agency workers with minimal training...and I swear, the 1st and most recent chap had even less clue how to use a mobile phone than I do. Also, the first test swab had no breakage point - had to use my secateurs to cut the plastic wand. Every single test kit has been different - either details on bottle, no  labelling at all and one with barely any liquid (just a little smear at the bottom of the tube).Second agency worker gives me an entirely different set of anwers regarding notification, claiming Accuvia will be writing to me. Today I am told results only go to GP and only if positive. Oh yeah, have had no vouchers either. And this is not taking into account the utter shambolic timekeeping. I get a phone call the night before a test, with a time... which still seems quite random. The one I had today had been to 2 other people and only just noticed none of the data had been saved from his previous testee (?)  (he was imputting wrong data on the barcode after failing to photograph it because his phone is an ancient dinosaur). He did say the agency were looking to recruit more testers and was a bit coy when I asked him what training he had had.
> O, and neither of them have worn masks and invariably pat my dog.


The vouchers do take a few weeks to come through. If you've given them an email address that's how you'll get them.

Have to say, my experience has been totally different - arranging appointments is chaos and I've only been tested about half as many times as I should, as a result, but the actual tests have been fine. Giving blood samples as well means I get actual trained medical professionals though, not some random agency worker.


----------



## campanula (Oct 2, 2020)

iona said:


> The vouchers do take a few weeks to come through. If you've given them an email address that's how you'll get them.
> 
> Have to say, my experience has been totally different - arranging appointments is chaos and I've only been tested about half as many times as I should, as a result, but the actual tests have been fine. Giving blood samples as well means I get actual trained medical professionals though, not some random agency worker.


 You have been doing this longer than me, Iona - I suspect a whole new tranche of testing has been initiated and Accuvia are simply not able to keep up with it. I am less worried about agency workers than I am about the lack of any  clarity or consistency.. I only did it because I thought it would be an early warning system (because I am still massively worried for a couple of very vulnerable family members , one of whom I live with and the other is also dependent on us for all sorts of support. I asked about blood samples (because I wanted the antigen tests) but none of those have been rolled out with this latest round of testing...it's all door to door agency staff.


----------



## newme (Oct 3, 2020)

Err may not entirely fit in here but my dad has been self isolating since February with my step mum. He has COPD so obviously seriously at risk also serious back and other issues so mobility issues too and consistently bad health in general. She has now had a very bad fall, broken femur, multiple ribs and most likely a wrist as well but we are waiting on an xray. When she's out she will be going to her sons for aftercare.

They had basically been self reliant up til this point and had cut back on as much care as possible due to infection risk. I setup food deliveries etc before this started as they were using carer hours just to get the shopping in I had found out. Most eveything is automated as far as bill paying, solar with battery incase of brown outs, oxygen backup tanks etc and they moved to a bungalow and it is as far as I am aware as adapted as it can be for them.

They had decided by July they were self isolating until December at minimum and had cut back on care to one person to limit exposure. He's always been incredibly self reliant and a stubborn bastard which is probably where I get it from. Well the stubborn bit anyway, I'm not a qualified pilot, pilot instructor, ex raf, ex merchant navy, oil rig worker of some description, plumber, financial advisor electrician, gas fitter nor have I built a house as a side project (obviously some other professionals involved at various points as he wasn't a roofer or a crane operator for example). Tho I did most of the plasterboard on it I suppose. 

Point is are there any additional services I could get in or options available for those extremely vulnerable and self isolating alone, he's not 70 until December if that makes a difference. Frankly if he has a similar fall no one might even find out for some time. I'm trying to get him to increase carer hours but well as above.


----------



## Thora (Oct 3, 2020)

Would he have one of those care line/personal alarm things?


----------



## two sheds (Oct 3, 2020)

newme said:


> Err may not entirely fit in here but my dad has been self isolating since February with my step mum. He has COPD so obviously seriously at risk also serious back and other issues so mobility issues too and consistently bad health in general. She has now had a very bad fall, broken femur, multiple ribs and most likely a wrist as well but we are waiting on an xray. When she's out she will be going to her sons for aftercare.
> 
> They had basically been self reliant up til this point and had cut back on as much care as possible due to infection risk. I setup food deliveries etc before this started as they were using carer hours just to get the shopping in I had found out. Most eveything is automated as far as bill paying, solar with battery incase of brown outs, oxygen backup tanks etc and they moved to a bungalow and it is as far as I am aware as adapted as it can be for them.
> 
> ...



Don't know, sorry but they sound an amazing couple. And you and they have set things up really well. Seriously impressive.


----------



## LDC (Oct 3, 2020)

newme said:


> Err may not entirely fit in here but my dad has been self isolating since February with my step mum. He has COPD so obviously seriously at risk also serious back and other issues so mobility issues too and consistently bad health in general. She has now had a very bad fall, broken femur, multiple ribs and most likely a wrist as well but we are waiting on an xray. When she's out she will be going to her sons for aftercare.
> 
> They had basically been self reliant up til this point and had cut back on as much care as possible due to infection risk. I setup food deliveries etc before this started as they were using carer hours just to get the shopping in I had found out. Most eveything is automated as far as bill paying, solar with battery incase of brown outs, oxygen backup tanks etc and they moved to a bungalow and it is as far as I am aware as adapted as it can be for them.
> 
> ...



Key safe outside, one of those care alarm installed (make sure he carries it), regular phone and in person check ins, neighbors to also check in regularly (maybe unobtrusively), and then don't be shy calling 999 for an ambulance/police welfare check on them if you get at all worried and you're not able to.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 3, 2020)

So I watched Handmaid's tale late last year on some digital cap catch up, but then it vanished from there so I only saw 4 episodes. Just picked it up again on Amazon and it's a bit weirdly close to the bone watching people recall a forgotten world where they could go where they like and meet up with who they like and there was all this stuff which just can't happen anymore. 

Totally different reasons and all,  but still kind of weird ...


----------



## editor (Oct 5, 2020)

Handy list ripping apart the various 'experts' whose names keep cropping up:










						Who were the so-called ‘top doctors and nurses’ that addressed the anti-Covid measures demo as global death toll reaches 843K?
					

If Covid19 can indeed be cured by tonic water as claimed, let’s hope there’s also a cure for stupid.




					www.thelondoneconomic.com


----------



## Cloo (Oct 6, 2020)

I am seeing more and more stuff from people who know what they are talking about (see my post on 'useful info') saying there's no evidence that transmission for surfaces is a thing. I mean obviously people should washing hands and surfaces in case anyway, but one thing that could improve life and make schools, work and childcare much easier, among other things, is if the advice changed to 'it's OK to touch things other people have touched if you clean your hands frequently'

I mean, we've all been touching stuff in shops and kids have been getting their mitts all over playgrounds for months anyway - there just doesn't seem to be any evidence that people catch it that way. But I don't know what it would take for it to become conventional wisdom - it's difficult to test for (hence early experiments using unrealistically heavy loads leading to 'It will live on surfaces for weeks!!!' mania early on) but at the same time there have apparently not been any cases that can definitively be said to have come from a surface rather than breathing in droplets.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 6, 2020)

Flurry of coronavirus reinfections leaves scientists puzzled | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian nooooo


----------



## LDC (Oct 7, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Flurry of coronavirus reinfections leaves scientists puzzled | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian nooooo



My understanding from some medical academic article recently is that this isn't a worrying concern still.


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 7, 2020)

Cloo said:


> I am seeing more and more stuff from people who know what they are talking about (see my post on 'useful info') saying there's no evidence that transmission for surfaces is a thing. I mean obviously people should washing hands and surfaces in case anyway, but one thing that could improve life and make schools, work and childcare much easier, among other things, is if the advice changed to 'it's OK to touch things other people have touched if you clean your hands frequently'
> 
> I mean, we've all been touching stuff in shops and kids have been getting their mitts all over playgrounds for months anyway - there just doesn't seem to be any evidence that people catch it that way. But I don't know what it would take for it to become conventional wisdom - it's difficult to test for (hence early experiments using unrealistically heavy loads leading to 'It will live on surfaces for weeks!!!' mania early on) but at the same time there have apparently not been any cases that can definitively be said to have come from a surface rather than breathing in droplets.



Have there been any cases where they've been able to say definitively how the person contracted it whether it be from droplets or surface?  I'm no scientist but surely the only way you could say for sure would be to carry out deliberate infections of otherwise healthy people in a controlled environment.  Volunteers anyone?

Anyway, it may well turn out to be true but it seems unlikely there will be a change anytime soon given how much emphasize Chris Whitty has put on handwashing all along. Outwardly they've always seen distancing and handwashing as more important than things like masks for example.


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Oct 7, 2020)

Even now, when I wash my hands, I get a pang of rage as I remember that cunt saying that all we needed to do was wash our hands and sing happy birthday.  MASKS ffs. You needed masks.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 7, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Have there been any cases where they've been able to say definitively how the person contracted it whether it be from droplets or surface?  I'm no scientist but surely the only way you could say for sure would be to carry out deliberate infections of otherwise healthy people in a controlled environment.  Volunteers anyone?


Apparently not according to the video,  no cases where it can be confirmed or was caught from surfaces.  But it also can't be tested for exactly the reason you state.  I think it perhaps has most to do with the fact of the number of droplets you need to get in your system in order to infect you, which is apparently quite a lot for C19. So it would be quite hard/unlucky to get enough fairly fresh drops off a surface and into your system by touching something.


----------



## Orang Utan (Oct 7, 2020)

The PC area of my library is looking more like an isolation area in a bad school than a library. Dystopian AF


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 7, 2020)

Wasn't one of the new Zealand outbreaks thought to have come from infected surfaces?


----------



## Yu_Gi_Oh (Oct 7, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Wasn't one of the new Zealand outbreaks thought to have come from infected surfaces?



There are concerns with frozen imported fish here in China, and it's been linked to several outbreaks now. I think they now test all the workers in this area every couple of days, and they picked up two infections a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm not sure if it was imported cold stuff in NZ too, or if it was ever confirmed anyway.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 7, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Wasn't one of the new Zealand outbreaks thought to have come from infected surfaces?



They were looking into a link with frozen food imports, but ruled it out. 



> The origin of the latest outbreak is still unknown, but authorities earlier on Tuesday ruled out the possibility that it came from frozen food items or freight.
> 
> “Seems clear now that the possibility is being ruled out from that investigation,” Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told reporters.











						New Zealand's Ardern hits back at Trump over coronavirus 'surge'
					

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hit back on Tuesday against U.S. President Donald Trump for saying her country is experiencing a "big surge" in COVID-19, calling the remarks "patently wrong".




					www.reuters.com


----------



## Cloo (Oct 7, 2020)

God there's a local woman who is obssessed with the fact there was a fair in our local park at the beginning of September and how could the council allow it when cases were rising and who is now insisting it's a 'super spreader event' because levels are high in the area, but I'm sure that's bollocks. I mean, it was outdoors, people were hardly crammed into the park shoulder to shoulder and it's doubtful dozens of people will have picked it up from surfaces (daughter went and said there was sanitiser by all the rides, which she and her friends used each time)


----------



## strung out (Oct 7, 2020)

Orang Utan said:


> The PC area of my library is looking more like an isolation area in a bad school than a library. Dystopian AF
> View attachment 233270View attachment 233271View attachment 233272


Just looks like a university library.


----------



## Orang Utan (Oct 7, 2020)

strung out said:


> Just looks like a university library.


I bet students don’t need to be kept an eye on so much as our customers. Not very accessible either. Will make the library even noisier too


----------



## planetgeli (Oct 7, 2020)

Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic
					

Billionaires have grown their wealth by 27% during the crisis, with industrial and tech bosses earning most.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				






> Billionaires have seen their fortunes hit record highs during the pandemic, with top executives from technology and industry earning the most.
> 
> The world's richest saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2trn (£7.9trn) from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.
> 
> ...





> Among the billionaires, the biggest winners this year have been industrialists, whose wealth rose a staggering 44% in the three months to July.
> 
> "Industrials benefited disproportionately as markets priced in a significant economic recovery [after lockdowns around the world]," UBS said.
> 
> ...



Burn them down.


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 11, 2020)

Well, got my test results this morning. Tested positive positive for Covid. Ho hum 10 days Chez Fedayn.....


----------



## two sheds (Oct 11, 2020)

how you feeling?


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 11, 2020)

A bit achey and an intermittent fairly gentle cough. No fever or sweats and no breathing problems.


----------



## nagapie (Oct 11, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> A bit achey and an intermittent fairly gentle cough. No fever or sweats and no breathing problems.


How long have you had symptoms?
Hope you're ok.


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 11, 2020)

nagapie said:


> How long have you had symptoms?
> Hope you're ok.


Well I have had a headache since Thursday, which can be part of the symptoms. However only stated coughing since yesterday.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 11, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> Well, got my test results this morning. Tested positive positive for Covid. Ho hum 10 days Chez Fedayn.....


Hope you are better soon.


----------



## nagapie (Oct 11, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> Well I have had a headache since Thursday, which can be part of the symptoms. However only stated coughing since yesterday.


Not to be alarmist but do you have someone you can call if you get really ill?


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 11, 2020)

nagapie said:


> Not to be alarmist but do you have someone you can call if you get really ill?



Between the official numbers and mates yeah I do.


----------



## danny la rouge (Oct 11, 2020)

Get well soon Fedayn


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 11, 2020)

This thing will go down in history as one of the world's great plagues.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 11, 2020)

Oh bollocks Fedayn. Hope someone can drop you food etc at the door? Fingers crossed you don't have too bad a time. Get well soon x


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 11, 2020)

weepiper said:


> Oh bollocks Fedayn. Hope someone can drop you food etc at the door? Fingers crossed you don't have too bad a time. Get well soon x



Aye, all sorted for when I need it, plenty of offers 
Ta x


----------



## Ax^ (Oct 11, 2020)

Hope you have a speedy recovery Fedayn


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 12, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> Aye, all sorted for when I need it, plenty of offers
> Ta x


How are you doing today?


----------



## 20Bees (Oct 12, 2020)

__





						Virus that causes Covid-19 can survive up to 28 days on surfaces, scientists find | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Researchers find Sars-CoV-2 survives longer at lower temperatures and lasts 10 days longer than influenza on some surfaces




					amp.theguardian.com
				




I work in a lovely supermarket, our customers are almost 100% compliant with face coverings and need only gentle reminders about distancing (the teenage staff are much more casual).  Coronavirus is always the main topic of conversation at the checkouts and a lot of customers still disinfect all the bags and packaging. We are still selling plenty of wipes, bleach and Dettol.


----------



## Numbers (Oct 12, 2020)

Wishing you all the best Fedayn


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 12, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Wishing you all the best Fedayn



Cheers Numbers.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 14, 2020)

Are you hanging in there, Fedayn?


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 14, 2020)

I am indeed, bit grubby and achey, and bunged up with a cold. Had better weeks mind.....


----------



## Numbers (Oct 14, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> I am indeed, bit grubby and achey, and bunged up with a cold. Had better weeks mind.....


Bet your togged out in designer pyjamas.


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 14, 2020)

Numbers said:


> Bet your togged out in designer pyjamas.


Sadly not numbers, I am not a pyjama man. Currently rocking a RL polo shirt and a pair of Celtic shorts.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 14, 2020)

Fedayn said:


> Sadly not numbers, I am not a pyjama man. Currently rocking a RL polo shirt and a pair of Celtic shorts.


Get well soon.


----------



## Raheem (Oct 15, 2020)

The husband of my partner's friend has just tested positive for the second time, as in with a gap of a few months. Not sure what to think about that.

ETA: I don't think he has an especially bad case, though.


----------



## mx wcfc (Oct 15, 2020)

Raheem said:


> The husband of my partner's friend has just tested positive for the second time, as in with a gap of a few months. Not sure what to think about that.


Sad to hear that.  There's been a few of these cases.  It does batter the shit out of the herd immunity bullshit.  Worryingly, the cases I've read about suggest that the second time is worse.

This is getting more and more shit everyday, isn't it.


----------



## Raheem (Oct 15, 2020)

They've got no idea whether he's caught it twice or had a false positive. But it happening to someone I know (though not well) makes me wonder if it's less uncommon than we generally think. I've never met anyone who has won a lottery jackpot, for example.


----------



## Cid (Oct 15, 2020)

Raheem said:


> They've got no idea whether he's caught it twice or had a false positive. But it happening to someone I know (though not well) makes me wonder if it's less uncommon than we generally think. I've never met anyone who has won a lottery jackpot, for example.



I think the procedure for properly confirming reinfection involves genomic analysis of samples from both infections... That's obviously already a high initial barrier.


----------



## Raheem (Oct 15, 2020)

Cid said:


> I think the procedure for properly confirming reinfection involves genomic analysis of samples from both infections... That's obviously already a high initial barrier.


Do they actually retain and store the samples?


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 15, 2020)

A mate who was seriously ill in May thinks she has it again.


----------



## Cid (Oct 15, 2020)

Raheem said:


> Do they actually retain and store the samples?



I have no idea, but I'm guessing generally not. So opportunities to carry out that kind of testing would be very rare... It wouldn't stop observation of people who seem to have been reinfected of course, but I suppose you need that additional level of testing to be sure that there wasn't a false positive, wasn't an atypical presentation etc.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 16, 2020)

Raheem said:


> They've got no idea whether he's caught it twice or had a false positive. But it happening to someone I know (though not well) makes me wonder if it's less uncommon than we generally think. I've never met anyone who has won a lottery jackpot, for example.


Or at least they've not told you if they have won it


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 16, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> A mate who was seriously ill in May thinks she has it again.



Was she tested first time around?  A half decent level of testing was being done by then I think?


----------



## LDC (Oct 16, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> A mate who was seriously ill in May thinks she has it again.



Very, very unlikely though isn't it? Barely any cases of confirmed reinfection globally.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> Was she tested first time around?  A half decent level of testing was being done by then I think?



She was told she had it but she came too late for a test.


----------



## LDC (Oct 16, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> She was told she had it but she came too late for a test.



I know a few people that swore they had it early on, but then tested negative anyway, including a few doctors who swore they had it. I think to some extent there was a bit of fitting some symptoms to the virus going on as well with some people. People also got told that it could/might be covid to make them careful about what they did, even if there was still a fair chance it was a non-covid infection. People also hear very selectively from HCPs with this stuff, especially if there's words they can recognise and latch onto. I've seen patients told they haven't got cancer for example, and they've burst into tears and whne asked why they'd just heard "Blar... blar... blar... CANCER blar... blar... blar." There's some good research looking into what patients hear and can remember from what HCPs tell them, it's shockingly low and often incorrectly recalled. I've had patients who've had surgery before, and they can't even remember what it was!


----------



## elbows (Oct 16, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Very, very unlikely though isn't it? Barely any cases of confirmed reinfection globally.



Too early for me to make claims about how likely such things are, this second wave / winter should offer a better look at that picture.


----------



## LDC (Oct 16, 2020)

elbows said:


> Too early for me to make claims about how likely such things are, this second wave / winter should offer a better look at that picture.



Yeah, maybe I'm just hoping a fuck of a lot...


----------



## Raheem (Oct 16, 2020)

It seems likely that immunity isn't forever (although we don't know that yet). If so, the rate of second infections will pick up at some point.


----------



## Cid (Oct 17, 2020)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, maybe I'm just hoping a fuck of a lot...



I mentioned this upthread, but iirc properly confirming reinfection requires an actual genomic analysis of both samples... Which is going to miss _a lot_ of potential cases. I may be wrong of course.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 17, 2020)

How's it going Fedayn? You still ok?


----------



## elbows (Oct 17, 2020)

I havent read the SAGE document in question yet but here is a new article about it:









						Covid reinfections 'to be expected' as virus spreads, say government scientists
					

Reports suggest timeframe between recovery and reinfection ‘relatively short’ for those who contracted virus twice




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Fedayn (Oct 17, 2020)

weepiper said:


> How's it going Fedayn? You still ok?



Still  a bit grubby and achey but getting better day by day basically.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 17, 2020)

A curb on my liberties might be OK if we weren’t led by Boris Johnson and co | Nick Cohen
					

Covid-19 is being used to give the state more powers. No 10 will one day see how they work• Coronavirus – latest updates• See all our coronavirus coverage




					www.theguardian.com
				




Bit of a muddled article by Nick Cohen here.


----------



## elbows (Oct 17, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> A curb on my liberties might be OK if we weren’t led by Boris Johnson and co | Nick Cohen
> 
> 
> Covid-19 is being used to give the state more powers. No 10 will one day see how they work• Coronavirus – latest updates• See all our coronavirus coverage
> ...



He has correctly picked up on some of the future themes and Johnson telegraphed some of them in his last press conference speech. But Cohen wants to wank on about bio-surveillance and whether something feels like a dictatorship to him,  rather than explain what he is on about properly.

I dont like it when he talks about lockdowns that are too late to do anything, since that concept is flawed, nor when he lumps South Asian countries together and says they used bio-surveillance rather than lockdowns. It varies per country but if I had to generalise, I'd say some did both, they still used lockdowns at the moments where the other ways were not up to the task, although that may be less true going forwards.

The theme he has correctly identified is that the government will want to use various forms of routine mass testing as an alternative to such hard lockdowns in future. And that in order for that approach to carry a heavy load, compliance with self-isolation rules needs to increase a lot. The timescale for such things is unclear, as is how far they will manage to take it in terms of scale. Likewise with enforcement of self-isolation, it looks like they will gradually be turning the thumbscrews in that area. 

There is a fairly long portion of Johnsons speech that tries to talk about the future testing with a realistic tone in an attempt for it to be taken seriously, in contrast to the attempt to sell it as Moonshot in a stupidly boosterish manner. And that section ended with Johnson mentioning the importance of self-isolation. An early step in what I've just been describing.

The 'take me seriously bit':



> First, it will take time to develop this plan. No country in the world is regularly testing millions of people, so we need to take the time to establish how to do this effectively and safely, and to build the logistics and distribution operation necessary for a large-scale operation across the country.
> 
> Second, we won’t be able to use testing to get business back to normal quickly. In time, we want to use tests to open, and keep open, more parts of the economy that have sadly been closed. But it is crucial that we make sure such systems work safely and I must level with you that it will take time to get this right before many organisations can buy and operate these tests themselves.



The self-isolation bit:



> But the most important thing is that people isolate if they test positive. If you test positive with one of these fast new tests, then you must stay at home.
> 
> If everyone follows the rule and self-isolates if you have symptoms, get a positive test, or have come into contact with someone who has the virus, we will suppress the disease.











						Prime Minister's statement on coronavirus (COVID-19): 16 October 2020
					

Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a statement at the coronavirus press conference.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## editor (Oct 18, 2020)

Resoect the Bassey


----------



## elbows (Oct 18, 2020)

In regards the enforcement of self-isolation, see this article:









						Police get access to people told to self-isolate by NHS test and trace
					

Fears move may deter people from getting tested for Covid-19 if forces get data




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 18, 2020)

Influencer Dmitriy Stuzhuk dies from COVID-19 after denying its existence
					

Dmitriy Stuzhuk told his followers that coronavirus didn't exist - but then he died from the disease.




					news.sky.com
				




Dont know who he is but if he was an "influencer" and denied covid19 existed then his followers will all be having a rethink.

Sort of the ultimate in influencing... 🤔

sorry... is that a bit wrong of me?


----------



## Badgers (Oct 18, 2020)

Sugar Kane said:


> Influencer Dmitriy Stuzhuk dies from COVID-19 after denying its existence
> 
> 
> Dmitriy Stuzhuk told his followers that coronavirus didn't exist - but then he died from the disease.
> ...


Good. Am glad he is dead. Hope he did not cause many others to die as a result of his cuntish, self serving bullshit. 

Fuck him.


----------



## 20Bees (Oct 21, 2020)

I’m reeling from a row with my daughter - very bright, fab career, single parent. She’s having friends down for the weekend, a couple and three kids under 12. Daughter is in Tier 1, I don’t know exactly where friends live but may be Tier 2. I raised an eyebrow (should know better!) and said which Tier are they in, are they allowed in to other homes, and surely that’s seven people... daughter doesn’t care which Tier they’re in, and said absolutely nobody is counting children. Life has to go on, she says, things need to get back to normal, mental health issues from not seeing friends and not going out are the bigger crisis. 
I said something on the lines of sod ‘going out’, what matters is saving lives and hospitals being able to cope through the winter. She said it’s unbelievably selfish that people like me don’t care that people like her face seeing their already huge mortgage payments double when interest rates go through the roof. I’m quite used to us being poles apart on most things but we are both thoroughly angry now, I despair that her attitude is entirely normal for her circle, and she despairs of mine.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 22, 2020)

Just listening to a Twiv podcast at work. They have discussed a paper where they were talking about how the spike protein from SARS-COV-2 can have a pain relieving effect, so they were talking about the possibility of using a chemical similar to that in pain relief drugs. Anyway just thought that was interesting


----------



## 2hats (Oct 22, 2020)

Probably this paper on blocking VEGF-A/NRP-1 signalling? doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002097

A broader explanation:








						SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may induce analgesia
					

A recent study published in the journal Pain in October 2020 adds another piece to the puzzle, showing that the virus is capable of dulling pain pathways. This may contribute to its early and extensive spread.




					www.news-medical.net


----------



## sojourner (Oct 22, 2020)

This might seem a stupid question, but how are they heating those Nightingales? Cos they look massive, with really high ceilings, and no lower or false ceilings to keep warmth in.


----------



## two sheds (Oct 22, 2020)

and how will they be staffing them? That was the problem last time wasn't it?


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2020)

two sheds said:


> and how will they be staffing them? That was the problem last time wasn't it?



Staffing levels are always the big issue with this and the only chance they have of doing that is when the point is reached that the NHS England dogma of keeping various other things going and restoring elective surgery is abandoned. And even then it would be a real struggle.


----------



## two sheds (Oct 22, 2020)

Not to mention the intense strain that NHS staff have already been under


----------



## William of Walworth (Oct 22, 2020)

sojourner said:


> This might seem a stupid question, but how are they heating those Nightingales? Cos they look massive, with really high ceilings, and no lower or false ceilings to keep warmth in.



The former Manchester Central Station (now the Manchester Exhibition Centre), is imminently re-opening as a Nightingale very soon, have I heard?
(I think it was mainly on stand-by before, at least for a while?  )

My own experience of the place (it was the huge base for the Manchester Beer Festival late every January for years  ) is that the heating there was astonishingly effective -- surprisingly!

Even in January, we were not shivering in our coats, we could sit around the Fest in (say) a shirt and a thin underfleece, even in one very icy year!


----------



## William of Walworth (Oct 22, 2020)

As for staffing though, I *really* hope these Nightingales are able to get enough staff!


----------



## MBV (Oct 22, 2020)

Just heard the phrase "Digital Christmas" How depressing!









						Covid: Scots told to prepare for 'digital Christmas'
					

The idea of people in Scotland having a normal Christmas in 2020 is "fiction", the national clinical director says.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## smmudge (Oct 22, 2020)

Guess this is basically relevant to a generic thread. Posted by someone on Facebook. They emailed Henry Smith tory MP to ask him why he didn't think children should get free school meals, apparently he replied with a load of crap and then at the end he put this



What the fuck 🧐


----------



## Hyperdark (Oct 25, 2020)

"People who are told to stay indoors because a household member has coronavirus will soon have to self-isolate for as little as seven days after widespread refusal to comply with the current 14-day period.

Separately, City dealmakers, hedge fund managers and company bosses flying into the UK will be exempt from the 14-day quarantine period under plans to “promote global Britain”.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 28, 2020)

Ugh at people being all 'Let people take their own risks' - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'YOUR OWN RISK' IN A PANDEMIC.


----------



## scifisam (Oct 28, 2020)

Cloo said:


> Ugh at people being all 'Let people take their own risks' - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'YOUR OWN RISK' IN A PANDEMIC.



Well sometimes there is. I mean for people who are clinically vulnerable but still choose to go out. If they wear masks to protect other people, and apply social distancing etc, then they are still taking risks, but to them more than others. And like Lynn said on another thread, an 85-year-old might prefer to take those risks rather than survive a little longer but not live.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 28, 2020)

scifisam said:


> Well sometimes there is. I mean for people who are clinically vulnerable but still choose to go out. If they wear masks to protect other people, and apply social distancing etc, then they are still taking risks, but to them more than others. And like Lynn said on another thread, an 85-year-old might prefer to take those risks rather than survive a little longer but not live.


Yeah, that's fair - I was thinking about it because of course some people could say to me 'If you're so concerned then you're free to barricade yourself into your own home, but I'm not gonna', but I don't do that. I do try to be careful when I'm out and about - masks, not going out too often, washing hands, if the rules say no houseguests, then no houseguests.

I think one problem with Christmas though, is we are looking at mass travelling cross country and close contact in homes, in many cases with more than two households meeting together. To my mind it's not a risk it's OK to take.


----------



## scifisam (Oct 28, 2020)

Cloo said:


> Yeah, that's fair - I was thinking about it because of course some people could say to me 'If you're so concerned then you're free to barricade yourself into your own home, but I'm not gonna', but I don't do that. I do try to be careful when I'm out and about - masks, not going out too often, washing hands, if the rules say no houseguests, then no houseguests.
> 
> I think one problem with Christmas though, is we are looking at mass travelling cross country and close contact in homes, in many cases with more than two households meeting together. To my mind it's not a risk it's OK to take.



I agree. But there are going to be a lot of genuinely tricky decisions, the last Christmas with someone who won't see the next one, for example.

For all the curmudgeons who'll be glad not to have to do the whole Christmas thing, it is actually a big deal for a lot of people.

An old urbanite posted on Facebook about her kids deciding between them which one will quarantine for two weeks before going to their nan, so that she's not alone. That sounds like a good solution if it's available.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 28, 2020)

scifisam said:


> An old urbanite posted on Facebook about her kids deciding between them which one will quarantine for two weeks before going to their nan, so that she's not alone. That sounds like a good solution if it's available.


 I wondered about that - not an option for people with kids in school though, certainly not secondary school.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, we've stuck with the rules during the big Jewish gatherings when it is also all about getting together with the family, so I  can't see why it's so impossible not to just the once not do family Christmas (though I get it sucks horribly for people living alone) but then I don't know how it feels. Like most Jews, our wider family are either living down the road or on another continent, so you're either seeing them all the time or only every few years, which is perhaps different to a typical anglo family where it's quite likely people are spread around the country and I can see that might rather change what family gatherings are like.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Oct 29, 2020)

Looking like Brighton & Hove will be going into Tier 2 soon. Was planning on visting family in the Midlands in a few weeks pre crimbo - doubt that’ll happen now.


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 30, 2020)

I was in a food shop today that I rarely visit and I had flashbacks to lock down.  How long the queue was outside and how careful the shop was being with limiting numbers inside at any one time.  Here we are now spiraling into the oblivion and no shop is doing any of that.  I used to see people using hand gel all the time, not so much these days.

I dunno, everyone has masks on for sure but the really important stuff seems to have been forgotten.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 30, 2020)

Teaboy said:


> I was in a food shop today that I rarely visit and I had flashbacks to lock down.  How long the queue was outside and how careful the shop was being with limiting numbers inside at any one time.  Here we are now spiraling into the oblivion and no shop is doing any of that.  I used to see people using hand gel all the time, not so much these days.
> 
> I dunno, everyone has masks on for sure but the really important stuff seems to have been forgotten.


Have noticed the same. Hardly anyone using the sanitiser going into big and small shops. To be fair mask wearing is better than it was in the spring but the minority who don't are not being challenged on it.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Oct 31, 2020)

Local Sainsbury’s rammed, no social distancing, trollies piled high, some shelves soon to be empty. It felt apocalyptic.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 31, 2020)

My mum went tesco on Friday and said it was worse than March


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 1, 2020)

Has anyone been for a hospital appointment during covid? What's it like? I'm kind of freaking out.


----------



## Boudicca (Nov 1, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Has anyone been for a hospital appointment during covid? What's it like? I'm kind of freaking out.


Yes, been several times, it's OK, very few people around.  I felt much more at risk in Specsavers!


----------



## two sheds (Nov 1, 2020)

Yep I had a scan, felt very safe - very few people round too. Distancing with the chairs and very quickly in and out .


----------



## yield (Nov 1, 2020)

Probably one of the safest places to be. Everyone all geared up. 

Mum had her eye done a few weeks back. I couldn't go on with her, and she was wheelchaired from the entrance


----------



## Espresso (Nov 1, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Has anyone been for a hospital appointment during covid? What's it like? I'm kind of freaking out.


Both of my elderly parents have been in - individually, for separate things - over the last couple of months and both were highly complimentary about how things were done. Dad especially was beside himself with the idea of going in but ended up being kept in for a week and said once he got over himself, he was alright with it and all the staff were excellent.


----------



## Mation (Nov 1, 2020)

Had to go to the launderette today as the washing machines aren't working at home (big houseshare, hence plural). There's a caff I sometimes go (went) to right next door to it, so thought I might get in my first outsourced English breakfast since before the first lockdown, if there weren't too many people and they were keeping the door open, but the place was closed. I was relieved, as I'd likely have only sat there fretting and regretting my poor/dangerous decision, but I hope they're ok and able to re-open at some point. 

Went to the local supermarket instead. No panic buying in evidence.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 1, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Has anyone been for a hospital appointment during covid? What's it like? I'm kind of freaking out.


Have been for three. 

All well organised. Damn sight safer than going to a supermarket or garden centre.


----------



## a_chap (Nov 1, 2020)

Mation said:


> Went to the local supermarket instead. No panic buying in evidence.



Panic buying *Very Much In Evidence Here* 

It's the old folk I feel sorry for.

I saw one pensioner elbowed out of the way in a frenzy to buy toilet paper.

If only the supermarket had bought enough stock I wouldn't have had to do it.


----------



## Mation (Nov 1, 2020)

a_chap said:


> Panic buying *Very Much In Evidence Here*
> 
> It's the old folk I feel sorry for.
> 
> ...


----------



## prunus (Nov 1, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> Has anyone been for a hospital appointment during covid? What's it like? I'm kind of freaking out.



Been for a couple of things, and taken my daughter too - absolutely fine, almost no-one there, masks on entry, sanitizer everywhere, one-way systems, staff marshalling people all over the place, controls on numbers in lifts; felt completely safe and that they had everything under control.


----------



## editor (Nov 2, 2020)

Lordy


----------



## Raheem (Nov 2, 2020)

dfm said:


> Just heard the phrase "Digital Christmas" How depressing!


Fingering a turkey, in other words.


----------



## miss direct (Nov 3, 2020)

Watching the adverts is surreal these days. (I used to enjoy the adverts when watching British TV from Turkey - give you a snapshot of priorities - they always seemed to be for cars and holidays). If you watch any TV tonight, pay attention to what the adverts are for.

Got my haircut today. I'd been putting it off and was becoming scarecrow like, plus imagine trying to get an appointment in December. Had to wait in a waiting area, about a metre away from a very large woman with no mask on. Turned my body the other way. Then she started coughing...once it was my turn for the cut, I was glad to get away...until two minutes later, when they put her in the chair right next to mine


----------



## Numbers (Nov 3, 2020)

Just been reading on the BBC that we’re only going to be able to go to the following places in this next lockdown, how are we meant to survive?


*Which businesses will be able to remain open in England?*
The government has published a list of businesses which will be allowed to remain open in England during the four-week lockdown. 
It includes:

Food retailers including supermarkets and corner shops
Off-licences and licensed shops selling alcohol
Pharmacies and chemists
Newsagents
Hardware stores
Building merchants
Petrol stations, car repair and MOT services
Bicycle shops
Taxi and vehicle hire services
Banks, building societies, credit unions, currency exchanges and other similar financial businesses
Post Offices
Funeral directors
Laundrettes and dry cleaners
Dental practices, osteopaths, opticians and other medical services
Veterinary surgeries and pet shops
Agricultural supplies shops
Storage and distribution facilities
Car parks
Public toilets
Garden centres


----------



## Sunray (Nov 3, 2020)

Garden Centers?


----------



## scifisam (Nov 3, 2020)

Ah, dry cleaners makes more sense now because they've included launderettes. If stores selling washing machines are closed, then some people might have to go out to wash clothes. TBF most people get those delivered, but it can be a lot quicker to buy one in person, especially secondhand (and handwashing isn't always a realistic possibility for more than a few days).


----------



## scifisam (Nov 3, 2020)

Thought this was the right thread for it: one of my friends who tested positive paid for a private test that also told her her viral load, and it said her viral load was low. Since she's most likely to be the one I caught it from, or we caught it at the same time, I'm wondering if my viral load was also low, and that's why I haven't got it badly.

We were both careful with masks and hand sanitizer etc, so I'm wondering if they actually did protect us from getting very ill even though they didn't stop us getting the disease. 

TBF I was sitting opposite her without a mask on for about half an hour, because we were eating, so we weren't completely masked the whole time, but I'd think it would mean we weren't exposed for as long, and weren't as exposed to other people, either spreading or being spread to.

Elbows?


----------



## MrSki (Nov 3, 2020)

Sunray said:


> Garden Centers?


No Garden Centres. A lot have farm shops & also sell edible plants that in the long term might be needed. A bit late for Crimbo potatoes but there are other winter veg. Also knock out a lot of the crimbo trees & if you have young kids then that is pretty essential.


----------



## Supine (Nov 3, 2020)

scifisam said:


> Thought this was the right thread for it: one of my friends who tested positive paid for a private test that also told her her viral load, and it said her viral load was low. Since she's most likely to be the one I caught it from, or we caught it at the same time, I'm wondering if my viral load was also low, and that's why I haven't got it badly.
> 
> We were both careful with masks and hand sanitizer etc, so I'm wondering if they actually did protect us from getting very ill even though they didn't stop us getting the disease.
> 
> ...



Viral load varies over time so it depends on where the original spreader was in the infection cycle and also where you was at test time. 

Masks and other measures have been clearly shown to reduce load and to therefore give your body more of a chance to learn how to kill covid before it takes you over. They may well have worked, although if it happened while eating without masks then not. Unfortunately there is no way to know exactly the time and circumstance of where the spread occured. It just comes down to percentages and risks. 

Good luck either way, hope it works out not too bad.


----------



## teuchter (Nov 3, 2020)

scifisam said:


> Ah, dry cleaners makes more sense now because they've included launderettes. If stores selling washing machines are closed, then some people might have to go out to wash clothes. TBF most people get those delivered, but it can be a lot quicker to buy one in person, especially secondhand (and handwashing isn't always a realistic possibility for more than a few days).


Some people don't have space for a washing machine, or live in shared accommodation where one isn't provided.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 3, 2020)

I lived above a launderette when I was in Oxford and it was a life saver.


----------



## mx wcfc (Nov 3, 2020)

frogwoman said:


> I lived above a launderette when I was in Oxford and it was a life saver.


I lived above a kebab shop when I was a student.  Likewise.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 3, 2020)

We had a washing machine but it didn't work because it was wired up to the sink


----------



## elbows (Nov 3, 2020)

Regarding viral load, what Supine said. With some extra unknowns, such as how that test determines viral load, how much difference how effectively the swab test is administered makes to what the test results say about viral load.

If viral load is the same or related to amount of viral shedding, there is also a whole topic about reasons why different people can shed very different amounts of the same virus. Including some stuff that I havent explored to the extent that I could safely claim I know it to be a solid fact, but that sounds plausible, such as children in general shedding more virus, or people with certain conditions being more prone to shedding a lot more virus than normal (eg type 1 diabetics).

I say all of this as general stuff rather than anything specific to this particular virus. In this pandemic I've tended to see more stuff come up about the possible consequences of being on the receiving end of a lot of virus, and whether thats one of the issues that make the pandemic more risky for healthcare workers. I dont know how sure they are about that because there are other potential factors including the changes of being exposed to multiple different varieties of the same virus in a short space of time.

It certainly seems reasonable to think that how much virus you were exposed to is a factor, combined with how well your body fights it off and other aspects of your health. But really the whole thing is a big complex picture where our understanding goes further than scratching the surface, but often not too much further. Like so many other aspects of the pandemic, scientific study and the quest for knowledge is so often hampered by our inability to view factors in isolation, so many variables making a difference, maybe truth is lost when trying to simplify etc. And when it comes to our immune systems which are obviously a rather important part of how different people react differently to this virus, there are so many genes involved and even things like our own personal array of gut flora can make a difference to how our immune system is balanced.


----------



## MrSki (Nov 3, 2020)

I lived close to the Hellshire Chat-Bout when I was a mature student. Luckily I didn't end up in a barrel off Beachy Head.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 3, 2020)

I wasn't a student, was just living/working there. I had one of the shittest landlords known to man tbh.


----------



## scifisam (Nov 3, 2020)

Mostly I was just pondering whether us wearing masks the majority of the time probably did help. Being immunosuppressed with shite lungs and a heart condition it feels like a miracle to have got off so lightly - and the others I know from this possible cluster have all got off lightly too, though none of them had risk factors.



teuchter said:


> Some people don't have space for a washing machine, or live in shared accommodation where one isn't provided.



Yep, that too. They definitely are essential. I just noticed them because dry-cleaners were included and I saw that as being listed as a laughable exception on another thread, but a lot of dry cleaners also provide other laundry facilities so it'd be hard to ban them while allowing launderettes.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 3, 2020)

To be honest I doubt people are gonna be hanging round dry cleaners for hours and hours


----------



## not-bono-ever (Nov 8, 2020)

found out that my uncle died of covid yesterday in his nursing home.This is real- I dont have to tell you this of course, its pretty obvious.


----------



## hash tag (Dec 5, 2020)

Out for a walk earlier, the traffic is as bad as it's ever been. I also noticed 2 buses each with virtually every seat taken.


----------



## campanula (Dec 5, 2020)

My d-i-l is back at work as a nursery teacher, despite being amongst the most medically vulnerable groups. She (and my youngest) are concerned with the longer-term implications of losing their jobs, to even risk being furloughed. In my lad's firm, those who remained on furlough over summer have been the first to be let go...and d-i-l is acutely aware that she has pushed the nursery support to the limit, having had a lengthy absence (because thyroid cancer). As renters in an insane market, they are already living hand to mouth. Back to being frantic again.


----------



## Cloo (Dec 6, 2020)

I've been doing some volunteering the last few weekends, things were much busier today than I've seen them before, and a lot of fairly busy eateries.

I note huge, crammed crowds outside Harrods yesterday - but of course that is the place where selfish morons would choose to shop. 

I'm not going to make any advance plans for February through to Easter, there's clearly going to be another peak starting a month or so after Christmas.


----------



## 20Bees (Dec 6, 2020)

__





						Hundreds of maskless young people ‘try to storm Harrods’
					

Huge crowds of maskless people were seen gathering outside luxury department store Harrods, in Knightsbridge, London on Saturday.



					metro.co.uk
				




“...many appeared to be dressed for a night out.”


----------



## Cloo (Dec 6, 2020)

20Bees said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...


How bizarre - if it was supposed to be some kind of thing to do with nightlife, I'm not sure what that's got to do with Harrods of all places.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 6, 2020)




----------



## Hyperdark (Dec 12, 2020)

Have there been any more reports of people catching it twice?


----------



## zora (Dec 12, 2020)

Hyperdark said:


> Have there been any more reports of people catching it twice?



Yes, quite a few afaik. Anecdotally (based on symptoms/positive PCR) quite a lot but also actual confirmed reinfections with the high hurdle of whatever needs to be done to prove it (genome sequencing from both?).

Again anecdotally (for example, someone yesterday on Independent Sage), in some  (thought to be rare) cases the illness is worse second time around.

This article from November in Forbes states  25 confirmed and 421 "well-documented" cases.

Obviously very much still an area of study, but with the second wave well under way and immunity from spring potentially waning, we will probably learn lots more about it soon.


----------



## Hyperdark (Dec 12, 2020)

OK, So a vanishingly small proportion, hopefully T Cell immunity will  be widespread and the proportion remains miniscule (just a hope, I have very little idea of the reality)


----------



## platinumsage (Dec 12, 2020)

Cloo said:


> How bizarre - if it was supposed to be some kind of thing to do with nightlife, I'm not sure what that's got to do with Harrods of all places.



Most of the crowd in that incident were travellers, I think describing their dress as such was meant to be a way of implying that.


----------



## Hyperdark (Dec 12, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> Most of the crowd in that incident were travellers, I think describing their dress as such was meant to be a way of implying that.



Eh?, Dressed for a night out implies they were travellers?


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 17, 2020)

One paper dosen't mean much - especially at the moment, but some suggestion that SARSCV2 may have a sneaky trick up its sleeve.





__





						Science | AAAS
					






					www.sciencemag.org
				




If true, that should leave the antivaxers conflicted.


----------



## William of Walworth (Dec 17, 2020)

Reassuringly, in that (interesting!) article :




			
				Science article said:
			
		

> David Baltimore, a virologist at the California Institute of Technology who won the Nobel Prize for his role in discovering RT, describes the new work as “impressive” and the findings as “unexpected” *but he notes that Jaenisch and colleagues only show that fragments of SARS-CoV-2’s genome integrate. “Because it is all pieces of the coronaviral genome, it can’t lead to infectious RNA or DNA and therefore it is probably biologically a dead end,” Baltimore says*. “It is also not clear if, in people, the cells that harbor the reverse transcripts stay around for a long time or they die. The work raises a lot of interesting questions.”



Also :



> *Zandrea Ambrose, a retrovirologist at the University of Pittsburgh, adds that this kind of integration would be “extremely rare” *if it does indeed happen. She notes that LINE-1 elements in the human genome rarely are active. “It is not clear what the activity would be in different primary cell types that are infected by SARS-CoV-2,” she says.


----------



## campanula (Dec 18, 2020)

Near my house, there are 3 nail bars within 50 metres of each other. All of them were still operating at 7pm...and all of them were full - every station occupied (between 8-14)  with numerous people waiting. While the workers all wore masks, around half of the customers were not bothering. Came home feeling despairing and appalled.


----------



## prunus (Dec 20, 2020)

I don’t remember which thread we were discussing it in, but there was discussion of the possible interaction of ACEIs (angiotensin conversion enzyme inhibitors - blood pressure control drugs) and other similar medicines with covid infections, given ACE2 is the target of both the drug and the virus.

Just published metaanalysis suggests no effect on infection rates or severity https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30289-2/fulltext which is good news.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 20, 2020)

Had a friend from London show up on our doorstep last night - she'd jumped in the car to drive up to Cambridgeshire to deliver presents before Tier 4 prevented them from leaving the city. Was all masked and properly distanced, but still; if you're just giving the kids money for Christmas, you could transfer it online.  At least she didn't get the train, I suppose.


----------



## Cerv (Dec 20, 2020)

a trip which was not permitted under the existing Tier 3 restrictions of course.
so rushing to make it before the Tier 4 kicked in was a futile exercise.

I wish a month ago the post office had run a campaign: "even if you're planning to visit for xmas, best post your gifts early just in case you have to cancel last minute" but a snappy 3 word slogan


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 20, 2020)

Cerv said:


> a trip which was not permitted under the existing Tier 3 restrictions of course.


I won't mention that she works for the Met, then...


----------



## Ax^ (Dec 20, 2020)

just testing her eyes


----------



## Supine (Dec 20, 2020)

prunus said:


> I don’t remember which thread we were discussing it in, but there was discussion of the possible interaction of ACEIs (angiotensin conversion enzyme inhibitors - blood pressure control drugs) and other similar medicines with covid infections, given ACE2 is the target of both the drug and the virus.
> 
> Just published metaanalysis suggests no effect on infection rates or severity https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30289-2/fulltext which is good news.



Good news. Tbh as an ace2 inhibitor user I was hopeful it would make me less susceptible. I'll take no difference as a reasonable outcome.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 21, 2020)

Don't think I've ever had this sort of message before 

Due to staff sickness affecting the surgery all week please be aware call wait times may be long and please be patient, our staff are working as hard as possible and working extra shifts to keep the surgery running efficiently. You may find your appointments could be moved, we will only do this if absolutely necessary. Can we kindly ask you only to call if the need is urgent and cannot wait until after Christmas. Thank you for your patience and understanding.


----------



## Sue (Dec 21, 2020)

One of my colleagues has just been posting photos from her holiday in Mexico (seems she just beat the flight cancellations and whatnot though I'm still really surprised she got there.) Think it's massively irresponsible but everyone else is like 'have a great holiday!', 'lucky you' etc. (Maybe I'm just old and bloody miserable though.)


----------



## 2hats (Dec 21, 2020)

Made contingency plans for being stuck in Mexico for the next 3-4 months did they?


----------



## two sheds (Dec 21, 2020)

Could always nip across the wall


----------



## Sue (Dec 21, 2020)

2hats said:


> Made contingency plans for being stuck in Mexico for the next 3-4 months did they?


Who knows. Theoretically if she's got her laptop/decent broadband, she can work from there but... 🤷‍♀️.


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Dec 23, 2020)

gentlegreen said:


> One paper dosen't mean much - especially at the moment, but some suggestion that SARSCV2 may have a sneaky trick up its sleeve.
> 
> 
> 
> ...







More on that in the 20 Dec edition of this podcast




__





						This Week in Virology
					

A podcast about viruses - the kind that make you sick



					www.microbe.tv
				





Which also breaks down the scary stats around the deaths of young people from Covid


----------



## Hyperdark (Dec 24, 2020)

Thanks for that link Sheila


----------



## SheilaNaGig (Dec 24, 2020)

I listen to it on frogwoman ‘s recommendations.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 24, 2020)

They did a QA on covid last night, listening to it now while I'm at work. 

Adam Kucharski is good to follow on Twitter too, he doesn't agree with them on the variant stuff but it's good to get all points of view.


----------



## Espresso (Jan 4, 2021)

Wiki says that there were 67,100 civilian deaths in this country in the whole of WW2.
Ten months of this - so far - and we're already past that.
Holy shit.


----------



## Sunray (Jan 4, 2021)

A sliver of good news from my favourite COVID reporter.

Dr John Cambell

I've not got it twice and I live in a bad COVID-19 area.


----------



## Wilf (Jan 4, 2021)

Not sure if this thread is for random stuff, but I just saw this and it made me sad.   
Husband from one of UK's first married Down's syndrome couples dies of Covid | UK news | The Guardian 
RIP.


----------



## platinumsage (Jan 5, 2021)

.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2021)

Anyone finding it really hard to get their head around such massive numbers?


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 5, 2021)

In the Bradley household, 4 of the 5 of us now have zero reason to leave the house for the duration of lockdown. Unfortunately, #5 has two jobs - in a school, where they're not allowed to wear masks in the classroom , and in a shop where they're not doing anything to discourage casual browsing/non-essential shopping.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 5, 2021)

How infectious is someone recovering from covid if they still have a slight cough after 2 weeks?

Asking for a friend.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 5, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> In the Bradley household, 4 of the 5 of us now have zero reason to leave the house for the duration of lockdown. Unfortunately, #5 has two jobs - in a school, where they're not allowed to wear masks in the classroom , and in a shop where they're not doing anything to discourage casual browsing/non-essential shopping.



Why are they not allowed wear masks in school? 😳


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 5, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Why are they not allowed wear masks in school? 😳


No idea - leadership diktat, apparently. They're all in 'bubbles' so presumably the idea is that any outbreak is confined to a small number of staff/pupils, but why they wouldn't permit staff to wear masks is beyond me.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 5, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> No idea - leadership diktat, apparently. They're all in 'bubbles' so presumably the idea is that any outbreak is confined to a small number of staff/pupils, but why they wouldn't permit staff to wear masks is beyond me.



All staff and pupils wear masks in the school I work in. 
Cant understand why they would actually stop someone. 
So what would the school do if your #5 just arrived and wore a mask? What could they actually do?


----------



## SpookyFrank (Jan 5, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> How infectious is someone recovering from covid if they still have a slight cough after 2 weeks?
> 
> Asking for a friend.



Act as though they are infectious, is the only sensible answer here.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 5, 2021)

SpookyFrank said:


> Act as though they are infectious, is the only sensible answer here.



Sorry. What I really want to know is how long is someone infectious for? 
3 weeks 5 weeks 2 months?


----------



## Pingety Pong (Jan 5, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Sorry. What I really want to know is how long is someone infectious for?
> 3 weeks 5 weeks 2 months?


Ten days supposedly, isn't it? I had colleagues coming back to school ten days after testing positive even though they still had a slight cough.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 5, 2021)

Pingety Pong said:


> Ten days supposedly, isn't it? I had colleagues coming back to school ten days after testing positive even though they still had a slight cough.



That's what I was thinking..
So the 14 day quarantine is...just extra careful.


----------



## zahir (Jan 6, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> So the 14 day quarantine is...just extra careful.



I think there's a real but small risk of still being infectious after 14 days and in some cases longer. I couldn't get a doctor to put a time on when I'd definitely no longer be infectious.


----------



## AverageJoe (Jan 6, 2021)

Fully expecting some backlash from my latest Facebook post.



I mean there's been quite a few. And now there's even more. Its a joke

I'll keep you informed of the hatred I get back


----------



## magneze (Jan 6, 2021)

If you were trying to cut out your face, you missed a bit.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 6, 2021)

AverageJoe said:


> Fully expecting some backlash from my latest Facebook post.
> 
> View attachment 247291
> 
> ...


What is your message suggesting?


----------



## two sheds (Jan 6, 2021)

you may need to clarify - sounds to me like you think they weren't really ill at all, possibly because coronavirus doesn't actually exist


----------



## magneze (Jan 6, 2021)

I took it to mean that they removed all the evidence of them mixing with other households.


----------



## two sheds (Jan 6, 2021)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh that makes much more sense, ta


----------



## nagapie (Jan 6, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> How infectious is someone recovering from covid if they still have a slight cough after 2 weeks?
> 
> Asking for a friend.


I think the advice is that they are no longer infectious after two weeks as the cough can linger.


----------



## AverageJoe (Jan 6, 2021)

magneze said:


> I took it to mean that they removed all the evidence of them mixing with other households.



This. All the photos of them travelling to the beach, or going to meet friends and stuff, and then finding out they've got Covid and deleting all their previous "misdemeanours".

Idiots.


----------



## two sheds (Jan 6, 2021)

shows how little I know about facebook - yes that'll doubtless be clear to people


----------



## ska invita (Jan 6, 2021)

From what I gather Whitty is talking about the usual taking the foot off the restrictions pedal once numbers eventually come down and expecting Covid to be around during winter to come, possibly for years to come.

When we came out of lockdown #one the numbers were low, but Superspreader Sunak and the rest of the cabinet encouraged everyone to go forth and multiply, instead of trying to stamp it out.

The Tories mindset aside,* is the possibility of having a Zero Covid policy in the UK impossible?*


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

ska invita said:


> From what I gather Whitty is talking about the usual taking the foot off the restrictions pedal once numbers eventually come down and expecting Covid to be around during winter to come, possibly for years to come.
> 
> When we came out of lockdown #one the numbers were low, but Superspreader Sunak and the rest of the cabinet encouraged everyone to go forth and multiply, instead of trying to stamp it out.
> 
> The Tories mindset aside,* is the possibility of having a Zero Covid policy in the UK impossible?*



I've touched on this in the last week.

I dont spend too much time on it because I dont think there will be many serious signs of the establishment going with such an approach unless key aspects of their remaining orthodox approach repeatedly fail.

In practice that probably means that the entire vaccination-based approach would have to be thwarted repeatedly before the powers that be might come to accept that zero covid was now the more plausible exist strategy.


----------



## magneze (Jan 6, 2021)

Only with travel restrictions and/or mass testing at all ports and airports. Even then, it'd be fairly tricky.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2021)

Is it even possible to get zero covid now tho?


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

magneze said:


> Only with travel restrictions and/or mass testing at all ports and airports. Even then, it'd be fairly tricky.



Yeah, size of population and nature of internal and external travel are some of the reasons why the establishment in this country would not generally consider having a complete suppression approach to respiratory viruses on their menu of orthodox options.

I did spend quite a lot of time commentating on the chunks of orthodoxy that went down in flames in this country, most notably in March but to some extent since (eg attitude towards masks). I will be sure to get involved in that again if the time comes, but I dont currently have reasons to expect more orthodoxy-busting moments soon.

They might well soon shift the extent to which they bother doing anything at all about certain kinds of travel restrictions and border tests. This would be another useful bit of progress should the time come to do that stuff more wholeheartedly in the pursuit of zero covid, but I dont know as I will ever really get to see it happen in that context.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 6, 2021)

magneze said:


> Only with travel restrictions and/or mass testing at all ports and airports.


yes please. the fact it hasnt/isnt happening is mind boggling to me.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 6, 2021)

frogwoman said:


> Is it even possible to get zero covid now tho?


if we get to low numbers like we did last summer (not a certainty this time around, what with mutations etc), i cant see why there couldnt be a serious push to squash it properly. proper test and trace and isolate. proper covid control on borders. 
inevitably instead we'll get bojo eating ice cream on a beach in cornwall singing knees up mother brown


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

frogwoman said:


> Is it even possible to get zero covid now tho?



Well now is not the moment to focus on it and consider its viability, those moments come when cases are back down to minimal levels.

Zero Covid is a tricky approach because of how many times you may need to go through it, and how strongly guards must be kept up. Its easier to imagine it if the establisment were onboard, and if most countries had the same approach. Otherwise there are just too many forces that are not sincerely onboard, and there is no end-game to the approach if the virus is still rampant in countries, ready to reimport it when border restrictions are eased.

Most countries that have managed to get into a position where they are able to go for something resembling zero covid, probably see it as a situation to be maintained in order to buy time for vaccinations. Vaccination is expected to totally change the nature of the burden this disease has on society, and then responses to the virus will in turn change. And I think that will be true whether its a country with an impressive zero covid record or one thats had huge, barely controlled waves of infection. Countries that have taken surveillance, control and preventative action seriously and built it into their systems may maintain aspects of that on an ongoing basis, but that side of things wont be asked to carry the same weight after mass vaccinations as it was before.


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

Fears over particular new strains are another way that some of the concepts from zero covid may end up finding new appreciation from the establishment. Even under such situations, they may just not bother though, and reach for other tools such as vaccinations tweaked to counter new strains as required.

We'll just have to wait and see. I know Scotland went so far as to at least introduce the concept of total suppression of the virus into its rhetoric at one stage, when cases were low. And they are more the sort of size of country where I'd expect such things to be easier to imagine, and face somewhat less political & press opposition from the usual toxic interests. And indeed there is mention in some documents about tracking of various strains and mutations, that one particular lineage with a particular mutation that was seen in Scotland in fair numbers for a time, appeared to go extinct at some stage, perhaps June, I forget the detail. There may be a lesson there. Not one many with power will want to heed, for economic reasons, unless they are forced to by failure of other options.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 6, 2021)

elbows said:


> Not one many with power will want to heed, for economic reasons, unless they are forced to by failure of other options.


Thing is the economy - by which i mean peoples lives - are getting destroyed right now. Propping the rest up with furlough is a huge spending exercise.
Tory economic thinking on this is more capitalist ideology of values than it is economic reason. Economic reason to me is Zero Covid


----------



## magneze (Jan 6, 2021)

ska invita said:


> yes please. the fact it hasnt/isnt happening is mind boggling to me.


Agreed as a temporary measure but really difficult to have permenantly which a zero covid strategy would mean.


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

I found the Scottish detail since it didnt seem right to make vague references to it without the deetail.

Its from a document about mutations from September, before the newcent new variant concerns came to light.



			https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/928724/S0790_NERVTAG_-_Is_there_evidence_for_genetic_change_in_SARS-CoV-2.pdf
		




> N439K in the receptor binding motif (RBM) in the spike glycoprotein gene. This mutation was present in a lineage, until recently almost unique to Scotland, that had infected more than 500 people. The mutation increases the binding affinity of spike protein to ACE2 which is one mechanism by which the virus might escape neutralization by monoclonal antibodies. The Scottish lineage defined by N439K has not been observed since the 20th June 2020. Detailed investigation of the available clinical data showed no increased severity, although any effects for this mutation alone are difficult to determine as it occurs on the D614G background. N439K has also been identified in another significant lineage which has been sampled in Romania, Norway, Switzerland and Ireland and now all parts of the UK. It has also been detected in four linked infections in the US and sporadically in the data. Multiple other mutations in the RBM specifically and spike (some of known antigenic significance) have been observed (some in linked infections) demonstrating that although (relatively) slow evolving, SARS- CoV-2 can readily tolerate mutations which have the potential to be antigenic/vaccine escape mutants or alter the interaction between virus and ACE2 receptor.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 6, 2021)

yeah they got down really low








						Zero confirmed coronavirus deaths in Scotland for 10 days
					

Four new cases recorded in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of positive cases across the country to 18,551.




					news.stv.tv
				




Scotland has a very open border of course


----------



## elbows (Jan 6, 2021)

ska invita said:


> yeah they got down really low
> 
> 
> 
> ...



When the dust settled on their equivalent of ONS stats, by date of death I dont think they actually ended up having more than 5 continuous days in a row without at least one Covid-related death according to death certificates.


----------



## nagapie (Jan 6, 2021)

Just thinking aloud about immunity. So they reckon that immunity lasts 5-6months now, is that right? So any chance the rules might change on isolating. For example if you've had a positive test and isolated, do you still need to isolate if you are named as a close contact? I'm guessing the answer is still yes.


----------



## prunus (Jan 7, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Just thinking aloud about immunity. So they reckon that immunity lasts 5-6months now, is that right? So any chance the rules might change on isolating. For example if you've had a positive test and isolated, do you still need to isolate if you are named as a close contact? I'm guessing the answer is still yes.



The answer is still yes, yes, and will remain so for some time I should think, until we’ve had time to examine just what immunity means for onward transmission.


----------



## LDC (Jan 7, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Just thinking aloud about immunity. So they reckon that immunity lasts 5-6months now, is that right? So any chance the rules might change on isolating. For example if you've had a positive test and isolated, do you still need to isolate if you are named as a close contact? I'm guessing the answer is still yes.



Very definitely yes. A friend had symptoms and tested positive recently, isolated and then recovered. And then her dickhead housemate brought someone in from London, who then developed symptoms and tested positive and so then she had to isolate again, 3 days after hers had finished. She was _slightly _pissed off...


----------



## smmudge (Jan 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> I've touched on this in the last week.
> 
> I dont spend too much time on it because I dont think there will be many serious signs of the establishment going with such an approach unless key aspects of their remaining orthodox approach repeatedly fail.



Unfortunately it feels like every failure makes it harder and harder to consider zero covid. When I still feel like there's a chance that will end up as our only option, when the virus is mutating and it's too hard to make vaccines effective. 

Maybe we're fucked in this pandemic, hopefully for the next one they'll pursue the zero virus approach a bit more avidly from the start.


----------



## Mation (Jan 7, 2021)

My 78-year-old dad had his first dose of vaccine today  

And, very pleasingly indeed, they booked him in for his second dose for 3-weeks' time


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2021)

Mation said:


> My 78-year-old dad had his first dose of vaccine today
> 
> And, very pleasingly indeed, they booked him in for his second dose for 3-weeks' time


Is he clinically vulnerable? My dad is the same age and hasn't heard anything yet


----------



## Mation (Jan 7, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Is he clinically vulnerable? My dad is the same age and hasn't heard anything yet


Some cognitive decline/early dementia. Cancer, but not one of the ones on the list. Very mobility impaired.

I don't know what the equation is that balances those and other things. Hopefully not too much 'postcode lottery' in it.

He only got his appointment 2 days ago (or became aware of it then).

Fingers crossed for your dad to get his vax asap.


----------



## BigMoaner (Jan 7, 2021)

been trying to find the first ever world news story that broke about the virus. best i can get:









						CNN's early reporting on the novel coronavirus: Articles, videos and posts from January and February 2020
					

President Donald Trump on Monday falsely claimed the media had ignored the outbreak of coronavirus in January and February, as he sought to defend his response to the pandemic.




					edition.cnn.com
				




creepy the way it was relatively small news for a few days. here we are 10 months or so later.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2021)

Mation said:


> Some cognitive decline/early dementia. Cancer, but not one of the ones on the list. Very mobility impaired.
> 
> I don't know what the equation is that balances those and other things. Hopefully not too much 'postcode lottery' in it.
> 
> ...


Ah ok, my dad is healthier - cancer but not poorly with it, just the usual age-related things like arthritice and no cognitive impairment. I'm just impatient as I don't want to bring it home to him from work.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Jan 8, 2021)

This is quite disturbing and disgusting behaviour from scottish police to a family that were obviously already under a huge amount of stress. Pushing their way into the house accusing them of having guests around, when their ill daughter had just returned home from hospital (and subsequently fits while the police continue to argue with the family) in stark contrast to how little businesses have been held to account for covid health and safety.  Comments on twitter show this is  being jumped on by smiley-faced covid deniers of course.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 9, 2021)

going back to zero covid chat i really agree with this



...and if lockdown doesnt work to bring R down we are well and truly stuffed


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 13, 2021)

I'm amazed they are still fuzzy around whether fever needs to be reduced.
I never have - I just take enough paracetomol / codeine / ibuprofen to relieve pain and it seems to work .


----------



## Supine (Jan 13, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> I'm amazed they are still fuzzy around whether fever needs to be reduced.
> I never have - I just take enough paracetomol / codeine / ibuprofen to relieve pain and it seems to work .



Paracetamol and Ibuprofen reduce fever


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 13, 2021)

Supine said:


> Paracetamol and Ibuprofen reduce fever


I think I mean I lean towards codeine, with ibuprofen for sinus pain.
I always endeavour to keep the dose as low as possible - especially paracetomol cos it's nasty stuff.
It's a pain having to get cocodamol off the pharmacist when I need a lot of it (when I had sciatica and shingles I had to use three different ones) - they used to dish the soluble ones out by the hundred.


----------



## prunus (Jan 13, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> I think I mean I lean towards codeine, with ibuprofen for sinus pain.
> I always endeavour to keep the dose as low as possible - especially paracetomol cos it's nasty stuff.
> It's a pain having to get cocodamol off the pharmacist when I need a lot of it (when I had sciatica and shingles I had to use three different ones) - they used to dish the soluble ones out by the hundred.



Why do you think paracetamol is nasty stuff?  If you keep to the recommenceded dosage it’s incredibly safe - far safer than aspirin or brufen or indeed codeine.


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 13, 2021)

prunus said:


> Why do you think paracetamol is nasty stuff?  If you keep to the recommenceded dosage it’s incredibly safe - far safer than aspirin or brufen or indeed codeine.


fair enough, but I find a bit of codeine goes a long way  ...


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 13, 2021)

BigMoaner said:


> been trying to find the first ever world news story that broke about the virus. best i can get:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



BBC had something a few days earlier.









						China pneumonia outbreak: Mystery virus probed in Wuhan
					

Some 44 people have been infected in the central city of Wuhan, officials say.



					www.bbc.com
				




And Reuters a few days before that: Chinese officials investigate cause of pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan


----------



## platinumsage (Jan 13, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> BBC had something a few days earlier.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



The WHO didn’t start issuing reports on it until the 20th of January:



			https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4


----------



## Yossarian (Jan 13, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> The WHO didn’t start issuing reports on it until the 20th of January:
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4



It had some earlier bulletins calling it "pneumonia of unknown cause." 





__





						Pneumonia of unknown cause – China
					






					www.who.int


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 13, 2021)

The WHO were certainly far less than stellar early on..
Not just them - taking so fecking long to suggest people improvise face coverings ...
I wore one in shops from April and it wasn't mandated until 24th July


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 13, 2021)

prunus said:


> Why do you think paracetamol is nasty stuff?  If you keep to the recommenceded dosage it’s incredibly safe - far safer than aspirin or brufen or indeed codeine.


codeine is just as safe as heroin if you follow the recommended dosage.


Spoiler: but



it is a bit habit forming if you don't follow the dosage


----------



## Spandex (Jan 13, 2021)

I had one of those moments of clarity today.

After a video call, I checked my mobile device for alert warnings that I'd been near a contaminated person, pulled on my mask and ventured outside, walking briskly and staying well away from other people. When I got back I casually checked the day's death figures and made some tea.

We're living in a 70s sci-fi dystopia.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 15, 2021)

why wasnt there a bigger swine flu pandemic in the uk?
what squashed the peaks?








						2009 swine flu pandemic in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## Badgers (Jan 15, 2021)

Could be useful 






						Thermometer for Adults, Non Contact Ear and Forehead Thermometer, Digital Infrared Thermometer for Fever with LCD Screen, Memory Recall, Fever Alarm, Used for Baby, Kids, Children: Amazon.co.uk: Health & Personal Care
					

Thermometer for Adults, Non Contact Ear and Forehead Thermometer, Digital Infrared Thermometer for Fever with LCD Screen, Memory Recall, Fever Alarm, Used for Baby, Kids, Children: Amazon.co.uk: Health & Personal Care



					www.amazon.co.uk


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 15, 2021)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> codeine is just as safe as heroin if you follow the recommended dosage.
> 
> 
> Spoiler: but
> ...


When I had shingles, according to my notes  I was taking one Co-codamol nearly every 4 hours for 2 weeks and had to get them from different chemists and I seem to remember a teeny bit of bathroom hesitancy and maybe even interesting dreams by the end ...
"you must only take these for 3 days" they told me (as they always do) ... I don't know what the doctor would have said ...
They meant I could actually wear clothes and get on with my life.

I luckily haven't had full-on sinusitis or cluster headaches for years now which required maxing out - but I have no issues with popping half a co-codamol and single ibuprofen when my sinuses occasionally complain enough to spoil my morning ...

I actually bought some aspirin recently - but those are for stripping enamel off of wire.


----------



## Hyperdark (Jan 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Could be useful
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Be careful, even the high priced Non Contact Thermometers are not as acurate as people think, reflectivity of the surface being measured and even things like humidity can skew results........I wouldnt put too much faith in a cheapo device from Amazon
(I use one for measuring temp of different areas of engines, but its dealing with higher temperatures so the percentage errors are much smaller)


----------



## elbows (Jan 15, 2021)

ska invita said:


> why wasnt there a bigger swine flu pandemic in the uk?
> what squashed the peaks?
> 
> 
> ...



It turned out that the Swine Flu version of H1N1 influenza had enough similarities to some H1N1 strains seen many years before, so people over a certain age tended to have a better immune response. The novel nature of a virus is what gives it pandemic potential, so when it turns out to not be so novel, the results dont resemble the terrible pandemics that really deserve the word pandemic. This is also the reason we didnt see a terrible death toll, and why that pandemic did not really tip people off about what a bad pandemic like the one we have now could be like. It was suggested that the response to that pandemic was an overreaction, and this did not eactly help encourage authorities to come up with more robust plans for future pandemics, or encourage authorities to act quickly with an abundance of caution.

Modelling of epidemic waves and peaks is heavily influenced by what percentage of the population are still susceptible. Things turn around when the pool of susceptible individuals that the virus can actually reach becomes too low to sustain continual growth to new heights.

We may also involve this in the question 'why were there 2 peaks with that timing?'.

To which the answer may very well be that it was a pandemic that largely affected young people, and school summer holidays broke chains of infection in a massive way, only to return when schools returned.

The picture I have described is likely to be incomplete and something of an oversimplification.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 15, 2021)

Just got invited to the antibody study, signing up.


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> It turned out that the Swine Flu version of H1N1 influenza had enough similarities to some H1N1 strains seen many years before, so people over a certain age tended to have a better immune response.


I just looked it up  ..
I had a messy flu in 1976 or 77 that dragged on for 2 weeks if I remember correctly - perhaps that explains why my young colleague got swine flu in 2009 but I didn't ...
I used to catch something every year working in that university that would knock me flat...

There were still (empty) gel dispensers and hand washing instructions left from that epidemic when covid came around.


----------



## ska invita (Jan 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> It turned out that the Swine Flu version of H1N1 influenza had enough similarities to some H1N1 strains seen many years before, so people over a certain age tended to have a better immune response. The novel nature of a virus is what gives it pandemic potential, so when it turns out to not be so novel, the results dont resemble the terrible pandemics that really deserve the word pandemic. This is also the reason we didnt see a terrible death toll, and why that pandemic did not really tip people off about what a bad pandemic like the one we have now could be like. It was suggested that the response to that pandemic was an overreaction, and this did not eactly help encourage authorities to come up with more robust plans for future pandemics, or encourage authorities to act quickly with an abundance of caution.
> 
> Modelling of epidemic waves and peaks is heavily influenced by what percentage of the population are still susceptible. Things turn around when the pool of susceptible individuals that the virus can actually reach becomes too low to sustain continual growth to new heights.
> 
> ...


sounds like you're suggesting herd immunity after two waves?


----------



## elbows (Jan 15, 2021)

ska invita said:


> sounds like you're suggesting herd immunity after two waves?



Its rarely that simple. I believe there were other waves beyond the period shown. And there was a vaccination campaign. 

I do not recommend thinking in terms of herd immunity as some kind of binary switch. Better to think about levels of population susceptibility and how these levels would be expected to alter over time.

And its not like the swine flu virus went away, its still out there, and its included in the mass vaccination every year.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jan 15, 2021)

gentlegreen said:
			
		

> I was taking one Co-Codamol nearly every 4 hours for 2 week



Two every ten hours for me when my rib was broken, very early 2016 -- and mine were the stronger, prescribed version, not the half-strength OTC version! 

How anyone on Co-Codamol longer-term manages to shit at all, is a mystery -- it might as well be anti-laxative medicine IME  

Apologies for continuing the non-Covid remedies chat!


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 15, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> How anyone on Co-Codamol longer-term manages to shit at all, is a mystery -- it might as well be anti-laxative medicine IME


given my diet and bathroom habits, I would probably have to neck a poppy field to see much difference


----------



## a_chap (Jan 16, 2021)

Anyone who knows me knows I eat a _*lot* _of chillies so my sense of taste could hardly be described as brilliant. But today I have literally no sense of taste at all. None. Nada. Zip.

So, I've had to book myself a test.

What are the odds that:

I have it
I'll die

The wife's keen to know.


----------



## LDC (Jan 16, 2021)

1) Depends.
2) Very low.


----------



## prunus (Jan 16, 2021)

a_chap said:


> Anyone who knows me knows I eat a _*lot* _of chillies so my sense of taste could hardly be described as brilliant. But today I have literally no sense of taste at all. None. Nada. Zip.
> 
> So, I've had to book myself a test.
> 
> ...



1. Reasonable. Of the instances of idiopathic anosmia occurring in the UK at the moment the majority will be due to Covid infection.

2. Low to very very low depending mostly on your age but also on other health issues you may have. If you are under 65 and generally healthy then it’s somewhere around very very low. More details can provide more accurate probability assessments of both questions.


----------



## a_chap (Jan 16, 2021)

Those answers to 2. are not the one she's looking for.

Anyway, we've just got back from having a test each so I should know within 24 hours or so whether I'm officially a statistic.

You know there ought to be cameras at these testing centres - it'd make for easy comedy viewing. In our case we were directed to leave but they'd not actually asked for the tests back. So we found ourselves being pursued by a bloke waving what looked like a litter-picker...


----------



## Cloo (Jan 17, 2021)

elbows said:


> It turned out that the Swine Flu version of H1N1 influenza had enough similarities to some H1N1 strains seen many years before, so people over a certain age tended to have a better immune response. The novel nature of a virus is what gives it pandemic potential, so when it turns out to not be so novel, the results dont resemble the terrible pandemics that really deserve the word pandemic. This is also the reason we didnt see a terrible death toll, and why that pandemic did not really tip people off about what a bad pandemic like the one we have now could be like. It was suggested that the response to that pandemic was an overreaction, and this did not eactly help encourage authorities to come up with more robust plans for future pandemics, or encourage authorities to act quickly with an abundance of caution.


I often thought that swine flu gave us a false sense of relative security. I'm sure I wasn't alone in thinking, when I first heard about COVID, 'Ah, it'll probably be like swine flu and not really take hold here', and I reckon sadly our government was holding that thought too. I guess I've kind of forgotten it was quite bad at the time - I didn't know anyone affected by it.


----------



## a_chap (Jan 18, 2021)

a_chap said:


> Anyway, we've just got back from having a test each so I should know within 24 hours or so whether I'm officially a statistic.



Test results came through and show I've failed it again. Negative.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 18, 2021)

Stood outside our village shop today waiting for Mrs BB, I watched a couple of blokes pull up in a van. One offered his mate a mask, but he refused it and marched into the shop - which has "No mask, no service" posters up in the window - with no mask on. wtf is wrong with some people? Did he think all the old ladies in the shop were going to mock him for literally following the law? What a twat.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 18, 2021)

Just came up on BBC South Today, police in Basingstoke raided a party, and the occupants claimed to be 'unware of the global pandemic, as they never watch the news!'

Fucking bullshit.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 18, 2021)

Daughter #1 might be able to get the vaccination soon - the head of her school has emailed to say there is excess supply in the area so education staff might be able to sign up to receive it.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jan 18, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Just came up on BBC South Today, police in Basingstoke raided a party, and the occupants claimed to be 'unware of the global pandemic, as they never watch the news!'
> 
> Fucking bullshit.




I'm sure some are aware of the cops raiding a shed party in Swansea at the weekend, where eight people had been partying in said shed (converted into a bar!  )

(apols for stupid pop-up ads, but it's a short article)


----------



## Mation (Jan 20, 2021)

<Not data alert>
A housemate who had it early on (before testing) and was severely ill, with awful long covid complications, was apparently reinfected over Christmas. He stayed away till he was better. Fortunately he is better. For him, it wasn't as bad.


----------



## Espresso (Jan 22, 2021)

Had a Zoom chat with some mates last night. One of the lads said that if someone had told him at the beginning of this that he'd be getting two lockdown birthdays, he'd have thought they were completely ridiculous. His birthday is at the end of March. 
Someone else said that they just hoped they didn't get to have two lockdown birthdays 
"When's your birthday, then, Rich?"
"Tomorrow"


----------



## Throbbing Angel (Jan 24, 2021)

Going for a SMART Lateral Flow test tomorrow as part of testing out a new facility before it goes live and is open to the public 5 days a week.
Result within half an hour apparently.


----------



## Cloo (Jan 24, 2021)

I'm generally feeling a bit better about things having seen this article. I guess part of me was assuming everyone else in Europe was round each other's houses and going to the pub and kids in school, but generally, no: Covid: How are European countries tackling the pandemic?

I mean, we're still way more fucked than any of them and will have a much harder time opening anything up in spring/summer, but it's not like things are fine everywhere else, which you kind of forget about just because of the massive shitshow here.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 24, 2021)

Cloo said:


> I'm generally feeling a bit better about things having seen this article. I guess part of me was assuming everyone else in Europe was round each other's houses and going to the pub and kids in school, but generally, no: Covid: How are European countries tackling the pandemic?
> 
> I mean, we're generally still way more fucked than any of them and will have a much harder time opening anything up in spring/summer, but it's not like things are generally fine everywhere else, which you kind of forget about just because of the massive shitshow here.


the shitshow is mostly global bar a few exceptions
edited for typo


----------



## a_chap (Jan 24, 2021)

Throbbing Angel said:


> Going for a SMART Lateral Flow test tomorrow as part of testing out a new facility before it goes live and is open to the public 5 days a week.
> Result within half an hour apparently.



Yep, results in half an hour.

Source: the wife has to take a lateral flow test every four days.


----------



## Cloo (Jan 25, 2021)

I am beginning to get the impression that the UK government has finally twigged that lowering  restrictions/reopening things for the sake of 'improving morale' during a pandemic is A Bad Idea at least


----------



## Throbbing Angel (Jan 25, 2021)

a_chap said:


> Yep, results in half an hour.
> 
> Source: the wife has to take a lateral flow test every four days.



I'm there now


----------



## Cloo (Jan 27, 2021)

Our lovely neighbour across the road, R, who goes to our synagogue, has just been taken to hospital - his wife told road Whatsapp group yesterday they'd tested positive. Apparently he had a bad night, he did walk into the ambulance, but who knows what will happen next? I think they may both be vulnerable - late-60s, but have taken a lot of care with masks etc since early on I suspect because they have underlying health issues. They do have lodgers though, so I'd imagine that's the most likely way they caught it


----------



## Nine Bob Note (Jan 27, 2021)

I've gone one whole year without a cold or associated chest infection (I usually get three-four every year). Can't remember when that last happened - I was probably seven or something. Keep your masks on and stay the fuck away from me you dirty fuckers 😷


----------



## Hyperdark (Jan 29, 2021)

Cloo said:


> I am beginning to get the impression that the UK government has finally twigged that lowering  restrictions/reopening things for the sake of 'improving morale' during a pandemic is A Bad Idea at least



Now we just need the Media to catch on and stop asking stupid questions relating to when we can go on holiday and going nuts on the story whenever they hear the mearest squeek of opening up being mentioned by any politician or 'expert'.


----------



## Mation (Jan 29, 2021)

I work with idiots. (Not the learners; the staff.)

A colleague is apparently off on a 2-week international holiday in a few days, with all his family, to get some sun. Booked the flights and everything. Very keen.

1. Going on holiday is currently illegal.
2. The country they think they're going to requires 2 weeks of quarantine on arrival.
3. They'd have to quarantine for 2 weeks on return.

How far do you think they'll get, urbs?

Turned back from the airport here? Arrested? Somehow manage to wrangle an essential travel permit to get there, but be stuck indefinitely? Even somehower get there and back, but have to pay for an additional fortnight's hotel quarantine?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 29, 2021)

Mation said:


> I work with idiots. (Not the learners; the staff.)
> 
> A colleague is apparently off on a 2-week international holiday in a few days, with all his family, to get some sun. Booked the flights and everything. Very keen.
> 
> ...


Has this been pointed out to them?


----------



## Mation (Jan 29, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Has this been pointed out to them?


I tried. Gently. Mentioned it.

They'd googled travel advice but not found anything. I found a current, relevant .gov.uk link and sent it to them (they asked me to send them anything I found). The page starts with a great big alert stating that travel is currently illegal.

Nothing doing.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 29, 2021)

Mation said:


> I tried. Gently. Mentioned it.
> 
> They'd googled travel advice but not found anything. I found a current, relevant .gov.uk link and sent it to them (they asked me to send them anything I found). The page starts with a great big alert stating that travel is currently illegal.
> 
> Nothing doing.


crikey, am I correctly inferring that these fools are academics?


----------



## miss direct (Jan 29, 2021)

Mation said:


> I work with idiots. (Not the learners; the staff.)
> 
> A colleague is apparently off on a 2-week international holiday in a few days, with all his family, to get some sun. Booked the flights and everything. Very keen.
> 
> ...


Which country?


----------



## Mation (Jan 29, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> crikey, am I rightly inferring that these fools are academics?


It's a teacher, yes.

(((our learners)))

(((the world)))


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## Mation (Jan 29, 2021)

miss direct said:


> Which country?


Does it matter?


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## miss direct (Jan 29, 2021)

Might help answer the question of how far they'll get...


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## Mation (Jan 29, 2021)

miss direct said:


> Might help answer the question of how far they'll get...


As in miles? If they manage to get there, it'll be a few thousand. But my question was less about the literal distance they might travel and more about at what stage their cunning plan will be foiled.


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## miss direct (Jan 29, 2021)

That's what I meant.


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## Cloo (Jan 29, 2021)

Neighbour R is in ICU and on ventilator, but stable apparently

It's going to be a long recovery for him if he comes off that I fear, I don't think he was in great health before this. We have contacted our synagogue and gsv found out his Hebrew name so he can be added to the prayer for the sick they say on the Shabbat Zoom service. Let's be straight, neither they nor us believe in prayer as such but it's to let the community know, and to let his wife know we're all thinking of them. gsv's checked in on R's wife - she's on her feet and not very ill, plus has lodgers at home, so she is OK to look after herself at least


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## Saunders (Jan 30, 2021)

Me and my old man booked in for asymptomatic test today. Symptom free testing is now available here in Kent and the local gov website saying to get a test every two weeks.


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## Streathamite (Jan 30, 2021)

A quick question that I hope someone can help me with.. I've just had my first jab. I was told at the jab centre it would be 12 weeks until I get my second. What level of immunity do I currently enjoy, or do I enjoy over the 12 weeks leading up to my second jab?


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## Cloo (Jan 30, 2021)

I do know that one should assume no extra protection for first 2-3 weeks,  as the body has to have time to respond, not sure what it's like after that, or how variable by individual. Someone here will probably know!


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## two sheds (Jan 30, 2021)

Streathamite said:


> A quick question that I hope someone can help me with.. I've just had my first jab. I was told at the jab centre it would be 12 weeks until I get my second. What level of immunity do I currently enjoy, or do I enjoy over the 12 weeks leading up to my second jab?



Which vaccine? I checked earlier because I had mine yesterday, Oxford.

"In the case of the *Oxford*-AstraZeneca *vaccine*, PHE said, "High *protection* against hospitalisation was seen from 21 *days* after dose one until two weeks after the second dose, suggesting that a single dose will provide high short term *protection* against severe disease . . . An exploratory analysis of participants who had received one standard dose of the *vaccine* suggested that efficacy against ..." 









						Covid-19 vaccination: What’s the evidence for extending the dosing interval?
					

On 30 December the four UK chief medical officers announced that the second doses of the covid vaccines should be given towards the end of 12 weeks rather than in the previously recommended 3-4 weeks. Gareth Iacobucci and Elisabeth Mahase look at the questions this has raised  In a letter sent...




					www.bmj.com


----------



## 2hats (Jan 30, 2021)

Streathamite said:


> A quick question that I hope someone can help me with.. I've just had my first jab. I was told at the jab centre it would be 12 weeks until I get my second. What level of immunity do I currently enjoy, or do I enjoy over the 12 weeks leading up to my second jab?


You can't know without performing a series of blood assays.

Irrespective, and no matter which vaccine is involved, you need to act as if your are infectious and also as if you can be infected now and after the second jab, until data on sterilising immunity becomes clear. Even then varying percentages of people will still carry and transmit the virus and/or experience mild symptoms and/or experience severe symptoms and/or die (in order of decreasing likelihood).


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## zahir (Jan 31, 2021)

Some problems with vaccination centres.


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## scifisam (Jan 31, 2021)

zahir said:


> Some problems with vaccination centres.




Yeah, I wasn't too impressed with where I went for my vaccination. Individual chairs spaced about 6 feet apart, and everyone was wearing masks - don't know if it was mandatory or if no-one was daft enough to try to claim an exemption - but it was quite a small room. And it was so warm that I literally could not see the form I was filling in because my glasses were entirely steamed up. My handwriting's fucked as it is, but this was ridiculous. With some context I was able to work out what to write where, but I went over the lines and the nurse couldn't read my birthdate.

And there were two of us being vaccinated in the same room. My blood tests have gone down to one in a room, and I thought this'd be the same.

Then, when leaving, it was via the fire exit, which is better than via the one fairly narrow entrance, but involved a sharp corner. Two people bumped into me, physically I mean, having just bumped into one another - they were mumbling apologies to each other and then apologising to me while I also apologised to them. I think they were going the wrong way, but there were no arrows or directions, so it's not surprising. We were all trying so hard not to touch each other again while getting past each other that we ricocheted like pinballs against the walls.  It was almost comical.


----------



## William of Walworth (Jan 31, 2021)

zahir said:


> Some problems with vaccination centres.


----------



## Sue (Jan 31, 2021)

scifisam said:


> Yeah, I wasn't too impressed with where I went for my vaccination. Individual chairs spaced about 6 feet apart, and everyone was wearing masks - don't know if it was mandatory or if no-one was daft enough to try to claim an exemption - but it was quite a small room. And it was so warm that I literally could not see the form I was filling in because my glasses were entirely steamed up. My handwriting's fucked as it is, but this was ridiculous. With some context I was able to work out what to write where, but I went over the lines and the nurse couldn't read my birthdate.
> 
> And there were two of us being vaccinated in the same room. My blood tests have gone down to one in a room, and I thought this'd be the same.
> 
> Then, when leaving, it was via the fire exit, which is better than via the one fairly narrow entrance, but involved a sharp corner. Two people bumped into me, physically I mean, having just bumped into one another - they were mumbling apologies to each other and then apologising to me while I also apologised to them. I think they were going the wrong way, but there were no arrows or directions, so it's not surprising. We were all trying so hard not to touch each other again while getting past each other that we ricocheted like pinballs against the walls.  It was almost comical.


A friend's volunteering as a marshall at a vaccination centre and she was expressing similar concerns last night about people catching it while there getting vaccinated.

She was also a bit surprised that most of her fellow volunteers are retired and therefore at higher risk. They were all vaccinated but started work immediately after so they obviously aren't protected yet...


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## two sheds (Jan 31, 2021)

Yes place I went to had three marshalls and three vacinatees in a small room. all masked and 2m between each of us but only just. Hadn't really registered but could have been a lot safer.


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## Epona (Feb 1, 2021)

There is a ruddy great sign at the Canning Town end of Barking Road warning people that they are entering a very high risk COVID area


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## Cloo (Feb 1, 2021)

scifisam said:


> Yeah, I wasn't too impressed with where I went for my vaccination. Individual chairs spaced about 6 feet apart, and everyone was wearing masks - don't know if it was mandatory or if no-one was daft enough to try to claim an exemption - but it was quite a small room. And it was so warm that I literally could not see the form I was filling in because my glasses were entirely steamed up. My handwriting's fucked as it is, but this was ridiculous. With some context I was able to work out what to write where, but I went over the lines and the nurse couldn't read my birthdate.
> 
> And there were two of us being vaccinated in the same room. My blood tests have gone down to one in a room, and I thought this'd be the same.
> 
> Then, when leaving, it was via the fire exit, which is better than via the one fairly narrow entrance, but involved a sharp corner. Two people bumped into me, physically I mean, having just bumped into one another - they were mumbling apologies to each other and then apologising to me while I also apologised to them. I think they were going the wrong way, but there were no arrows or directions, so it's not surprising. We were all trying so hard not to touch each other again while getting past each other that we ricocheted like pinballs against the walls.  It was almost comical.


I don't get why they don't use places like little non-league football ground near us where you're basically outdoors but sheltered from rain. People could wait in seats on the terraces, be vaccinated in individual tents on the pitch. There must be so many sites like this around the country and within easy reach of lots of people


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## William of Walworth (Feb 1, 2021)

Just seen this post of mine from yesterday again**, without any comment from me even 
I have to say that I'm struggling to remember why I re-posted zahir 's link -- apologies 

**(#2,878, towards the foot of previous page of thread)


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## Pickman's model (Feb 3, 2021)

the spanish flu killed 228,000 people in the uk. i expect the johnson virus to account for at least as many - and we're more than halfway there.


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## Pickman's model (Feb 3, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Just seen this post of mine from yesterday again**, without any comment from me even
> I have to say that I'm struggling to remember why I re-posted zahir 's link -- apologies
> 
> **(#2,878, towards the foot of previous page of thread)


never apologise, never explain

obvs it's easier when you've forgotten as you can't explain

but you shouldn't in future let on you've forgotten


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## MrCurry (Feb 4, 2021)

What’s the prognosis like for someone still experiencing breathlessness a month after contracting covid, and nearly three weeks after shaking off the other symptoms?  Is this kind of long lasting breathlessness normal or does it mean there’s permanent damage?

Not me, but a family member of mine.


----------



## prunus (Feb 4, 2021)

MrCurry said:


> What’s the prognosis like for someone still experiencing breathlessness a month after contracting covid, and nearly three weeks after shaking off the other symptoms?  Is this kind of long lasting breathlessness normal or does it mean there’s permanent damage?
> 
> Not me, but a family member of mine.



Precise prognosis is difficult to say at the moment as there simply isn’t enough data, and largely impossible over the internet with just the information given (or at all), but an anecdote might help: a work colleague of mine was similar, she was still breathless enough to have to be taken into hospital overnight over a month after the disease started, and long after all the other symptoms (fever, aches, fatigue etc) had gone.  It took her maybe another 3 months to be completely back to normal, but she is now.  So there’s one possible prognosis.


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## MrCurry (Feb 4, 2021)

prunus said:


> Precise prognosis is difficult to say at the moment as there simply isn’t enough data, and largely impossible over the internet with just the information given (or at all), but an anecdote might help: a work colleague of mine was similar, she was still breathless enough to have to be taken into hospital overnight over a month after the disease started, and long after all the other symptoms (fever, aches, fatigue etc) had gone.  It took her maybe another 3 months to be completely back to normal, but she is now.  So there’s one possible prognosis.


Good to know, thanks.


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## zahir (Feb 4, 2021)

MrCurry said:


> What’s the prognosis like for someone still experiencing breathlessness a month after contracting covid, and nearly three weeks after shaking off the other symptoms?  Is this kind of long lasting breathlessness normal or does it mean there’s permanent damage?
> 
> Not me, but a family member of mine.



I can't speak for anyone else but I had episodes of breathlessness for 3 or 4 months and then an unexpected night or two of breathlessness in December. Since then I've been OK though I'm not sure I'm quite back to normal.

Has your family member had a chest x-ray? This ought to show if there's any sign of scarring on the lungs - there was no sign of scarring on mine.


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## MrCurry (Feb 4, 2021)

zahir said:


> I can't speak for anyone else but I had episodes of breathlessness for 3 or 4 months and then an unexpected night or two of breathlessness in December. Since then I've been OK though I'm not sure I'm quite back to normal.
> 
> Has your family member had a chest x-ray? This ought to show if there's any sign of scarring on the lungs - there was no sign of scarring on mine.



I don’t think so. Maybe a bit too soon to be getting worried over it, but just making some discreet enquires for my own peace of mind.


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## zahir (Feb 4, 2021)

I don't think there's anything unusual about still getting breathlessness a month in. As you say it may be a bit early to be worrying about it.


----------



## Cloo (Feb 4, 2021)

Our neighbour is out of heavy coma and ventilation and into lighter version of both - gsv spoke to his wife this morning. She's just having to wait around to for calls to say if there's been any change in his condition as, for obvious reasons the hospital says they can't really take calls from the next of kin; it must be torturous for her.  I am glad things have improved though and that hopefully they made the right call for treatment, I know medics are getting much better this time round in handling when and who to ventilate.


----------



## zahir (Feb 4, 2021)

A useful thread about the role of children and schools in transmission.




Also this follow up thread:


----------



## 8ball (Feb 5, 2021)

Just a quick question for anyone here who has already had, or currently has the dreaded bug...

What was the first symptom you noticed?

Asking for a friend...


----------



## BigMoaner (Feb 5, 2021)

.


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## Hyperdark (Feb 8, 2021)

zahir said:


> A useful thread about the role of children and schools in transmission.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Sorry but that is not at all usefull, its just strongly put opinions, with no evidential links


----------



## cupid_stunt (Feb 8, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Sorry but that is not at all usefull, its just strongly put opinions, with no evidential links



That thread included various quotes from the likes of SAGE, and a link to the Lancet, did you not read it, are you drunk, or just trolling?


----------



## zahir (Feb 8, 2021)

Another thread from Deepti Gurdasani.


----------



## William of Walworth (Feb 8, 2021)

Could be in several threads, these questions , but ......

*1,* How much is _really_ known yet about how much or not the vaccines currently in use prevent/restrict transmission of 'the' virus?

*2.* To what extent is it actually known yet how effective (and how easy to do) adapting the vaccines will work?

*Also ......

3.* My impression right now is that there's exceptionally recently renewed talk of 'herd immunity' 

*4.* *But!!* How much has 'herd immunity' *really* been proposed as a realistic thing? And I don't mean back in last Spring. I now ask the question about 'herd immunity' being talked of after vaccines have been approved and used?? 

*5.* Oh, yes, and one last one : *Why on earth* is a (possible) prospect of people having to be anti-Covid vaccinated annually, with variant versions of the jab each Autumn or Winter, still being talked of as a problem**?

**That would be *no problem at all IMO*, if the vaccines really can be adapted to work well .....  ... see question *2.* above ....


----------



## Sunray (Feb 9, 2021)

People said they rushed these vaccines. The reality is

It took 50 years to make the mRNA vaccine


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Feb 9, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> *4.* *But!!* How much has 'herd immunity' *really* been proposed as a realistic thing? And I don't mean back in last Spring. I now ask the question about 'herd immunity' being talked of after vaccines have been approved and used??


I've not heard it being talked about particularly. But isn't it just a fact that once we've reached a particular level of immunisation, herd immunity becomes a factor in whether or not the disease is able to carry on spreading? So it's not so much a strategy as a natural stage in the process.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Feb 9, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> I've not heard it being talked about particularly. But isn't it just a fact that once we've reached a particular level of immunisation, herd immunity becomes a factor in whether or not the disease is able to carry on spreading? So it's not so much a strategy as a natural stage in the process.


Yes, herd immunity by having a critical mass of vaccinated people is different to the so called "herd immunity" that was touted early on and which was a case of "let the virus rip through the population and may the strongest survive" which is what my mum reckons should have been done. I actually had to put the phone down on her the other day due to intense ranting :/


----------



## LDC (Feb 9, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> That thread included various quotes from the likes of SAGE, and a link to the Lancet, did you not read it, are you drunk, or just trolling?



I've put them on ignore, they seem to contribute nothing of any use or interest, and are borderline trolling or shit stirring imo.


----------



## Sunray (Feb 9, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Could be in several threads, these questions , but ......
> 
> *1,* How much is _really_ known yet about how much or not the vaccines currently in use prevent/restrict transmission of 'the' virus?
> 
> ...



There is a lot of data now coming out of Israel,  phase 4 trials of the Pfizer vaccine. Does it work on mass like we think it works? Generally, it's working as expected after 21 days.

For adapting vaccines, I refer you to the video I posted about the mRNA vaccine. This was invented in just the nick of time, it can be modified very quickly unlike the other vaccines which take a lot longer, although I suspect they are already working on it as we speak.

Expect revised mRNA vaccines sometime in the autumn as a booster.


----------



## Hyperdark (Feb 9, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> That thread included various quotes from the likes of SAGE, and a link to the Lancet, did you not read it, are you drunk, or just trolling?



You're right Cupid I didnt read the thread my apologies to zahir, not intentional but entirely due to my ignorance of how Twitter works and not seeing the link to the thread, I thought I was reading the thread but was only reading the front page which contained zero information just the Lady's conclusions


----------



## Hyperdark (Feb 10, 2021)

The countries that have done well like NZ either have to stay locked away from the rest of the world indefinitely or let the Virus in...most of the world UK included are fucked for a long time its endemic and our only hope is that it mutates into something less deadly, we can temporarily limit it but ultimately its out of our hands.
Could be goodnight Irene for us lot


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Feb 10, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> The countries that have done well like NZ either have to stay locked away from the rest of the world indefinitely or let the Virus in...most of the world UK included are fucked for a long time its endemic and our only hope is that it mutates into something less deadly, we can temporarily limit it but ultimately its out of our hands.
> Could be goodnight Irene for us lot


I'd guess that once they have rolled out vaccines they'll be able to open up more.


----------



## editor (Feb 12, 2021)

Interesting take:



> When I was asked to calculate the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 in the world for the BBC Radio 4 show More or Less, I will admit I had no idea what the answer would be. My wife suggested it would be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. “Either that or a teaspoon,” she said. “It’s usually one or the other with these sorts of questions.”
> 
> So how to set about calculating an approximation of what the total volume really is? Fortunately, I have some form with these sorts of large-scale back-of-the-envelope estimations, having carried out a number of them for my book The Maths of Life and Death. Before we embark on this particular numerical journey, though, I should be clear that this is an approximation based on the most reasonable assumptions, but I will happily admit there may be places where it can be improved.











						All the coronavirus in the world could fit inside a Coke can, with plenty of room to spare
					

Never has the saying ‘dynamite comes in small packages’ been more apt.




					theconversation.com


----------



## MBV (Feb 13, 2021)

Article about the Gov dashboard:









						Behind the scenes of the coronavirus dashboard - the government's most popular ever web page
					

In their first newspaper interview, a tiny team from Public Health England discuss how they put together the UK government's most popular ever website




					inews.co.uk


----------



## teuchter (Feb 13, 2021)

dfm said:


> Article about the Gov dashboard:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Never mind captain whats-his-face - send these guys on holiday to Barbados once it's all over. Actually I greatly appreciate all of the people, including all those independently run not for profit sites, who take the numbers and put them into visual form so that we can get some handle on what's going on.


----------



## Espresso (Feb 15, 2021)

The Mayor of Blackburn has resigned, seeing as he broke lockdown rules by going to a wedding. The sodding Mayor! 
Since the very beginning, Blackburn has consistently been up there at the top of the shitlist for high deaths, massive infection rates and all out awful lethal misery because of Covid 19. 
What a cockwomble.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Feb 19, 2021)

Two women in the US disguised themselves as grannies to get vaccinated - managed their first shot, but were rumbled when they went for the second.  









						Florida women wear 'granny' disguise to try to get Covid vaccine
					

Two women aged 34 and 44 rumbled while wearing bonnets and gloves to vaccination centre




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Mation (Feb 19, 2021)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Two women in the US disguised themselves as grannies to get vaccinated - managed their first shot, but were rumbled when they went for the second.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


That's a rollercoaster.

Totally disapprove of queue-jumping, whilst understanding the desire to do so.

They got away with having the first jab, so, from a public health perspective, shouldn't they have the second one at an optimal time relative to the first? The effect of a delay may have an impact on other people's health.

If you want to make an example of people (or rather, the behaviour) to discourage others from also trying to queue-jump, do it with the people you catch before their first dose.

"The girls." What? They were adult women.


----------



## Sunray (Feb 19, 2021)

farmerbarleymow said:


> Two women in the US disguised themselves as grannies to get vaccinated - managed their first shot, but were rumbled when they went for the second.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It's hilarious but I think I'd rather people want to get a vaccine than say getting a vaccine is 'doom' because 'doom'.


----------



## Cerv (Feb 19, 2021)

Mation said:


> That's a rollercoaster.
> 
> Totally disapprove of queue-jumping, whilst understanding the desire to do so.
> 
> ...



if they were to get the second shot, they could at least be charged the full retail price for both


----------



## Mation (Feb 19, 2021)

Cerv said:


> if they were to get the second shot, they could at least be charged the full retail price for both


USA prices? I don't know what that would be. They're selfish and wrong, but ruining them won't help. (Not saying you were suggesting that last bit.)


----------



## Hyperdark (Feb 25, 2021)

There seem to be a quite a few Health Care workers in here and I wonder if some light could be shone on the numbers of care home workers vaccinated in Wales compared to the numbers of residents vaccinated, in my health board the ratio is about 1.8 to 1 in favour of Care workers which makes bugger all sense to this simpleton.

Also in the figures of the vaccine inequality study shown on the PHW site then the only group that has no percentage uptake data are care home and health workers, this tells me they don't actually know how many they have or alternatively they don't have a defined criteria and are jabbing people that simply  come forward and say they look after someone, hence they can give the number jabbed figure but not a percentage.y

This of course leaves the system open to abuse and it looks to me very much like it is being abused....what am I missing?


----------



## spitfire (Mar 7, 2021)

There's a scumbag who is trawling FB Mutual Aid groups for women's clothing, we just fucked him out of the Tower Hamlets one, same happened in Canary wharf as well so keep an eye out.

Wasn't sure which thread was best so I put it here.


----------



## kropotkin (Mar 7, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> There seem to be a quite a few Health Care workers in here and I wonder if some light could be shone on the numbers of care home workers vaccinated in Wales compared to the numbers of residents vaccinated, in my health board the ratio is about 1.8 to 1 in favour of Care workers which makes bugger all sense to this simpleton.
> 
> Also in the figures of the vaccine inequality study shown on the PHW site then the only group that has no percentage uptake data are care home and health workers, this tells me they don't actually know how many they have or alternatively they don't have a defined criteria and are jabbing people that simply  come forward and say they look after someone, hence they can give the number jabbed figure but not a percentage.y
> 
> This of course leaves the system open to abuse and it looks to me very much like it is being abused....what am I missing?


The care workers are the prime vector of transmission. It makes total sense to vaccinate them with greater priority than the residents they care for as this will reduce the probability of any residents becoming infected more quickly.. Additionally, the carers are minimum (or almost minimum) wage workers who are unable to flee work due to poverty and commonly 0-hour contracts. The infection rate of these people is extremely high. Carers have extremely close proximity to very vulnerable people who are huge risk of transmission to that worker.

I don't know about the second bit of your post


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 7, 2021)

That theory doesn't fit with the claimed tactic of prioritising vaccination to those most likely to suffer serious illness or death, the elderly, vulnerable residents/patients should have been vaccinated first


----------



## elbows (Mar 7, 2021)

That stuff has always been part of the recommendations and tactics, for bloody good and obvious reasons.

JCVI:



> *Health and social care workers*
> Frontline health and social care workers are at increased personal risk of exposure to infection with COVID-19 and of transmitting that infection to susceptible and vulnerable patients in health and social care settings. The committee considers frontline health and social care workers who provide care to vulnerable people a high priority for vaccination. Protecting them protects the health and social care service and recognises the risks that they face in this service. Even a small reduction in transmission arising from vaccination would add to the benefits of vaccinating this population, by reducing transmission from health and social care workers to multiple vulnerable patients and other staff members. This group includes those working in hospice care and those working temporarily in the COVID-19 vaccination programme who provide face-to-face clinical care.
> 
> There is evidence that infection rates are higher in residential care home staff (see references 22 to 25), than in those providing domiciliary care or in healthcare workers. Care home workers are therefore considered a very high priority for vaccination.
> ...











						Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation: advice on priority groups for COVID-19 vaccination, 30 December 2020
					






					www.gov.uk


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 11, 2021)

Lots of Europe showing significant rises basically a third wave, only a matter of time till we follow hopefully slightly reduced by increased vaccination but that will be somewhat offset  by bad policy making by our government and the large proportion of fat stupid people we have.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 11, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Lots of Europe showing significant rises basically a third wave, only a matter of time till we follow hopefully slightly reduced by increased vaccination but that will be somewhat offset  by bad policy making by our government and the large proportion of fat stupid people we have.



OK.  Why bother posting that?  Surely you have something better to do, even in lockdown life?


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 11, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> ... the large proportion of fat stupid people we have.


Really?
fuck off


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 11, 2021)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> Really?
> fuck off



Yes really...You would have to be fucking stupid not to have noticed...twat


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 11, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Yes really...You would have to be fucking stupid not to have noticed...twat


No more of your shit please


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 11, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Yes really...You would have to be fucking stupid not to have noticed...twat



Fuck off. Again. And don’t bother sending another petulant internet hard-man “make me” pm, you utter fucking flute.


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 12, 2021)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fuck off. Again. And don’t bother sending another petulant internet hard-man “make me” pm, you utter fucking flute.



I'll resist any more name calling as it appears you can only get away with it if you are one of the crew, I'll simply ask why are you inventing something that didnt happen?, I've never sent you a PM.


Please post this PM so I can see it


----------



## Numbers (Mar 12, 2021)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Fuck off. Again. And don’t bother sending another petulant internet hard-man “make me” pm, you utter fucking flute.


Lol @ flute.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 12, 2021)

Why can't we get nice new friends ?


----------



## existentialist (Mar 12, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Lots of Europe showing significant rises basically a third wave, only a matter of time till we follow hopefully slightly reduced by increased vaccination but that will be somewhat offset  by bad policy making by our government and the large proportion of fat stupid people we have.


You're becoming a pain.


----------



## Supine (Mar 12, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> Why can't we get nice new friends ?



Urban isn't a friend's hangout. It's a battle zone where people must be argued with all the time


----------



## existentialist (Mar 12, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> I'll resist any more name calling as it appears you can only get away with it if you are one of the crew, I'll simply ask why are you inventing something that didnt happen?, I've never sent you a PM.
> 
> 
> Please post this PM so I can see it


Ah yes, the old "insider pile-on" gambit. So it hasn't occurred to you that it might just be that your comments are offensive to so many people that some kind of reaction was inevitable?

Make the most of the rest of your time here, because I don't think it's going to be infinite.


----------



## prunus (Mar 12, 2021)

Supine said:


> Urban isn't a friend's hangout. It's a battle zone where people must be argued with all the time



No it isn’t


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 12, 2021)

Supine said:


> Urban isn't a friend's hangout. It's a battle zone where people must be argued with all the time


This is why I feel more at home in SUBurban


----------



## William of Walworth (Mar 12, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> it appears you can only get away with it *if you are one of the crew*



Us Urban insiders all get our single-thought checked on a regular basis, to ensure uniformity and conformity   

For that purpose, editor 's got a special machine to which only"us" in "the crew" have access ...


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Mar 12, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> why are you inventing something that didnt happen?, I've never sent you a PM.



I’ve just replied to it, just to jog your memory like.

Then you can apologise to all the people here who maybe over weight, then you can fuck the fuck off.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 12, 2021)

Mr.Bishie said:


> I’ve just replied to it, just to jog your memory like.
> 
> Then you can apologise to all the people here who maybe over weight, then you can fuck the fuck off.


i doubt he has the wherewithal to fuck the fuck off, he'll have to be assisted out the door


----------



## existentialist (Mar 12, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> i doubt he has the wherewithal to fuck the fuck off, he'll have to be assisted out the door


He could fuck himself off - I'm sure he could manage that


----------



## ATOMIC SUPLEX (Mar 12, 2021)

This is slightly worrying news. . . and something that I don't think is actually new,  as I remember it being talked about at the beginning when it was thought 12 weeks in-between jabs might be too long.









						Cancer patients 'lack same protection' after first jab
					

A 12-week gap could leave those having two Pfizer jabs vulnerable to Covid-19, researchers suggest.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




It's been on my radar because while they are always talking about cancer patients undergoing treatment, what they really mean is neutropenia because of that treatment. Annoyingly neutropenia itself was actually left off the 'danger list', you had to specifically have cancer and be getting treatment. Just having cancer or just having neutropenia anyway wasn't included. 

While the mention in the article is always 'cancer patients' it could be pregnant teens, elderly black people or anyone that just has it. It was only diagnosed in me after several trips to the doctor, where it was initially brushed off for years until one doctor sent me for hospital tests. . even then it took a while for them to figure it out. Anyone of any age might have it (develops at any time) and not know. 

Luckily I have had the AZ which isn't mentioned in the article, but I think it more effective on first jab.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Mar 12, 2021)

Did a lft at keyworker testing centre on Monday, didn't get results. Did another lft this morning, this time showed phone to staff to check I had registered - 3.5 hours later no result. Rang 119, they went through all my details and test number, 1.5 hours later still no result. Any idea wtf i should do now? 

Also agree with all the fuck the fuck off stuff.


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 13, 2021)

I think I'll join in ...Fuck the fuck off the whole Hive-minded, pseudo-justice-warrior limp wristed fat stupid lot of you...with fucking bells on


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 13, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> I think I'll join in ...Fuck the fuck off the whole Hive-minded, pseudo-justice-warrior limp wristed fat stupid lot of you...with fucking bells on


Toodle pip


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 13, 2021)

Bye bye ninj


----------



## Supine (Mar 13, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> I think I'll join in ...Fuck the fuck off the whole Hive-minded, pseudo-justice-warrior limp wristed fat stupid lot of you...with fucking bells on



Happy Saturday. Skinny chunt.


----------



## gentlegreen (Mar 13, 2021)

"*pseudo*"-SJW ?
That's actually some kind of insult if not meant disingenuously ...


----------



## MickiQ (Mar 13, 2021)

Mation said:


> I work with idiots. (Not the learners; the staff.)
> 
> A colleague is apparently off on a 2-week international holiday in a few days, with all his family, to get some sun. Booked the flights and everything. Very keen.
> 
> ...


Only just discovered this post and I am itching to know how they got on


----------



## existentialist (Mar 13, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> I think I'll join in ...Fuck the fuck off the whole Hive-minded, pseudo-justice-warrior limp wristed fat stupid lot of you...with fucking bells on


So what the fuck are you doing here, then? You clearly despise the place and the people in it.

I mean, "and YOUR mum smells too!" might work in the playground, but you're not in the playground now.


----------



## William of Walworth (Mar 13, 2021)

I'm going to take a bit of credit here (in my earlier post**)  for provoking the fucker  

Anti-troll counter-trolling!  

(**post 2,936, previous page   )


----------



## Cloo (Mar 13, 2021)

Our neighbour across the road is still in hospital, recovering but slowly. Sadly we found out today from his wife that their little King Charles spaniel they have had for years is on his last legs and will be put to sleep in the next week.   Very sad for them both - I guess his 'dad' won't see him again and I think having him for companionship and walkies meant a lot to his 'mum'. We're glad she does have lodgers living with her so she won't be on her own at least, but what an awful time to lose a dog.


----------



## farmerbarleymow (Mar 14, 2021)

This is an interesting article - how your state of mind affects vaccine efficacy.  Makes sense in many ways.









						Look after yourself: how your state of mind could affect your Covid jab
					

Psychological burdens from stress to loneliness to lack of sleep have been shown to affect immune responses to other vaccinations




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Hyperdark (Mar 19, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> I'm going to take a bit of credit here (in my earlier post**)  for provoking the fucker
> 
> Anti-troll counter-trolling!
> 
> (**post 2,936, previous page   )



Well done on your joining the other hive minded arseholes, you must be very proud


----------



## existentialist (Mar 19, 2021)

Hyperdark said:


> Well done on your joining the other hive minded arseholes, you must be very proud


Being here is evidently, by your own words, a miserable experience for you...and yet here you are, still. What on earth is your motive for staying here, since you seem to find its denizens and their views so offensive?


----------



## William of Walworth (Mar 19, 2021)

William of Walworth said:
			
		

> I'm going to take a bit of credit here (in my earlier post**)  for provoking the fucker
> 
> Anti-troll counter-trolling!
> 
> (**post 2,936, previous page   )





Hyperdark said:


> Well done on your joining the other hive minded arseholes, you must be very proud



That post was a pisstake on my part , but you're not showing any original thinking yourself, in your 'response' ...


----------



## Mation (Mar 20, 2021)

MickiQ said:


> Only just discovered this post and I am itching to know how they got on


They got there and back, and don't seem to have infected anyone or been infected. I didn't ask whether they quarantined when they got to their holiday destination, as I imagined they hadn't.

They did have to do home quarantine when they got back, and had to take it as extra annual leave, plus had the required tests and paid for them, which they weren't happy about. I was secretly pleased  

I'm also pleased they mostly got away with it; completely, in the most important way. When they're not being a fucking idiot, they're very nice!


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 20, 2021)

In Ontario, the government has announced that restrictions will be eased in the "red zone" I'm in - red is the second most infected on a four-zone scale - and pubs and restaurants can now move from 10% of capacity indoors to 50%, with a maximum of 50 customers inside.

They've also warned that case numbers are rising and the more infectious British COVID variant is spreading widely. Vaccination rollout has been slow, they're just getting started on the 75 to 80-year-olds.

I don't know why the government is adopting policies that appear to be pro-coronavirus, but I do know that I won't be going to the pub anytime soon.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 21, 2021)

Well that's unexpected. Positive result this morning for me after my test yesterday afternoon. Thankfully I'm on holiday and have been since my last negative test so I'm assuming my work people are safe. In a week, apart from dropping off a test at a post box, I've only been out once, and that was last Sunday so I'm guessing that's where I picked it up. I was really enjoying this holiday time and was due back on Wednesday. Clearly that's not happening now unless I have to rerun the test and it changes.


----------



## William of Walworth (Mar 21, 2021)

Mogden , can you feel any/many symptoms yet?

I hope you get off as lightly as possible -- look after yourself .......


----------



## Mogden (Mar 21, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Mogden , can you feel any/many symptoms yet?
> 
> I hope you get off as lightly as possible -- look after yourself .......


Thanks William. Nothing at all. I have a thermometer and I'm in the normal range. I usually run pretty cool anyway. No breathing issues, no cough. If I'm gonna get any symptom I'd rather it be the loss of taste, temporarily, cos I could do with not eating too much while I can't go out at all. I've had the first part of the Pfizer vaccine a couple of weeks ago so this is a bit of a surprise although I'm well aware that doesn't protect you completely.


----------



## strung out (Mar 21, 2021)

Mogden said:


> Well that's unexpected. Positive result this morning for me after my test yesterday afternoon. Thankfully I'm on holiday and have been since my last negative test so I'm assuming my work people are safe. In a week, apart from dropping off a test at a post box, I've only been out once, and that was last Sunday so I'm guessing that's where I picked it up. I was really enjoying this holiday time and was due back on Wednesday. Clearly that's not happening now unless I have to rerun the test and it changes.


Might be a false positive. My wife had a completely unexpected positive test after not leaving the house for over a week, with zero symptoms and then got a negative the following day. We self isolated just to be on the safe side, but I'm 99.9% sure she didn't have it, especially as I tested negative myself throughout.


----------



## Teaboy (Mar 21, 2021)

Certainly the lateral flow tests which the government have brought tons of seem to have a problem with false positives.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 21, 2021)

strung out said:


> Might be a false positive. My wife had a completely unexpected positive test after not leaving the house for over a week, with zero symptoms and then got a negative the following day. We self isolated just to be on the safe side, but I'm 99.9% sure she didn't have it, especially as I tested negative myself throughout.


I suspect this is the case. I was actually due to start using lateral flow tests last week so I can swab and test myself at home, don't currently have the equipment as on annual leave, and was expecting a false positive from that but this was a swab test I did and posted yesterday afternoon. I'm in no hurry to go back so will wait from feedback from the office tomorrow before doing another test. The thing is would a false negative from the next one be more likely than a false positive this time?   Given I'm working with vulnerable and shielding people I would tell me to isolate for 10 days regardless.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Mar 21, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Certainly the lateral flow tests which the government have brought tons of seem to have a problem with false positives.



I thought their main problem was with false negatives.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I thought their main problem was with false negatives.


Nope.









						Covid-19: False test results 'ruining' return to school
					

Experts and parents criticise approach as reports emerge of pupils incorrectly told they have virus.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




And Innova is the one I will be using.


----------



## BigMoaner (Mar 21, 2021)

has the impact from opening up schools being spotted yet in the stats? sorry, don't really follow them. i know it was a big thing to look for obvisiouly.


----------



## StoneRoad (Mar 21, 2021)

From about the time the schools were going back -

a) Huge jump in the number of tests
b) decline in the decrease in the number of cases 

Cases | Coronavirus in the UK (data.gov.uk)  go to the part of the page 
*"recent 7-day case rates by specimen date" *and select* "percentage change"*

and look at the shape of the graph, and the values for the last few [5] entries [-1.5, -1.4, -0.3, -0.6, -1.3 compared to the -34.5 figure for 4th March]


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 21, 2021)

Had another session at the vaccination centre today. In January it was 80 year olds turning up an hour too early for their appointment.

Today it was people in their 50s. A few tried to blag their way in but didn't succeed.

Your name's not down etc


----------



## blameless77 (Mar 21, 2021)

Mogden said:


> I suspect this is the case. I was actually due to start using lateral flow tests last week so I can swab and test myself at home, don't currently have the equipment as on annual leave, and was expecting a false positive from that but this was a swab test I did and posted yesterday afternoon. I'm in no hurry to go back so will wait from feedback from the office tomorrow before doing another test. The thing is would a false negative from the next one be more likely than a false positive this time?   Given I'm working with vulnerable and shielding people I would tell me to isolate for 10 days regardless.



If you have a positive from lateral flow you should take a confirmatory PCR test


----------



## elbows (Mar 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I thought their main problem was with false negatives.



False positives get all the attention of late because they generate stories of people being inconvenienced. I've seen articles in the recent past where the likes of the BBC kept a straight face while daring to go on about the rate of false positives without even properly mentioning the rate of false negatives. The inconvenience of dying via a chain of infection due to undetected outbreaks as a result of false negatives was not deemed worthy of such loud complaints.

There were some legitimate reasons to draw attention to the larger relative impact of false positives at a stage when relatively few genuine positives were being discovered, but the emphasis and framing still stunk.


----------



## Mogden (Mar 22, 2021)

blameless77 said:


> If you have a positive from lateral flow you should take a confirmatory PCR test


Yes having done extensive online training last week I'm well aware of that but I've not actually done any LFTs yet as I've said further up, I've not been in work to receive them.

Test and Trace have called. They wanted to know of any symptoms, who else I'd had here/been in contact with directly but interestingly didn't ask where I had been on the day I said I'd probably picked it up. I would thought that sort of knowledge would be key as they are quite busy shops and with other people reporting, might show an outbreak hotspot. It's refreshing for once to say I've seen bugger all people apart from shopping that one day and it's just me here with no contact and have someone say that makes it easier for me!


----------



## Cloo (Mar 23, 2021)

Our neighbour who has been in hospital with COVID since early Feb has messaged street WhatsApp group for first time since he went to hospital - really lovely to hear from him again, though he says his energy is still very low and walking is still a strain. He is still in ICU but definitely recovering.


----------



## kropotkin (Mar 23, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I thought their main problem was with false negatives.


You are quite correct.

The false negative rate is high as they have a  "sensitivity" of between around 50 and 75% depending on who does them. The sensitivity if you are ill and have high viral load is much higher (over 95%), which is what swing the decision making around them - very useful to pick up the most infectious people.
Sensitivity is the liklihood it tests positive if you do have the disease.

Specificity if the opposite: the probability it says you don't have it when you don't have the disease. This is very high with this test (99.7%) meaning a false positive rate of 0.3%. 

The problem comes when you multiply it up hugely by a massive number of people doing the test, and you need to take the base rate into account (the actual prevalence of a disease on the population). When there is high prevalence (like when something like 1 in 4 people had coronavirus in London), then the chance of a random person having a positive test result would be 25%*75% = 18%
The chance of a random false positive would be 0.3%*75%=0.2%


Now, if the rate dropped hugely as we controlled the pandemic to more like 1% of people things become trickier.
The chance of a random true positive test is now not 1% but only 75%*1%=0.75%
The chance of a false positive is now 0.3%*99%=0.3%

So if the population prevalence drops to 1%, the chance of a positive lateral flow being correct is just over twice the chance it is wrong.
The further the base rate falls, the worse this balance becomes until it flips. The latest stat I can find for England is an estimated rate of 1 in 340 = 0.3%.

So
True + = 0.3%*75%= 0.2%
False += 0.3%*99.7%=0.29%

So by my shakey maths we've reached the point at which a positive lateral flow is more likely to be wrong than right. I'm tired and just finished my shift a couple of hours ago, so apols if I've misremembered and fucked all the above up


----------



## Cloo (Mar 26, 2021)

Parents have second jab date, pretty much bang on 12 weeks after their first - I'm pleased and much happier to potentially have to wait another month for my first if they and other more vulnerable people are getting their 2nd sooner/on time.


----------



## Cloo (Mar 30, 2021)

Other good news, neighbour is coming back home from hospital tomorrow. He still can't do stairs or walk very much,    and will have visiting carers,  plus his wife is at home but it won't be easy for her. Whole street willing to help out at least.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 1, 2021)

Unless this is an April Fool's joke, the Ontario government has decided that their policy of opening things up while cases are rising steeply has not been a success, for some mysterious reason.









						Ford government applying emergency brake to place Ontario in month-long shutdown: sources
					

The Ontario government will use its emergency brake and place the province in a shutdown for at least a month to reverse the rapid rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, CTV News has learned.




					www.cp24.com


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 1, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> Unless this is an April Fool's joke, the Ontario government has decided that their policy of opening things up while cases are rising steeply has not been a success, for some mysterious reason.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Maybe Doug has been visited by the ghost of Rob or something


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 1, 2021)

DaveCinzano said:


> Maybe Doug has been visited by the ghost of Rob or something



I can only imagine what the headlines would have been like if Rob Ford had been mayor of Toronto during the pandemic - "43 People, 3 Raccoons Test Positive After Illegal Party at Ford Residence."


----------



## MBV (Apr 2, 2021)

Not at all scientific but it feels like the stay local guidance is being ignore by most people. I've flexed the rules myself by taking a relative to a medical appointment but I'd much prefer to travel a couple of hours to enjoy the countryside.


----------



## Cloo (Apr 3, 2021)

Went to synagogue today,  was a bit odd, very cold (but I guess that means well ventilated!) but still nice.  Rabbi's new dog decided to join in with the sermon at one point


----------



## zahir (Apr 4, 2021)

A thread on architecture and the pandemic, arguing that seasonal risk is about building design not the weather.


----------



## hash tag (Apr 5, 2021)

The end is in sight UK - Grayson Perry is casting a bell to ring at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 8, 2021)

Back under a four-week stay-at-home order in Ontario as of today - the last couple of weeks in this chart are a good demonstration of what happens when you start reopening things while cases are rising.


----------



## zahir (Apr 12, 2021)

More on the lab escape theory.





e2a: a short video from 2019 on the Chinese bat research













						Is a Wuhan lab leak the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic? - Thai Enquirer Covid-19
					

Latest Thailand English Online News Is a Wuhan lab leak the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic? Covid-19 - Thai Enquirer %




					www.thaienquirer.com
				





> Hi, joining me today on the podcast is Alina Chan, a Post Doctorate researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
> 
> Alina has made headlines over the past year for being one of the advocates of investigating all plausible explanations of Covid-19. Specifically, she has drawn the ire and fury of some scientists and the Chinese government for suggesting that the pandemic could be the result of a lab leak from a virology lab in Wuhan.
> 
> She talks today about the evidence that she and other scientists have found that suggests that the hypothesis might be true and why natural causes might not be as apparent an explanation as one may think.








> The World Health Organization recently sent a team to China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus that sparked our pandemic. But they returned with little new information beyond a vague assertion that the virus probably had a “natural” origin in an animal. There was no explanation for how, where or when it jumped to humans.
> 
> Matt Ridley, a journalist with a background in biology, says the possibility of a lab accident is far from ruled out. He talks about potential clues being withheld, including a database cataloguing the genetic sequences of viruses studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He calls out,  “an appalling lack of transparency,” and applauds a group of volunteer internet sleuths.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 13, 2021)

There are children running around my library screaming again and it’s music to my ears. Feeling quite emotional!


----------



## rubbershoes (Apr 13, 2021)

zahir said:


> More on the lab escape theory.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Sounds like a lot of bollocks to me
  A lot of talk about the lab escape theory but dismissing the jump from animals out of hand


----------



## elbows (Apr 13, 2021)

rubbershoes said:


> Sounds like a lot of bollocks to me
> A lot of talk about the lab escape theory but dismissing the jump from animals out of hand



Which one dismisses the jump from animals out of hand? I've only read the written articles, because I have little time for videos and podcasts. The written one does not dismiss the jump from animals out of hand, it talks about what evidence has and has not been found so far.

My own opinion on these matters has not changed at all, in contrast to some mainstream media etc sources that have felt the need to shift a little bit over time. My opinion remains that both sorts of possibilities are worthy of further investigation, nothing has come up so far which would lead me to rule the lab stuff in or out. And that it would be especially stupid of me to rule it out because of the nature of the lab work done at Wuhan, and because of certain lessons from history. And so I have to keep an open mind unless something more concrete emerges. I dont have high hopes of the pertinent facts emerging, unless we get lucky on the animal front, or, if it was a lab thing, someone blabs or obtains sensitive info.


----------



## elbows (Apr 13, 2021)

Hmm maybe sloppy language from me there, if ruling something in just keeps the option open rather than indicating certainty, then I do rule the lab stuff in.


----------



## rubbershoes (Apr 13, 2021)

elbows said:


> Which one dismisses the jump from animals out of hand? I've only read the written articles, because I have little time for videos and podcasts. The written one does not dismiss the jump from animals out of hand, it talks about what evidence has and has not been found so far.
> 
> My own opinion on these matters has not changed at all, in contrast to some mainstream media etc sources that have felt the need to shift a little bit over time. My opinion remains that both sorts of possibilities are worthy of further investigation, nothing has come up so far which would lead me to rule the lab stuff in or out. And that it would be especially stupid of me to rule it out because of the nature of the lab work done at Wuhan, and because of certain lessons from history. And so I have to keep an open mind unless something more concrete emerges. I dont have high hopes of the pertinent facts emerging, unless we get lucky on the animal front, or, if it was a lab thing, someone blabs or obtains sensitive info.




The bottom box of zahir's post



> The World Health Organization recently sent a team to China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus that sparked our pandemic. But they returned with little new information beyond a vague assertion that the virus probably had a “natural” origin in an animal. There was no explanation for how, where or when it jumped to humans.



What they say doesn't give any detail on the WHO assertion , but derides it as "vague"

Yet they're prepareed to go to any length to show that covid could have escaped from a lab despite there being no evidence that it did.  As with many conspiracy theories,   much time is spent looking at the holes in the net rather than the net itself


----------



## elbows (Apr 13, 2021)

I guess you arent familiar with the criticisms of the WHO investigation then, or the fact that the head of the WHO had to admit to shortcomings. Honestly, dismissing the lab stuff as a conspiracy theory is really not the correct approach to this complex issue at all.



> The US and the UK have sharply criticised a World Health Organizationreport into the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, implicitly accusing China of “withholding access to complete, original data and samples”.
> 
> The statement, also signed by 12 other countries including Australia and Canada, came hard on the heels of an admission on Tuesday by the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, that the investigation was “not extensive enough” and experts had struggled to access raw information during their four-week visit to Wuhan in January.





> Despite studying data of samples from large numbers of farmed wild animals the researchers were unable to find evidence of Covid-19.











						UK and US criticise WHO's Covid report and accuse China of withholding data
					

Statement signed by 12 other countries says investigation into origins of virus was not extensive enough




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## elbows (Apr 13, 2021)

And to be quite clear, reasons I call it a complex issue very much include international politics. But also that some of the possibilities involving natural, animal->human origins can be difficult to get a proper handle on. If thats what actually happened then I wouldnt necessarily expect this to be discovered via the studies done to date, even if access to information had been much better.

I do understand some of the reasons why people would struggle to keep an open mind on this, but thats still not a stance I have much respect for at all.


----------



## zahir (Apr 13, 2021)

rubbershoes said:


> The bottom box of zahir's post
> 
> What they say doesn't give any detail on the WHO assertion , but derides it as "vague"
> 
> Yet they're prepareed to go to any length to show that covid could have escaped from a lab despite there being no evide4nce that it did.  As with many conspiracy theories, ,  much time is spent looking at the holes in the net rather than the net itself



I only copied that box of text as an indication of what the podcast with Matt Ridley is about.   For me the podcast is worth listening to. It’s perfectly reasonable not to bother with listening to it but I don’t see you can then judge the arguments he’s making.


----------



## rubbershoes (Apr 13, 2021)

If it's all the same to you I'm not going to listen. But I can still comment on the tone of what I see


----------



## Supine (Apr 13, 2021)

rubbershoes said:


> The bottom box of zahir's post
> 
> 
> 
> ...



There is plenty of evidence that it didn’t escape from a lab. It’s also impossible to say with certainty where it was first introduced into humans. There is no audit trail to follow.  Expecting the who report to be able to say with certainty is naive.


----------



## zahir (Apr 13, 2021)

Supine said:


> There is plenty of evidence that it didn’t escape from a lab.



What would you say is the evidence against a lab escape?


----------



## rubbershoes (Apr 13, 2021)

zahir said:


> What would you say the evidence against a lab escape is?



That's not how evidence works


----------



## zahir (Apr 14, 2021)

Another podcast with Alina Chan, this time with an edited transcript.









						A Different Theory of COVID-19’s Origin
					

A previously fringe suggestion is getting more mainstream consideration.




					slate.com


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 14, 2021)

I think with Donald Trump out of office, people like former CDC director Robert Redfield coming out in support, and the Chinese government Streisand Effecting the hell out of it, the lab leak theory should probably at least be classed as a plausible alternative theory of COVID's origins instead of dismissed as a conspiracy theory.


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 16, 2021)

A lab accident whilst devastating would seem to me to be slightly more comforting than the alternative.

Thing is it just seems like a dead end because the nature of the Chinese state means that there would be no chance of a proper open investigation.  I'm not saying that other governments wouldn't cover up just that the Chinese government definitely would


----------



## elbows (Apr 16, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> A lab accident whilst devastating would seem to me to be slightly more comforting than the alternative.



Even if this one was lab-related it doesnt really change the fundamental risks of animal-human vectors for diseases. Viruses getting a chance to jump species barriers is a pretty well established part of orthodox understanding of where things like new influenza pandemics etc come from. Hence continued concerns over various avian influenza strains and the occasions where some limited animal->human infection occurs, there is always concern that such events could go beyond small outbreaks if the virus is able to spread effectively between humans, becomes better adapted to human hosts etc.


----------



## elbows (Apr 16, 2021)

I should also have said that thats a big reason why labs like the Wuhan one do the sort of work they do in the first place. And that although flu has captured the lions share of attention in this area historically, the original SARS gave some focus to the possibilities of a similar picture with coronaviruses.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 17, 2021)

I might have to take a break from social media soon because the contrast between the gradual reopenings my friends in Britain and Hong Kong are seeing and the situation here in Ontario is too jarring.

We are now at the worst time so far in the pandemic, with record high case numbers every day, hospitals at full capacity, and a lockdown getting stricter by the week - the useless Conservative premier, Doug Ford, announced Friday that police are being given new powers to stop, question, and fine people suspected of leaving their homes for unauthorised purposes.

Ford is the fucking idiot who loosened restrictions less than a month ago while cases were rising and the British variant was spreading - he's the poster boy for what happens when you take reactive instead of proactive measures.


----------



## Boudicca (Apr 18, 2021)

Very interesting article in the Guardian about 'brain fog'

"Simons’ advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can, to maximise our cognitive reserve within the remaining restrictions."

We have to do this.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Apr 18, 2021)

Boudicca said:


> Very interesting article in the Guardian about 'brain fog'
> 
> "Simons’ advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can, to maximise our cognitive reserve within the remaining restrictions."
> 
> We have to do this.


I mean that would be nice wouldn't it. Not sure that "do the things you can't do and are miserable for not being able to do" is all that helpful advice.


----------



## Boudicca (Apr 18, 2021)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I mean that would be nice wouldn't it. Not sure that "do the things you can't do and are miserable for not being able to do" is all that helpful advice.



I don't think that is what he is saying.  

I feel my brain has atrophied so much during lockdown.  Zoom gives me a headache and I've done virtually no socialising since restrictions started easing because I have forgotten how.

He is saying I need to force myself out there, find something on the 'not forbidden' list, do something to to re-engage my brain, otherwise dementia beckons.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Apr 18, 2021)

Boudicca said:


> I don't think that is what he is saying.
> 
> I feel my brain has atrophied so much during lockdown.  Zoom gives me a headache and I've done virtually no socialising since restrictions started easing because I have forgotten how.
> 
> He is saying I need to force myself out there, find something on the 'not forbidden' list, do something to to re-engage my brain, otherwise dementia beckons.


This isn't news though is it? You knew that being stuck in with Zoom meetings pretending to be life wasn't cutting it, and that you needed to do other things. Christ knows I did. The problem was, and is, *how*.


----------



## BigMoaner (Apr 18, 2021)

Feel immensely grateful for living in London and that meet up groups are back open. Feel like I've been thrown a life line. Most of my mates have moved out or are married with kids. Recommend meet up.com


----------



## BigMoaner (Apr 18, 2021)

Meetup - We are what we do
					

Find Meetup events so you can do more of what matters to you. Or create your own group and meet people near you who share your interests.




					www.meetup.com
				




It's only these last few weeks I've started to feel I am getting on an even keel again. So long just living with NOTHING to look forward too. My kids kept me busy when I have them but outside of that, jesus it was like treading thick treakly water. This has traumatised so many people.


----------



## Boudicca (Apr 18, 2021)

BigMoaner said:


> Feel immensely grateful for living in London and that meet up groups are back open. Feel like I've been thrown a life line. Most of my mates have moved out or are married with kids. Recommend meet up.com


Yes, I'm thinking of starting my own.  It's going to be called 'Tea with a View'.  Meet somewhere nice outdoors, bring mug and chair.  Short walks will be encouraged, but it will mainly be about the tea and the view.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 18, 2021)

I feel so grateful that I've gone to work throughout all this (apart from the first month). I also work with the public, which I think has helped.


----------



## rubbershoes (Apr 19, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> I feel so grateful that I've gone to work throughout all this (apart from the first month). I also work with the public, which I think has helped.



I thought you hated the public


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 19, 2021)

rubbershoes said:


> I thought you hated the public


Dunno why you thought that


----------



## glitch hiker (Apr 19, 2021)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I mean that would be nice wouldn't it. Not sure that "do the things you can't do and are miserable for not being able to do" is all that helpful advice.


Sounds nice, doesn't it.

For me, lockdown ending means society has missed an opportunity to fundamentally change which I think it should.

Instead it means going back to worrying about DWP demands (I have a telephone based work focused interview next Friday, no idea what they want me to say) and stressing about when they are going to next call me in for a WCA. You can be sure they'll want to have those back up and running ASAP. Back to business as usual. WIll the state and capitalism make any allowances as we readjust?

Don't as me how I think society should fundamentally change. I have no clue, I just feel that this horrible period ought to yield some good. Rather than racing back to queue up outside the shops and buy all the useless shit we never needed anyway


----------



## Aladdin (Apr 19, 2021)

In Ireland, today the acting CMO stated that they've found that symptomatic children have been sent to school....which is really despicable. 

They've also announced that the Indian Variant has been found in three cases here.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 20, 2021)

New field hospital has gone up about 5 minutes walk away from me, which makes shit seem pretty real - on the brighter side, I might get vaccinated a lot sooner than expected because Ontario is apparently getting unwanted AstraZeneca vaccines from elsewhere.

Looks like a lot of other places will soon be dealing with similar exponential case growth numbers as the B117 variant spreads - Thailand has recorded almost a quarter of its pandemic total COVID cases in the last week.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Apr 20, 2021)

Finally managed to get my hair cut for the first time since about September.


----------



## Sue (Apr 20, 2021)

Harold Hill Deer Aid. Who knew?   









						Deer graze on east London housing estate
					

Surprised residents wake up to find a herd of deer grazing on their doorstep.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Finally managed to get my hair cut for the first time since about September.


Wales allowing haircuts came earlier -- I had mine cut in the week straight after Easter  .... by a man called Atilla who never does small-talk!  

But my (radical!!) cut was for the first time in at least eighteen months ....


----------



## mx wcfc (Apr 20, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Wales allowing haircuts came earlier -- I had mine cut in the week straight after Easter  .... by a man called Atilla who never does small-talk!
> 
> But my cut was for the first time in at least eighteen months ....


We need photos - before and after.


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 20, 2021)

mx wcfc said:


> We need photos - before and after.



You'll get neither!!


----------



## Teaboy (Apr 23, 2021)

So my company sent a professional photographer out to take photos of a bridge over a motorway being built because they were using our products and we thought it would be a good project to highlight for marketing.  This was in the autumn of last year.

We got loads of good photos back but the contractor has vetoed us from using most of them because they feature site workers not social distancing.  They are carrying out tasks which are simply not safe to do (sometimes not even possible to do) without fellow workers near you. 

Covid has brought about lots of these little weird strange moments which will be funny some day but at the moment its just another shrug, shake of the head and move on.


----------



## Cloo (Apr 23, 2021)

I am starting to wonder what coming out of this all will look and feel like... I guess one thing is 'different in different countries' for a start. I was sure from the off there'd never be one 'grand day of freedom' (sorry Boris), but what precautions will drop first and last? I guess handwashing and sanitising may just be with us for good, if for no other reason than a lot of us having enjoyed having fewer colds etc.

If hospital admissions and deaths continue to drop relative to infections will we just go back to normal or might we, especially in winter, have some sort of midway restriction, like everyone can  only have one household over, and reduced capacity in places people gather? Is there any halfway house between lockdown and normal movement, especially when outdoors is less of an option?


----------



## LDC (Apr 24, 2021)

Had someone come into the house yesterday in a professional capacity (meeting about something) and they did wear a mask, but they said they'd had both vaccine doses and didn't actually have to now. I corrected them and they said no, they'd seen some news that said people could mix freely with others and not wear masks if they'd been fully vaccinated. Anyway, turns out this news was from FB (obviously) and they couldn't remember the source, but said it looked official rather than a friend's post. They did believe me after a chat, and said what they saw must have been wrong, but ffs, who is spreading that stuff?!


----------



## LDC (Apr 24, 2021)

Cloo said:


> If hospital admissions and deaths continue to drop relative to infections will we just go back to normal or might we, especially in winter, have some sort of midway restriction, like everyone can  only have one household over, and reduced capacity in places people gather? Is there any halfway house between lockdown and normal movement, especially when outdoors is less of an option?



No, 'normal' is a long way off yet. The kind of thing is what we've had mostly over the last year is what you suggest though isn't it? Not a full 'lockdown' but a variety of restrictions. And yes, it's been made clear we're likely to have more of them for the forseeable future, especially later this year.


----------



## Yossarian (Apr 24, 2021)

Cloo said:


> I am starting to wonder what coming out of this all will look and feel like... I guess one thing is 'different in different countries' for a start. I was sure from the off there'd never be one 'grand day of freedom' (sorry Boris), but what precautions will drop first and last? I guess handwashing and sanitising may just be with us for good, if for no other reason than a lot of us having enjoyed having fewer colds etc.



I think you're right about the handwashing and sanitising being a longlasting effect - which is weird because infected surfaces, touching your face etc. seems to be a very rare way of COVID transmission, I'm not sure if there's much evidence it has ever happened at all.

Another longlasting effect might be stricter border controls, especially after Western countries catch up with each other in vaccination rates and COVID becomes a disease predominately found in poorer countries - making travelers from countries like India pay for a week or two in mandatory hotel quarantine if x number of cases have been detected in their country in the previous month probably isn't a power anti-immigration governments are going to want to give up in a hurry.


----------



## elbows (Apr 24, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> I think you're right about the handwashing and sanitising being a longlasting effect - which is weird because infected surfaces, touching your face etc. seems to be a very rare way of COVID transmission, I'm not sure if there's much evidence it has ever happened at all.



I find that very hard to judge because of what counts as proper evidence. Most of the proper science in regards this stuff is implied via theoretical understanding because we dont have a habit of doing real, live testing of modes of transmission in humans, at least not with this virus due to its deadliness. 

But certainly it isnt hard to speculate that the emphasis on hand washing was because it was relatively easy to achieve without economic etc disruption, as opposed to various airborne routes that were inconvenient, causing authorities to drag their heels as much as possible. 

If I had more time in this pandemic I would have reviewed the existing literature in regards surface touching and other respiratory illnesses, here there should be more existing evidence. But I didnt do that, so I just have some vague sense of this vector being more obviously confirmed for things like flu. But again the bias against inconvenient truths may have been in effect in terms o such established wisdom.


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 24, 2021)

People will go back to their old ways


----------



## William of Walworth (Apr 24, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> People will go back to their old ways


 What, all people going back to all of their old ways?

I have some doubts about the 'alls' there!


----------



## stdP (Apr 28, 2021)

Not strictly news as such, but along with a whole load of extra pfizer jabs...








						UK orders 60m more doses of Pfizer Covid vaccine for booster jabs
					

Health secretary says greater supplies of vaccine will help safeguard progress in tackling coronavirus




					www.theguardian.com
				




...and me walking past a nearby GP surgery-cum-vaccination-centre and seeing some massive new chiller units being installed I've jumped the the conclusion that a large new medical freezer capable of maintaining -80degC is being installed. They're apparently already using the pfizer jab already but I don't know if they're actually storing it on site yet, but certainly looks like they will be.


----------



## Sasaferrato (May 6, 2021)

It looks like a mechanism has been found to explain the AZ clotting.









						AstraZeneca COVID Vaccine: Clotting Disorder Mechanism Revealed?
					

More information has become available indicating that the vaccine may be linked to a condition that clinically resembles heparin-induced thrombocytopenia and seems to occur mainly in younger women.



					www.medscape.com


----------



## two sheds (May 6, 2021)

> They found that serum from four patients who were tested showed platelet-activating antibodies directed against platelet factor 4 (PF4), similar to what is seen in HIT.



Difficult to see how they could alter the vaccine to prevent this? Perhaps could find which people most susceptible though.


----------



## Aladdin (May 8, 2021)

How is it that even after getting the vaccine, someone can still be classed as very high risk on an online covid age assessment toolkit?


----------



## magneze (May 8, 2021)

Because vaccinations aren't 100% protective probably.


----------



## existentialist (May 8, 2021)

And because I think everybody (everybody scientific, anyway) is being extremely (and wisely) conservative about the possible benefits of vaccination.

There is always going to be a danger - and it's already happened, _vide _LynnDoyleCooper's earlier post - that people will see the vaccine as a black-and-white safe/not safe thing, Hopefully the caution being expressed will help reduce that from happening too much.


----------



## sideboob (May 11, 2021)

I know it`s hard to compare different countries and the way they`ve dealt with the pandemic, but Japan has only tested 12.5 million people so far.  In a country of about 125 million.  People I know who have had covid, or thought they had it couldn`t even get tested, they were told to stay home and to contact the hospital if their fever topped 37 (if I remember correctly).  No need to fudge the numbers if you`re not testing people.  








						Japan COVID-19 Coronavirus Tracker
					

Live updates of the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in Japan




					covid19japan.com


----------



## Aladdin (May 13, 2021)

Was with one of my consultants who signed my occ health form as Very High Risk...still...
And then said "Covid is pretty much over here now".

I was taken aback because there is still Covid around and the Indian variant has arrived.

So ... Are we going back to normality and will the Autumn be Covid free this year? 
Will the "Very High Risk" people be heading back into offices and working in close contact with others?

Call me a pessimist but...I don't see it happening that soon...


----------



## Mation (May 15, 2021)

I've spent quite a bit of time for various reasons in a few different hospitals recently, and I've noticed that lots of the doctors don't wear their masks properly. Not so much the nurses.

Lots of docs not bending the nose wire, and so the mask slips down, they pull it back up, and repeat.

Why? Can any NHS workers here shed light on what the docs are thinking?


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 15, 2021)

I recently took a mate to an appointment at Brighton hospital, and was shocked that the consultant we saw was wearing his mask below his nose, I wanted to say something, but didn't as my mate was upset & nervous enough without me adding to his stress.

I took him back for two further appointments, and passed staff in the corridors with masks below their noses, some even just hanging around their necks, and others doing as you say, Mation.

Yet, when I took him to Haywards Heath hospital for a scan last week, there was a chap behind a desk issuing free face masks, and getting anyone with unsuitable face coverings to swap them, and every member of staff & the public were wearing their masks correctly.

Oddly, both hospitals are part of the same trust.  🤷‍♂️


----------



## iona (May 16, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Yet, when I took him to Haywards Heath hospital for a scan last week, there was a chap behind a desk issuing free face masks, and *getting anyone with unsuitable face coverings to swap them*, and every member of staff & the public were wearing their masks correctly.


RSCH made me take off my FFP2 mask and put on a standard surgical mask instead the other week.


----------



## pogofish (May 16, 2021)

I’ve just gone into town for the first time since re-opening to get a prescription.

I couldn’t believe my eyes - THEY HAVE REOPENED TWO FUCKING ABOMINATIONS OF CHRISTMAS MARKETS. That were simply abandoned after the Dec 26th lockdown

Yes, decs/holly/misletoe-up, lights twinkling kiddies rides running, stalls serving…!  At least they are still banned from playing music.

Also, nearby one place has set up a lot of sheds in part of its large car park. I had thought this might be for machines/other entertainments - but no, each shed has a plastic table and appropriate number of chairs, bookable in 2-hr slots for the serving of drinks from their utterly crap and grossly overpriced bar.

The queue for the sheds was right off the site, down the road to the nearest set of traffic lights and round the corner on to the main road.
Are people really that desperate?


----------



## a_chap (May 16, 2021)

pogofish said:


> I’ve just gone into town for the first time since re-opening to get a prescription.
> 
> I couldn’t believe my eyes - THEY HAVE REOPENED TWO FUCKING ABOMINATIONS OF CHRISTMAS MARKETS. That were simply abandoned after the Dec 26th lockdown
> 
> Yes, decs/holly/misletoe-up, lights twinkling kiddies rides running, stalls serving…!



Hurrah!

Where is that??? How long's it open for?


----------



## existentialist (May 16, 2021)

a_chap said:


> Hurrah!
> 
> Where is that??? How long's it open for?


Until January 31st, or whenever Brexit Independence Day (aka "Britmas") is celebrated.


----------



## pogofish (May 16, 2021)

Aberdeen - and probably for however as long as social distancing persists.

They have at least made attempts to make the second (larger, mostly sells drink) one looks bit more seasonal- ie hanging some plastic flower garlands amongst the holly/mistleto.

But - ELEVEN QUID FOR A CHEESEBURGER..!  That’s dearer than even the Christmas market was stitching punters for - the cheapest food item on the entire menu was six quid.
I didn’t hang around to see the drink prices but there was no shortage of folk waiting for a table to become free.

One table did start singing and the bouncers were straight over - “STOP - You can get arrested for that!”


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 16, 2021)

pogofish said:


> But - ELEVEN QUID FOR A CHEESEBURGER..!


What sort of a twat would pay that?


----------



## pogofish (May 16, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> What sort of a twat would pay that?



Someone that desperate for a drink - or to be seen having a drink.

I didn’t see where the burgers were coming from but when it was running in full Germanic mode at Christmas, there were a hell of a lot of Dulano packets in the bins behind the grill - so that might give you an idea of the scale of markups involved!

It will be interesting to see if the prices come down tomorrow when the restrictions are eased to allow indoor drinking again.


----------



## Mogden (May 17, 2021)

I've just had word that a relation asked a pharmacist if they had any covid tests and was told they don't exist.  When clarified the pharmacist ranted about chip injections and all manner of loonspudery. This was at an supermarket instore pharmacy. It needs reporting doesn't it.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 17, 2021)

Mogden said:


> I've just had word that a relation asked a pharmacist if they had any covid tests and was told they don't exist.  When clarified the pharmacist ranted about chip injections and all manner of loonspudery. *This was at an supermarket instore pharmacy. It needs reporting doesn't it.*


YES!


----------



## Teaboy (May 17, 2021)

Mogden said:


> I've just had word that a relation asked a pharmacist if they had any covid tests and was told they don't exist.  When clarified the pharmacist ranted about chip injections and all manner of loonspudery. This was at an supermarket instore pharmacy. It needs reporting doesn't it.


Yes.


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2021)

Mogden said:


> I've just had word that a relation asked a pharmacist if they had any covid tests and was told they don't exist.  When clarified the pharmacist ranted about chip injections and all manner of loonspudery. This was at an supermarket instore pharmacy. It needs reporting doesn't it.


Yes. Report it (somewhere?) because that is dangerous. 

I have had a few reports of pharmacy staff asking questions like 'why do you need one' and asking for ID 

They are free and simple to order online. You can pick them up at the testing centres with just a phone number. We have been giving people more than they need and as much advice as time allows.


----------



## Mogden (May 17, 2021)

Yeah have fed back that it definitely needs reporting. I know of the store but not which person but I reckon that would be enough to go on if I need to report it myself.  Talk about unprofessional!


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Yes. Report it (somewhere?) because that is dangerous.


I would suggest both the supermarket and the General Pharmaceutical Council. 





__





						Reporting concerns | General Pharmaceutical Council
					

We regulate pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacies in Great Britain. We work to assure and improve standards of care for people using pharmacy services. Our role is to protect patients and the public and give them assurance that they will receive safe and effective care when using...



					www.pharmacyregulation.org


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2021)




----------



## Mogden (May 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 268742


Hey Icarus, mind that su..  never mind


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2021)

__





						Don’t travel to amber list countries, says No 10 despite no ban | Transport policy | The Guardian
					

PM’s spokesperson declines to say why holidays to places such as Spain are allowed to remain on sale




					amp.theguardian.com
				






> Downing Street has urged Britons not to take holidays in so-called amber list countries including France and Spain, but declined to explain why it remains legal for people to do so.
> 
> Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the advice was that people should not travel to these destinations for leisure, but did not say why travel companies were being permitted to sell holidays to them.
> 
> “Our advice is that no one should be travelling to amber list countries, in the interests of public health,” he said when asked why amber list holidays were on sale. “There may be unavoidable, essential reasons for people to travel to amber list countries.”


----------



## elbows (May 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Yeah Hunt just asked Hancock about that in parliament and he confirmed that no, people should not go on holiday to amber list countries.


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2021)

elbows said:


> Yeah Hunt just asked Hancock about that in parliament and he confirmed that no, people should not go on holiday to amber list countries.


Yeah, but no, but...


----------



## Orang Utan (May 17, 2021)

JFC, people shouldn’t travel, but they can if they want. And it’s the public’s fault when it call goes tits up


----------



## Teaboy (May 17, 2021)

The amber status confuses me as well.  Green and red are pretty clear but amber just looks like the government saying don't travel here whilst doing a massive theatrical wink to the audience.


----------



## Badgers (May 17, 2021)

June 21 lockdown easing roadmap thrown into doubt amid variant concerns
					

Downing Street is no longer promising that conclusions of social distancing and Covid passports reviews will be announced this month, citing uncertainty caused by the Indian variant.




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## Sunray (May 17, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> What sort of a twat would pay that?


If a Big Mac is your burger of choice, it's expensive.   That's candy floss bread and Gerkin flavoured sauce.

If you have taste buds that work, it's worth investing a few quid more.   Five Guys cheeseburgers are £8.95.  I put Five Guys at the bottom run of the 'posh' burgers places.  
My fav Byron (who just about went bust) classic Byron Burger is £11.95 but you get chips with that one.
£4 quid for chips at Five Guys. I'm always sure I don't need to spend £4 at Five Guys for chips because no human really needs that many chips in one sitting.  

hmm now I fancy a Five Guys burger .....


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 17, 2021)

Sunray said:


> If a Big Mac is your burger of choice, it's expensive.   That's candy floss bread and Gerkin flavoured sauce.
> 
> If you have taste buds that work, it's worth investing a few quid more.   Five Guys cheeseburgers are £8.95.  I put Five Guys at the bottom run of the 'posh' burgers places.
> My fav Byron (who just about went bust) classic Byron Burger is £11.95 but you get chips with that one.
> ...



When I asked 'what sort of a twat would pay that?', it was in the context of a burger from basically a market stall.

My fav village pub near me does a brilliant home-made burger with double fried chips for £9.95, which you get to enjoy in a lovely old building, with all the associated costs involved, so I get your point.

But, £11 for a market stall burger, nope.


----------



## Numbers (May 17, 2021)

I’d Love a burger right now.


----------



## William of Walworth (May 17, 2021)

I'd prefer *a good pint* right now ....  

(Finishes off 2nd bottle of fairly strong beer at home  )


----------



## Badgers (May 19, 2021)




----------



## cupid_stunt (May 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




That's a handy new feature, from that I can see Worthing is on 69.7% of adults having had the first dose, slightly behind the national average 69.9%, but second doses are well ahead, being 46.9% compared to 39%, reflecting the slightly higher percentage of older people to the national average.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 19, 2021)

Just looked at the figures for the 'hot spot' of Bolton, there it's 63.2% / 36.2%, which is down on the nationals figures, but bloody good compared to Brighton & Hove City at 52.7% / 26.6%, which is worrying as the Indian variant is there & it's only 12 miles up the coast.


----------



## teuchter (May 19, 2021)

London is doing very badly according to those numbers.


----------



## Teaboy (May 19, 2021)

teuchter said:


> London is doing very badly according to those numbers.



Yes, there appears to be a real issue in low take up in some boroughs.


----------



## teuchter (May 19, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Yes, there appears to be a real issue in low take up in some boroughs.


I've put some individual borough numbers here

The worst ones aren't necessarily what you might assume.


----------



## Saffy (May 19, 2021)

My son (18) have just been invited to get his jab. Managed to get him an appointment at 18.40 today. Am I right in thinking he'll most likely get Moderna?


----------



## elbows (May 19, 2021)

I'm quite interested in whether the per location data thats now on the dashboard gives people a different sense of how low the rates of first dose vaccinations per day have been since they really ramped up second doses.

I havent looked at many areas, but certainly in my town the different is quite stark. The following graph is what I'm n about for my area, and shows daily first doses (on the site there is a button to see second doses instead)

Nuneaton & Bedworth:


----------



## Teaboy (May 19, 2021)

Saffy said:


> My son (18) have just been invited to get his jab. Managed to get him an appointment at 18.40 today. Am I right in thinking he'll most likely get Moderna?



I don't think so.  He'll likely be given a choice between az and a different one which will be either pz or moderna.  I think we still have much more pz jabs so probably most likely that but it really is just whatever that particular vaccination centre has on that day.

Iirc giving the under 40's an option of az or another was something they aim to do for as many as possible but there was a caveat that it may not be possible for everyone. This being the case he may just be offered az but it does seem unlikely.


----------



## teuchter (May 19, 2021)

elbows said:


> I'm quite interested in whether the per location data thats now on the dashboard gives people a different sense of how low the rates of first dose vaccinations per day have been since they really ramped up second doses.
> 
> I havent looked at many areas, but certainly in my town the different is quite stark. The following graph is what I'm n about for my area, and shows daily first doses (on the site there is a button to see second doses instead)
> 
> ...


Not quite so stark here in Lambeth


----------



## elbows (May 20, 2021)

Dogs more accurate than lateral flow tests suggests a French study:









						Dogs can better detect Covid in humans than lateral flow tests, finds study
					

French trial shows dogs were able to detect presence of coronavirus with 97% accuracy




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (May 21, 2021)

Covid rate rises by 300 per cent in Cheshire neighbourhood
					

Coronavirus is suppressed in the vast majority of areas in Cheshire but concerns still remain over the Indian variant



					www.cheshire-live.co.uk


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (May 21, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Covid rate rises by 300 per cent in Cheshire neighbourhood
> 
> 
> Coronavirus is suppressed in the vast majority of areas in Cheshire but concerns still remain over the Indian variant
> ...



When levels are fairly low though one localised outbreak can do that. From the link there that's a rise of 18 cases, not a massive number in the scheme of things, it could easily be related to one workplace or something like that.


----------



## Teaboy (May 21, 2021)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> When levels are fairly low though one localised outbreak can do that. From the link there that's a rise of 18 cases, not a massive number in the scheme of things, it could easily be related to one workplace or something like that.



You're right of course but we're all a bit scarred from the last 15 months.  Local outbreaks have most often led to a much larger problem.  Obviously we all hope it will be different this time but its hard to shrug off the feeling of an impending problem.


----------



## Badgers (May 21, 2021)

Not terrible but not ideal


----------



## Badgers (May 21, 2021)

dp


----------



## Badgers (May 21, 2021)

New thing happening this week. 

Have had two lots of parents bring kids in with cold symptoms. They tested both negative via the lateral flow but the schools have refused to allow them back in until they have been PCR tested.


----------



## Badgers (May 22, 2021)

Germany imposing quarantine on travellers from UK: health institute
					

Germany will impose a quarantine on people arriving from Britain due to the spread there of the coronavirus variant first found in India, the Robert Koch health institute said Friday.




					news.yahoo.com
				






> Germany will impose a quarantine on people arriving from Britain due to the spread there of the coronavirus variant first found in India, the Robert Koch health institute said Friday.
> 
> From Sunday, all travellers arriving from the UK will have to submit to a quarantine period of two weeks, regardless of whether they can provide a negative test result for the virus.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 22, 2021)

I'm just about to go to a shopping centre for the first time in getting on for 18 months. Bit nervous about it tbh. Are people wearing masks in these places?


----------



## Orang Utan (May 22, 2021)

S☼I said:


> I'm just about to go to a shopping centre for the first time in getting on for 18 months. Bit nervous about it tbh. Are people wearing masks in these places?


They were in the one I went to


----------



## pogofish (May 22, 2021)

Sunray said:


> If a Big Mac is your burger of choice, it's expensive.   That's candy floss bread and Gerkin flavoured sauce.
> 
> If you have taste buds that work, it's worth investing a few quid more.   Five Guys cheeseburgers are £8.95.  I put Five Guys at the bottom run of the 'posh' burgers places.
> My fav Byron (who just about went bust) classic Byron Burger is £11.95 but you get chips with that one.
> ...



This was not a quality/artisan burger, served fully garnished and even with a side or two.  This was more fairground grade - which is the stock-in trade of the company supplying the market/outdoor structures.

I wouldn’t even rate Five Guys as the bottom end of posh - any burger I’ve had from them has been poor and their much-vaunted chips are not that special either. Other than you do get a lot. Nothing on a half-decent chipper though.


----------



## pogofish (May 22, 2021)

S☼I said:


> I'm just about to go to a shopping centre for the first time in getting on for 18 months. Bit nervous about it tbh. Are people wearing masks in these places?



IME, yes. Compliance is pretty decent, although a generation of kids appear to have worked out that you are allowed to pull your mask down for drinking, so go around with their masks round their chin and a bottle of pop wedged near-permanently in their gobs - which must be so hygienic!

Also saw my first full-on hen party pouring out of a pub today - there was no way this lot were complying with the guidelines (nor were the pub staff taking pics of them), unless they had worked-in a particularly drink sodden wedding or funeral!


----------



## Badgers (May 23, 2021)

__





						No 10 ‘tried to block’ data on spread of new Covid variant in English schools | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Scientists, unions and teachers concerned after data cut from Public Health England report ahead of shift on face masks




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (May 23, 2021)

More on this.. 

Thread :


----------



## Badgers (May 23, 2021)




----------



## Supine (May 23, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




I saw that interview. I’m really starting to dislike her.


----------



## elbows (May 23, 2021)

Supine said:


> I saw that interview. I’m really starting to dislike her.



I've disliked her since eearly in the pandemic when she tried to bat away the WHOs 'test,test,test' message by claiming that stuff was for poor countries, countries the UK helps out in a paternalistic fashion.


----------



## Badgers (May 24, 2021)




----------



## Mogden (May 24, 2021)

Imagine the history lesson years from now. 

"Pupil: So the UK had a plan for it but they just ignored it?
Teacher: Yes that's what our records report. 
P: Why?
T: I'd like to tell you I know why but I'm as baffled as you."


----------



## existentialist (May 24, 2021)

Mogden said:


> Imagine the history lesson years from now.
> 
> "Pupil: So the UK had a plan for it but they just ignored it?
> Teacher: Yes that's what our records report.
> ...


Nah, it'll be airbrushed out. By the time the history books are written, Johnson will have caught Covid to save us. And it will have worked.


----------



## elbows (May 24, 2021)

I havnt seen a good UK plan for pandemics in any of the historical documentation I've looked at over the years. But its entirely possible I missed a good one, or knew how to read between the lines of one that was superficially good but was actually designed to pay mere lip service to certain principals, and so was full of nice sounding principals that were not backed up by the actual implementation detail.

For example its a long-standing UK tradition in pandemic planning that there are phases labelled 'contain' that are not actually sincere attempts at containment at all, but would more appropriately be described as 'survey and delay'.

If I wanted to fish out one example of this, the report into the UKs handling of the 2009 swine flu pandemic made exactly that criticism, that the 'contain' phase was inappropriately titled because it was nothing of the sort. I might try to find this document later.


----------



## Badgers (May 25, 2021)

Thread on latest school closures and cases...


----------



## Badgers (May 25, 2021)

Scream if you want to go faster folks... 









						Covid: Eight Indian variant areas should avoid indoor gatherings
					

People are also asked not to go into or out of places hardest hit by the so-called Indian variant.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				






> The guidance appears to have been updated on Friday, without any government announcement, to include the eight affected areas - although it was first given earlier in the month for Blackburn and Bolton.
> 
> A televised Downing Street briefing on Wednesday focused heavily on the Indian variant - but did not outline any specific rules or guidance for those areas.
> 
> ...


----------



## Badgers (May 25, 2021)




----------



## crossthebreeze (May 25, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Scream if you want to go faster folks...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Absolutely ridiculous. Tyneside (and the wider North East England) is completly interlinked - lots of people will be visiting family across council borders, there'll be loads of Newcastle people planning a day on North Tyneside beaches and bars, and North Tyneside people planning shopping or drinking/eating in Newcastle. Also if they don't want people to meet indoors they need to close (and support) indoor venues.

From my personal point of view I live in Newcastle and work in North Tyneside 50% of my week, my girlfriend lives there and works in Newcastle.  I spent last Sunday walking (and stopping for coffee) with friends from Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, and Sunderland on a couple of the beaches of North Tyneside.


----------



## Badgers (May 25, 2021)

Unenforceable shit and public blaming again.

I am going to a (small garden) party on Saturday in Hertfordshire, close to the Bedfordshire border. Hertfordshire has no new restrictions but a third of the guests are in Bedfordshire so can't attend under the new (sneaked out) rules. 

Understand things are going south due to the #JohnsonVariant and we do have to be careful, but this is a long/carefully planned 50th wedding anniversary. Gazebo and outdoor heaters have been hired, hotel rooms booked, food, booze and cakes ordered. 

We can test everyone first and break the rules  but there are a few elderly people attending and the hosts are amid a nasty planning permission row with their neighbours  

FFS


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (May 25, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Unenforceable shit and public blaming again.
> 
> I am going to a (small garden) party on Saturday in Hertfordshire, close to the Bedfordshire border. Hertfordshire has no new restrictions but a third of the guests are in Bedfordshire so can't attend under the new (sneaked out) rules.
> 
> ...



No worries, it's only guidance anyway.


----------



## Badgers (May 25, 2021)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> No worries, it's only guidance anyway.


Advisory/Guidance means that those who already don't give a fuck will carry on not giving a fuck. 

Pointless. Utterly pointless.


----------



## elbows (May 25, 2021)

William Shakespeare is dead 









						Covid-19: First man to get jab William Shakespeare dies of unrelated illness
					

Bill Shakespeare's death was unrelated to the jab and his friend urges others to get vaccinated.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (May 26, 2021)

Yesterday in Luton we had 3 times the number of positive tests that we recorded in the whole previous month. 

#JohnsonVariant


----------



## Badgers (May 26, 2021)

Just to put some balance on that. It is really not a good sign because the general theme is that the vaccination dodgers are also not likely to be testing either. 

That said those results are across three testing centres with one delivering 60% of the positives, so there is a localisation factor on this. We now have surge testing teams in the impacted areas which we hope will have an effect. 

In less positive (future) news, the lateral flow test centre's are being phased out. To be fair to that decision the numbers coming in are really low compared to last year / early this year so they are becoming pointless and expensive. 

The next phase is home testing. 

This makes sense in terms of numbers. We have some mobile testing centre's (shopping centre, train stations, supermarkets, etc) which are distributing 500-1000 test boxes (7 tests per box) per day. Compared to the test centres barely seeing 100 people test per day and are manned by 5-10 staff. 

The downside to home testing is there is no proof needed for home test kits. You can test tap water, submit the result and get an 'NHS' email and text stating you are negative  we have seen people in the test centre's trying to blag their tests for work or holiday so if those people test at home then they can blag it easily. When we do a test we have to submit a photo of the negative result, all of which have a unique QR code. 

In order to travel outside the UK they need to pay around £60-200 for a PCR test (most countries offer this for free btw) but people will (kinda understandably) blag this to avoid cost and get their own way.


----------



## IC3D (May 26, 2021)

Charging for these travel tests is pure corruption


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 26, 2021)

IC3D said:


> Charging for these travel tests is pure corruption



What & why?


----------



## krtek a houby (May 29, 2021)

And now... yoga?

Prince Charles advises people recovering from Covid to practise yoga

His wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, has said “it makes you less stiff” and “more supple”


----------



## LDC (May 29, 2021)

IC3D said:


> Charging for these travel tests is pure corruption



Yeah explain? Prices too high, or you think they should be free, or something else?


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah explain? Prices too high, or you think they should be free, or something else?



The government apparently requires all test results for travel to be provided by private companies, not the NHS, even for NHS workers who are regularly tested at work - I don't know how many Conservative MPs are shareholders in the companies approved to carry out private tests but the number is probably a lot higher than zero.









						Passengers refused boarding amid testing confusion
					

Travellers with Ryanair and EasyJet were told they could not fly because they had taken the wrong PCR test.



					www.bbc.com


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

If it was up to me, there would be no such thing as a COVID test you had to pay for - placing barriers, including payment, in front of testing is not the way to end a pandemic,


----------



## Supine (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> If it was up to me, there would be no such thing as a COVID test you had to pay for - placing barriers, including payment, in front of testing is not the way to end a pandemic,



I’m not going on foreign holidays at the moment due to the pandemic. Why should I contribute towards someone else going? Seems fair to me that if you want to go then you pay for your own test.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> The government apparently requires all test results for travel to be provided by private companies, not the NHS, even for NHS workers who are regularly tested at work - I don't know how many Conservative MPs are shareholders in the companies approved to carry out private tests but the number is probably a lot higher than zero.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


That article makes it clear that it's the Irish government, like mainly others, that insist on a PCR test, NHS only provides PCR tests free to the public if you have symptoms or got a positive result from a lateral flow test, it would totally overload the system if they were provided free for those privilege/stupid enough to be travelling aboard this year.

The NHS worker in that article claims she has regular PCR testing at work, but IIRC NHS workers are only getting twice weekly lateral flow tests, that's certainly what's happening at my local hospital, the fact the test didn't have the letters 'PCR' on it suggests it was a lateral flow test. 

I am not convinced that those travelling should have their tests subsidised by the rest of us.


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

Supine said:


> I’m not going on foreign holidays at the moment due to the pandemic. Why should I contribute towards someone else going? Seems fair to me that if you want to go then you pay for your own test.



What's more important right now - keeping infections at a minimum by making sure there are no fudged/skipped/dodged/forged/avoided COVID tests, or being absolutely fair to taxpayers who aren't going on holiday?

Private companies exist to create profit for shareholders, that's their whole reason for being, would anybody be remotely surprised if there was a headline a few months from now about workers at one of these companies skipping a few steps in quality control because they were under pressure from above to get as many tests done as possible in a short period of time because there was a sudden increase in demand and not enough skilled employees to deal with it?

As long as it goes some way toward bringing the pandemic to an end as soon as possible, I have no objection to subsidising free COVID tests for every traveler, even if I think they shouldn't be flying.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> What's more important right now - keeping infections at a minimum by making sure there are no fudged/skipped/dodged/forged/avoided COVID tests, or being absolutely fair to taxpayers who aren't going on holiday?



Offering free tests for leaving the UK would not prevent or change the chance of 'fudged/skipped/dodged/forged/avoided COVID tests' for those returning, which is the biggest risk to the UK. 

The NHS only has a PCR testing capacity of around 650k a day at present, and almost half of that is already being used, with cases on the increase, we may need the rest of that capacity, there isn't spare capacity for travellers.


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Offering free tests for leaving the UK would not prevent or change the chance of 'fudged/skipped/dodged/forged/avoided COVID tests' for those returning, which is the biggest risk to the UK.
> 
> The NHS only has a PCR testing capacity of around 650k a day at present, and almost half of that is already being used, with cases on the increase, we may need the rest of that capacity, there isn't spare capacity for travellers.



Given the speed with which the British strain of COVID became the dominant one in many other countries, I'd argue that the NHS should devote at least some of its resources to making sure the country doesn't export any more cases.


----------



## Supine (May 29, 2021)

I wouldn’t let the daft cnuts go on foreign holidays, unless it’s to visit family abroad, so testing wouldn’t be a problem.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> Given the speed with which the British strain of COVID became the dominant one in many other countries, I'd argue that the NHS should devote at least some of its resources to making sure the country doesn't export any more cases.



So you are suggesting some of the NHS capacity should be used for travellers, but what do you suggest the NHS does when it's overloaded and can't provide tests for those remaining at home, that actually need them?


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

Supine said:


> I wouldn’t let the daft cnuts go on foreign holidays, unless it’s to visit family abroad, so testing wouldn’t be a problem.



Why would testing not be a problem if people were only allowed abroad to visit family? I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't have family abroad, if you include cousins in Australia etc.


----------



## Badgers (May 29, 2021)

Ryanair passengers flying to Dublin barred from boarding plane over Covid rules
					

Passengers on the Ryanair flight from Stansted to Dublin were not allowed to enter the plane after a mix-up over the rules about travelling to Ireland




					www-mirror-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org
				






> "A number of passengers on this flight from London Stansted to Dublin Airport were denied boarding as they failed to present a negative Covid-19 RT-PCR test result, as required by Irish regulation."





> The incident on Tuesday coincided with Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary threating to pull his planes out of Ireland if the Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan, didn't produce a plan for the return of international travel.


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> So you are suggesting some of the NHS capacity should be used for travellers, but what do you suggest the NHS does when it's overloaded and can't provide tests for those remaining at home, that actually need them?



I would suggest the NHS uses the full power of the government to requisition testing capacity from private companies. And once the public health emergency is over, I would suggest they employ the fussiest accountants in the land to make sure the private companies involved were fairly reimbursed for their expenses but didn't make a profit from the pandemic. 

And then I would suggest that the government nationalise those companies to make sure that the next time there is a pandemic, public health policy won't be influenced by whatever corrupt capitalist motherfuckers happen to be close to the government of the time.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> I would suggest the NHS uses the full power of the government to requisition testing capacity from private companies. And once the public health emergency is over, I would suggest they employ the fussiest accountants in the land to make sure the private companies involved were fairly reimbursed for their expenses but didn't make a profit from the pandemic.
> 
> And then I would suggest that the government nationalise those companies to make sure that the next time there is a pandemic, public health policy won't be influenced by whatever corrupt capitalist motherfuckers happen to be close to the government of the time.



Not got a problem with that, but I still can not support the idea the NHS should subsidise people's holidays, when they have far bigger priorities, not least catching up on the backlog of people needing hospital treatment.

Getting treatment is a right, overseas travel is a privilege.


----------



## LDC (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> Private companies exist to create profit for shareholders, that's their whole reason for being, would anybody be remotely surprised if there was a headline a few months from now about workers at one of these companies skipping a few steps in quality control because they were under pressure from above to get as many tests done as possible in a short period of time because there was a sudden increase in demand and not enough skilled employees to deal with it?



The people providing tests around me tend to be smaller businesses who have seen a niche and quickly acted to fill it, so not any connected to contracts or Tory donors and mostly no shareholders, so I think saying that's the reason it's happening the way it is is erroneous.

I agree with what's been said re: NHS capacity that currently shouldn't be used for people going on holiday. If the price puts some people off going away then I'm afraid that has some advantages currently. It is shit in some ways, but given all the other disasters going on moaning about people having to pay for PCR tests to go on holiday is at the bottom of my list tbh.


----------



## Yossarian (May 29, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I agree with what's been said re: NHS capacity that currently shouldn't be used for people going on holiday.



There's also an argument to be made for not allowing your country to become a fucking plague pit that exports infectious COVID variants around the world, tbf.


----------



## LDC (May 29, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> There's also an argument to be made for not allowing your country to become a fucking plague pit that exports infectious COVID variants around the world, tbf.



Yes, I think we can agree on that!


----------



## Supine (May 29, 2021)

So, my sister has decided it’s ok tomorrow when she arrives on holiday to have four kids with her. Three of them from three other households. I’m right to feel pissed off about this hopefully?


----------



## crossthebreeze (May 29, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> The NHS worker in that article claims she has regular PCR testing at work, but IIRC NHS workers are only getting twice weekly lateral flow tests, that's certainly what's happening at my local hospital, the fact the test didn't have the letters 'PCR' on it suggests it was a lateral flow test.
> 
> I am not convinced that those travelling should have their tests subsidised by the rest of us.


All care home staff now get one PCR test and at least two lateral flow tests per week, and I think those that do very high risk work in the NHS are the same. The tests are meant to be on a strict regular schedule for the whole care home/ward though, so they won't want people manipulating the schedule round doing a PCR x hours before their flight and y days after their return.


----------



## existentialist (May 30, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Not got a problem with that, but I still can not support the idea the NHS should subsidise people's holidays, when they have far bigger priorities, not least catching up on the backlog of people needing hospital treatment.
> 
> Getting treatment is a right, overseas travel is a privilege.


Yebbut...if they are to be granted that privilege (which I have serious problems with a.t.m.), I think the argument that as few obstacles to testing as possible should be put in place is a valid one. Yeah, it means "we" are paying for people to ensure they are safe, but it's also about ensuring _we_ are safe from _them_. The situation where someone has had a perfectly valid PCR test within the required timeframe, but because it wasn't done through a private company, it doesn't count, is utterly irrational and transparently idiotic.


----------



## cupid_stunt (May 30, 2021)

existentialist said:


> I think the argument that as few obstacles to testing as possible should be put in place is a valid one. Yeah, it means "we" are paying for people to ensure they are safe, but it's also about ensuring _we_ are safe from _them_.



In a ideal world, but as pointed out the NHS doesn't have the capacity, in fact there's increasing reports of the handful of private labs doing the test results are getting overwhelmed, and results are not turning up, or not turning up in time.

Imagine the mess, if they open up overseas travel even more, when the system is already close to collapse. 



existentialist said:


> The situation where someone has had a perfectly valid PCR test within the required timeframe, but because it wasn't done through a private company, it doesn't count, is utterly irrational and transparently idiotic.



The woman flying to Dublin claimed she had a PCR test, but the result was not marked as being a PCR test, so was invalid for the Irish authorities.

The UK doesn't require people coming from Ireland to have a test, so this case had nothing to do with the UK rules.


----------



## Badgers (May 31, 2021)

Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown
					

Exclusive: Johnson ruled out lockdown 24 hours after meeting with Sunetra Gupta – resulting in ‘1.3m extra COVID infections’




					www.opendemocracy.net
				






> Johnson’s apparent U-turn decision to not impose lockdown, which experts say may have resulted in an estimated 1.3 million extra COVID infections, came just 24 hours after meeting with Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta.
> 
> Today, openDemocracy can reveal that Gupta received almost £90,000 from the Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation to fund research “into the prevalence of COVID-19 in the population” in April last year.


----------



## Badgers (May 31, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (May 31, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Unenforceable shit and public blaming again.
> 
> I am going to a (small garden) party on Saturday in Hertfordshire, close to the Bedfordshire border. Hertfordshire has no new restrictions but a third of the guests are in Bedfordshire so can't attend under the new (sneaked out) rules.
> 
> ...


Update on this...

We followed the 'science' and spaced out the 13 guests outside. 

The 'planning' dispute neighbour did not (to my knowledge) report us. However he spent most the afternoon and evening using noisy power tools, lawnmower, leaf blower, strimmer, etc


----------



## Badgers (Jun 3, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)

> Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has been notified via the NHS app that he has come into contact with someone who has coronavirus.
> 
> The senior Conservative had recently returned from Portugal after supporting Chelsea in the Champions League final.
> 
> Instead of self isolating for 10 days, Mr Gove will take daily Covid tests as part of a pilot scheme designed to measure testing effectiveness.


----------



## pbsmooth (Jun 4, 2021)

wondering if my mates wedding on the 26th is going to happen now...


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)

Good good 









						Anti-vax nurse struck off for claiming the pandemic is a hoax
					

The NMC has made the decision to permanently remove prolific conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Kate Shermirani from their register.



					nursingnotes.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)




----------



## cupid_stunt (Jun 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Good good
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Check out the interview with her son, I've just posted here - Discussion: UK anti-vaxx 'freedom' morons, protests and QAnon idiots


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)

> Kerry says: "This holiday was everything for us our first with our baby who has had no experiences in his first 18 months on this planet."











						Portugal travel list: 'Let us go on holiday and live our lives'
					

UK travellers react with dismay and resignation as quarantine-free travel to Portugal is halted.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Yeah  because the 18 month old brat will suffer so much.


----------



## elbows (Jun 4, 2021)

So many rich and vital experiences from the simplest of things during the first 18 months of life too. Theres not that much to be learnt from a trip to Portugal compared to the basics such as learning whats part of your own body, how to move it, peoples faces and their expressions, the rhythm of communication between people, how the big mess of colours before your eyes can come to be seen as distinct objects that you can interact with etc etc.

edit - my child development knowledge is a bit rusty and I may have undersold how far a child has got by 18 months. When I repeated this stuff to my mum a short time ago she went a bit further with ' a walk around the park would be sufficient stimulus for an 18 month old'.


----------



## Cerv (Jun 4, 2021)

I'm thinking the baby would actually prefer staying at home to a 3 hour flight.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 4, 2021)

UK records another 6,238 C19 cases 

The highest daily increase for more than two months


----------



## Teaboy (Jun 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> UK records another 6,238 C19 cases
> 
> The highest daily increase for more than two months



Nothing in the data etc...


----------



## elbows (Jun 4, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Nothing in the data etc...


----------



## glitch hiker (Jun 4, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Nothing in the data etc...


Given the obvious hateful stubborn nature of that reply I have no problem believing he said "let the bodies pile high"

Every day he dithers, every hour, he is making it worse. He and the rest of the maniacs. At this point it's criminal negligence, and I'm being kind saying that. The more a lockdown is made likely, even if it's markedly less likely we'll need one, perhaps only regionally. Sorry Bolton, no wandering for you.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jun 4, 2021)

My Dad had a stroke a few weeks ago, and has finally been moved out of the hospital into a rehabilitation place that's only 20 minutes down the road from us. Unfortunately that means 14 days of Covid-related quarantine, so we can't go and visit him properly until that's over.


----------



## pogofish (Jun 5, 2021)

The ”shed bar” at the beach has been given a once-over since I was last down. Now, with the better weather they have removed some and put-in some outdoor tables and for the remaining sheds, about half have some kind of food/drinks concession in them but there appears to still be an A to E set of sheds that can be booked If you want the luxury of plastic chairs and tables.

Not had the courage too go see how the Christmas markets are doing but I’m due a prescription later in the wee, so I’ll have the pleasure  then.


----------



## HAL9000 (Jun 8, 2021)

Room ventilation

There's an aritcle in the economist about room ventilation, but its behind a pay wall









						Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2
					

There has been a misunderstanding about how the virus spreads




					www.economist.com
				




I think the paper they refer to, to support this argument is this..





__





						Evidence for probable aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a poorly ventilated restaurant
					

Background The role of aerosols in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 remains debated. We analysed an outbreak involving three non-associated families in Restaurant X in Guangzhou, China, and assessed the possibility of aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and characterize the associated environmental...




					www.medrxiv.org
				





Claims that a number of people caught covid due to poor ventilation

economist version of this image is...



The economist article suggests that CO2 levels should be kept below 700 ppm (outside its normally 400 ppm).   Then either have lots of extractors, or if that's not possible recirculators that can kill or fillter viruses.

Seems like a plausible idea, but I'm not aware of evidence that this would work in practice.

The other idea that was missed out, positive air pressure, clean rooms operate at higher air pressure to keep dirty air out.   I don't know if that's practical solution for some situations.
(or perhaps negative pressure might be better, if any air that people breathed out was sucked out of the room quickly)


----------



## Petcha (Jun 10, 2021)

To lighten things slightly, I found out this afternoon that my company is providing us with a stylist next month who will be providing group sessions and then one on one sessions to help us with the readjustment to office life and our fashion sense after such a long time out.

I thought this was a joke but it's not. We'll be in groups of 6. I joined during Covid so nobody has really seen what a total bum I am, having wisely invested in several quality polo shirts which I keep next to the laptop and can throw on in a few seconds notice and I've never let them see the below the line, so to speak. Through the looking glass.


----------



## teuchter (Jun 11, 2021)

HAL9000 said:


> Room ventilation
> 
> There's an aritcle in the economist about room ventilation, but its behind a pay wall
> 
> ...


I don't really get what's new here - we've known for ages now that ventilation is key.

And positive or negative pressure is not really relevant here - it's rate of air change that matters.


----------



## not a trot (Jun 13, 2021)

Lovely weekend and not a sound of an ice cream van round our way. Are they banned from plying their trade under covid rules.


----------



## davesgcr (Jun 13, 2021)

not a trot said:


> Lovely weekend and not a sound of an ice cream van round our way. Are they banned from plying their trade under covid rules.



No - they are around and alive in this part of the world - both static and touring.


----------



## LDC (Jun 13, 2021)

Continued selling crack, weed, those gas canisters, and 99 flakes around ours all through lockdown.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 14, 2021)

So...

June 21st as 'the man who saved Christmas' promised?

Or July as the 'man who ruined summer' has leaked to the press as per usual?


----------



## Sunray (Jun 16, 2021)

Cummings texts show Boris Johnson calling Matt Hancock ‘totally hopeless’
					

Former aide publishes 7,000-word essay attacking Johnson’s ‘chronic dysfunction’ and revealing PM’s scathing verdict on health secretary




					www.theguardian.com
				




This has made me lol but be sad at the same time.  What a bunch of losers.


----------



## Maggot (Jun 24, 2021)

A friend of mine is in Barbados. He was expecting to have to isolate on his return, but it is getting put on the green list whilst he is flying back. How lucky is that?


----------



## existentialist (Jun 25, 2021)

Maggot said:


> A friend of mine is in Barbados. He was expecting to have to isolate on his return, but it is getting put on the green list whilst he is flying back. How lucky is that?


So long as someone remembers to tell the virus, it's all cool


----------



## Maggot (Jun 25, 2021)

existentialist said:


> So long as someone remembers to tell the virus, it's all cool


He still has to have a negative test, so there's not much risk.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 28, 2021)

Here we go again, scream if you want to go faster...


----------



## fucthest8 (Jun 28, 2021)

Just to demonstrate that you can get whatever news you want by choosing the rag, here's what the Grauniad reckons. Is that "swift"?


----------



## prunus (Jun 28, 2021)

fucthest8 said:


> Just to demonstrate that you can get whatever news you want by choosing the rag, here's what the Grauniad reckons. Is that "swift"?
> 
> View attachment 275686



These are two different stories, despite the commonality of personnel and subject matter.  The latter is about the will we won’t we unlock on the 5th of July as floated (unrealistically) by fantasist Pollyanna Johnson - we won’t and that will be officially announced by Javid (just announced, it’s not his decision per se); the former is about Javid having explicitly said he wants to unlock as soon as possible because of damage to the economy etc etc - ie he’s an antilockdowner at heart.

This is bad news, as it means that in the event that we require another lockdown (not unlikely) more reluctant lockdowners in the cabinet mean it’s likely to be delayed for longer than it would otherwise (while they - what? hope for a miracle?), and we’ve already seen what damage even a few weeks delay can do in terms of exponential case number rises. Twice. Morons.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 28, 2021)

In some South London areas almost half the population have had no jab at all. These are densely populated urban areas. In Lewisham 42%, in Lambeth and Southwark 45%, have had no jab at all. 

This is vastly out of kilter with the national figure of 19%.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 28, 2021)

Children over 12 must be vaccinated ‘as soon as possible’ to combat rising Delta variant, experts say 



> Children over 12 in the UK must be vaccinated “as soon as possible” in order to reach the vital herd immunity threshold needed to suppress the exponentially rising Delta variant, scientists have warned.
> 
> The call came as it emerged that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will not make any decision on vaccinating adolescents until later next month – even though Britain’s medicines regulator approved the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab for 12- to 15-year-olds three weeks ago.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 28, 2021)

New cases up 70%
Deaths up 64%

Tests are well up so that explains the higher number to some degree. However the governcunts should not be easing anything early.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 29, 2021)




----------



## Sue (Jun 29, 2021)

Badgers said:


> In some South London areas almost half the population have had no jab at all. These are densely populated urban areas. In Lewisham 42%, in Lambeth and Southwark 45%, have had no jab at all.
> 
> This is vastly out of kilter with the national figure of 19%.
> 
> View attachment 275694


Not looking good over this way either.  









						Hackney is one of the least vaccinated places in Britain
					

Hackney's director of public health has said low vaccine uptake in the borough is a result of its young population, high levels of...




					www.hackneygazette.co.uk


----------



## LDC (Jun 29, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




Yeah, I'm dreading the end of restrictions in July with the figures the way they are going. And then really dreading working in the NHS this winter.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 29, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, I'm dreading the end of restrictions in July with the figures the way they are going. And then really dreading working in the NHS this winter.


Have been following this chap for a while and he is almost always spot on with the numbers sad to say. 

40k people at Wembley (plus staff etc) for the two Euro Semi's then 60k in for the final. Plus the horse racing and dropping of restrictions is a melting pot.


----------



## LDC (Jun 30, 2021)

Our last PCN vaccine clinic tomorrow has been cancelled. Numbers booking in have been falling generally, and tomorrow they're so low as to make it not worth running the clinic.


----------



## Badgers (Jun 30, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Our last PCN vaccine clinic tomorrow has been cancelled. Numbers booking in have been falling generally, and tomorrow they're so low as to make it not worth running the clinic.


Really? 

We have just increased PCR (for symptomatic people) opening hours in Luton. More because of rising cases than footfall, but the footfall is creeping up.


----------



## Yossarian (Jun 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




Has there been anywhere in the world that lifted restrictions while case numbers  were rising without it being a total disaster?


----------



## gosub (Jul 1, 2021)

Not out of the woods vet. Talking to someone working on the winter flu jabs yesterday. They have no data to work with re which variants to go after.  In normal times, with jab program flu kills 25-60k and hospitalises 2 million a year


----------



## Supine (Jul 1, 2021)

gosub said:


> Not out of the woods vet. Talking to someone working on the winter flu jabs yesterday. They have no data to work with re which variants to go after.  In normal times, with jab program flu kills 25-60k and hospitalises 2 million a year



That isn’t quite correct. This years strains were announced by WHO earlier this year and includes a new strain from cambodia (if i remember correctly).  It might be a bit of an odd flu year due to social distancing but the strains have been chosen.


----------



## 2hats (Jul 1, 2021)

For northern hemisphere 2021-22 season, WHO/CDC/ECDC recommending multivalent vaccines for:

A/Victoria/2570/2019 (H1N1) pdm09
A/Wisconsin/588/2019 (H1N1) pdm09
A/Cambodia/e0826360/2020 (H3N2)
B/Washington/02/2019 (B/Victoria lineage)
B/Phuket/3073/2013 (B/Yamagata lineage)


----------



## elbows (Jul 1, 2021)

Concerns about the next big flu outbreak probably include how large it could be given how well shielded from these sorts of infections people have been for prolonged periods in the pandemic. And the possibility of having lots of flu patients needing hospital care at the same time as covid patients. Or the possibility that the strains that bounce back wont be a great match for the vaccine strain choices made earlier this year. Or even the possibility that prior covid infection or vaccination might change some peoples immune response to influenza.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 2, 2021)

Ffs





			https://twitter.com/i/events/1410910129898151937?s=09


----------



## Supine (Jul 2, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Ffs
> 
> View attachment 276414
> 
> ...



If brexit hadn’t happened the indian factory would have been qualified already. UK inspections only count for UK now though.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 2, 2021)

Did a day's training on 'Vaccine Reassurance' which is mostly about myth busting. Was fairly obvious stuff to me but useful. Have got to train up twelve people on this Monday and we will be going out into 'the field' on Tuesday  

Should be a laugh 

Also I was supposed to be training people on putting up gazebo and managing outdoor 'event work' but the branded gazebos are stuck at customs due to Brexit delays


----------



## two sheds (Jul 2, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Also I was supposed to be training people on putting up gazebo and managing outdoor 'event work' but the branded gazebos are stuck at customs due to Brexit delays


'
No day's training on 'Brexit Reassurance'?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 2, 2021)

two sheds said:


> '
> No day's training on 'Brexit Reassurance'?


That shitty ship sailed a long time ago...


----------



## Supine (Jul 2, 2021)

IBM and John Hopkins have developed a chat bot to talk to people about vaccine hesitancy. Got a question about vaccines?









						Chat | Vaxchat
					

Chat with VIRA, the COVID-19 vaccine chatbot developed by the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center, browse featured questions, or complete a brief survey.




					vaxchat.org


----------



## Raheem (Jul 2, 2021)

Supine said:


> IBM and John Hopkins have developed a chat bot to talk to people about vaccine hesitancy. Got a question about vaccines?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


And I've heard it said that counselling is one of the professions safe from automation.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 3, 2021)

Supine said:


> IBM and John Hopkins have developed a chat bot to talk to people about vaccine hesitancy. Got a question about vaccines?
> 
> 
> 
> ...





> _Will it make me magnetic?_
> 
> I'm not sure I understood your question.







> _Will they put a microchip in me?_
> 
> Good question! There are no microchips in the COVID-19 vaccines. The only purpose of the vaccine is to protect you.



Well, they would say that, wouldn't they.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 3, 2021)

Supine said:


> IBM and John Hopkins have developed a chat bot to talk to people about vaccine hesitancy. Got a question about vaccines?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Excellent


----------



## Badgers (Jul 3, 2021)

Not a light thread but worth reading


----------



## existentialist (Jul 3, 2021)

Raheem said:


> And I've heard it said that counselling is one of the professions safe from automation.


It's certainly not "safe", but so far, AI counselling has some very significant flaws, and I doubt it will ever replace human beings being therapists.


----------



## HAL9000 (Jul 3, 2021)

Soft Drinks used to Fake Positive Results on COVID-19 Tests​


_A COVID-19 test with a fake positive caused by cola and a COVID-19 test that used cola after it was washed with a buffer. _










						Here's How Kids Are Using Soft Drinks to Fake Positive Results on COVID-19 Tests
					

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive COVID-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks.




					www.sciencealert.com
				




_(I don't know how accurate this story is, I've never used a lateral flow test)_


----------



## Badgers (Jul 4, 2021)

#thiswillgowell


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 276731
> 
> #thiswillgowell


Easy typo to make.


----------



## 2hats (Jul 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 276731
> 
> #thiswillgowell


Enrich the American economy as UK healthcare collapses, presumably?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 4, 2021)

Can't wait till 'Freedom Day' when we can get rid of these pesky masks and all do exactly what we are already doing.


----------



## Supine (Jul 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Can't wait till 'Freedom Day' when we can get rid of these pesky masks and all do exactly what we are already doing.



Freedom for covid to do what it wants!


----------



## Badgers (Jul 5, 2021)

#itsover trending on Twotter  

Glad to hear that


----------



## Badgers (Jul 6, 2021)

Covid-19: New rules for schools in England to be set out
					

It is expected that testing of pupils will replace the need to send entire class "bubbles" home.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




I can see both sides of this ^

One issue that is not in the public domain (like many things ) is a shortage of testing kits.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jul 6, 2021)

Don't know if this has been posted already or wether this is the correct place to post it tbh :









						LONG COVID: WE ARE STILL NOT SAFE! - Anarchist Communist Group
					

In many ways it feels like Covid has been a long haul.  As communities we put ourselves through social restrictions the like of which we have never seen, the cost of which in human, in mental health, in social terms we still don’t know.  We did all this for the common good.  So that the...




					www.anarchistcommunism.org


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 7, 2021)

Predictions of up to 1000 cases a day of delta by mid July here.
This is running rings around the vaccine program.
🙁


----------



## Badgers (Jul 7, 2021)

Two NHS hospitals declare code black alert as Covid cases soar and staff isolate
					

NHS Grampian said both Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Dr Gray's Hospital in Elgin, Moray have had to postpone non-urgent elective operations due to the increasing number of Covid patients



					www.mirror.co.uk
				






> Two hospitals in Scotland have declared Code black status due to Covid-19 pressures.
> 
> NHS Grampian said both Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Dr Gray's Hospital in Elgin, Moray have had to postpone non-urgent elective operations due to the soaring number of Covid patients.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 7, 2021)

Cancer surgeries cancelled at one of England’s largest hospitals as NHS summer crisis deepens
					

Exclusive: Senior doctors warn of rising Covid admissions and A&E department overwhelmed at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust




					www.independent.co.uk
				






> Cancer patients at one of England’s largest hospital trusts have had their surgeries cancelled after rising numbers of coronavirus patients, which senior medics said was “affecting all our wards everywhere.”
> 
> Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust said it had seen a “marked increase” in Covid admissions and was now having to cancel surgery for urgent patients “who’ve already waited too long”.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 7, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cancer surgeries cancelled at one of England’s largest hospitals as NHS summer crisis deepens
> 
> 
> Exclusive: Senior doctors warn of rising Covid admissions and A&E department overwhelmed at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust
> ...




Not good. 🙁🙁


----------



## Badgers (Jul 8, 2021)




----------



## LDC (Jul 8, 2021)

Cancer surgeries cancelled at one of England’s largest hospitals as NHS summer crisis deepens
					

Exclusive: Senior doctors warn of rising Covid admissions and A&E department overwhelmed at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust




					www.independent.co.uk
				




My area. Called an ambulance for one of my patients the other day; I was on hold for over 20 minutes before I got through. Not chatted to someone who then triaged it as low priority and then on hold, but 20 minutes before I spoke to _anyone_. Never had that before. Completely fucked up.


----------



## two sheds (Jul 8, 2021)

Badgers said:


>



Good short summary, ta


----------



## extra dry (Jul 10, 2021)

Mrs Miggins said:


> View attachment 201167


It would be informative to show the differing variants of C19


----------



## 2hats (Jul 10, 2021)

extra dry said:


> It would be informative to show the differing variants of C19


Just extend it to the right to 7.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 14, 2021)

Not ideal 









						HMS Queen Elizabeth: Covid outbreak on Navy flagship
					

There have been around 100 cases on HMS Queen Elizabeth, the BBC has been told.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Jul 14, 2021)

#worldbeating





__





						England Summary | Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK
					

Official Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease situation dashboard with latest data in the UK.




					coronavirus.data.gov.uk


----------



## killer b (Jul 14, 2021)

So... if you got pinged by the app this evening and it said you need to isolate for 8 days, when does that mean you were in contact with the infected person? Saturday? Sunday?

(this is a really inconvenient moment to get pinged by the app, let me tell you.  )


----------



## prunus (Jul 15, 2021)

killer b said:


> So... if you got pinged by the app this evening and it said you need to isolate for 8 days, when does that mean you were in contact with the infected person? Saturday? Sunday?
> 
> (this is a really inconvenient moment to get pinged by the app, let me tell you.  )



Monday, I’d have thought. 10 days isolation from contact, so if it says 8 days left on Wednesday contact was on Monday. I think that’s how it works anyway.

Sorry you’ve been pinged :-(


----------



## killer b (Jul 15, 2021)

I thought Monday, and it's really weird because I had zero prolonged contact with anyone that day, other than the three people I work with (none of whom have tested positive)


----------



## crossthebreeze (Jul 15, 2021)

killer b said:


> So... if you got pinged by the app this evening and it said you need to isolate for 8 days, when does that mean you were in contact with the infected person? Saturday? Sunday?
> 
> (this is a really inconvenient moment to get pinged by the app, let me tell you.  )


I think Sunday - the 10 days start the day after the contact. 

Me and my partner were in close contact with a friend on Tuesday who started coughing on Tuesday evening,  tested positive on a Lft,  and told us immediatly. They ordered a PCR on Tues night but are still waiting for it. Meanwhile we are yet to be contacted by T&T/nhs app and official guidance is we don't need to self isolate until that happens - just social distance!

Obviously we are both self-isolating, apart from that my partner is picking up a laptop and mobile from work today so she can work from (my) home, as they can't officially class her as self-isolating until test and trace contacts her - and I'll take the bins out and bring stuff up from her car (I live on an upper flat). We're both going to do an LFT, wash hands, and mask up to do this. I'm self employed, so losing out on quite a bit of work.

The whole system is useless - And the government guidance is confusing and out of date - lots of stuff about support bubbles still in there.


----------



## killer b (Jul 15, 2021)

I only had contact with two people on Sunday, neither of whom has tested positive - I'm sure everyone feels a similar feeling of injustice under these circumstance, but there is literally no possible long contacts in the possible timeframe I haven't eliminated and I'm supposed to be going to my best friend's memorial service on Sunday and to visit my brother on Monday and it's not fair.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 15, 2021)

Was a bit worried about our neighbour over the road was very ill and hospitalised Feb-April, as I saw an ambulance outside their house yesterday.  Saw his wife this morning and she said he was a bit unwell yesterday so gp called ambulance,  but he's back home and ok now. 

I developed a dreadful cold with really bad sore throat at weekend so took a test (with daughter, who had very blocked nose) seeing as I'd heard delta presented like a cold often and was pretty convinced this was it,  but apparently not! Daughter did swear there was a non-covid cold going round- think I've given it to gsv now. Started to recede on Monday,  never got fatigue or aches so I think it really is just a cold.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 15, 2021)

Also, Monday - 'Freedom day'  - will be the day my full vax protection kicks in but I just feel like it doesn't make much difference in current context. OK so I have more, but not total protection, and I'm hearing about a heck of a lot more infected double-jabbed people, including among friends, than I expected. But now COVID is all over the place and catchier it kind of feels like the advantages are cancelled out and like I have a similar chance to being not vaccinated in low-to-medium incidence of the virus.

I was never in much danger from it in the first place anyway, but I could still get laid out by it for a week or two, give it to someone else or my double-jabbed parents, I'm still sure as hell not going anywhere crowded without a mask (though I am very unbothered about wearing one). So I don't feel especially liberated by it right now - don't get me wrong, I'm not scared or anxious about it, I'm just annoyed and deflated!


----------



## SpookyFrank (Jul 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Not ideal
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Oh no, now they won't be able to do any of the vital nothing they do all day.


----------



## marty21 (Jul 15, 2021)

I don't know if this has been covered yet on here.  Deaths are rising again,  is there any information about whether those deaths are people who were unvaccinated?


----------



## elbows (Jul 15, 2021)

marty21 said:


> I don't know if this has been covered yet on here.  Deaths are rising again,  is there any information about whether those deaths are people who were unvaccinated?


Information about that is available but tends to lag quite far behind the latest data. I will see if I can find the most recent version.


----------



## Petcha (Jul 15, 2021)

So, I decide to go back into the office for one day, the fourth day I've been in since I started 10 months ago. Got a message from my assistant an hour or so ago saying she's tested positive after attending a baby shower on the weekend. We were sitting close for about 9 hours. I've done the home test thing and that was negative. I'm also double vaxxed. Like a lot of young bulletproof people she didnt have her app switched on so i've not been pinged, but do I need to self-isolate now? I do have a stonking headache, but I get those sometimes.

I've booked a proper test for today.. grrrrrr.. how long does that take? I'm so fucked off at my employers who have been putting subtle pressure on us to go in a couple of times a week. About 10 of us had lunch so I assume that's all of them out now too. We're also expected to return full time, 5 days a week as of Monday.


----------



## 2hats (Jul 15, 2021)

marty21 said:


> I don't know if this has been covered yet on here.  Deaths are rising again,  is there any information about whether those deaths are people who were unvaccinated?


Table 5 of PHE VOC/VUI Technical Briefing 18.

Spiegelhalter covered this a few weeks ago.








						Why most people who now die with Covid in England have had a vaccination | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters
					

Don’t think of this as a bad sign, it’s exactly what’s expected from an effective but imperfect jab




					www.theguardian.com
				




Deaths in vaccinees have been (not unsurprisingly) greatest amongst elderly (50+), whilst deaths in the unvaccinated have been skewed to younger cohorts.


----------



## elbows (Jul 15, 2021)

marty21 said:


> I don't know if this has been covered yet on here.  Deaths are rising again,  is there any information about whether those deaths are people who were unvaccinated?


OK following on from my last post, here are some of the figures from last weeks variant surveillance report. edit - ah I see 2hats beat me to it but I'll still post this anyway. Its just some of the numbers from the table he mentioned.

These numbers are all looking at confirmed Delta cases in England from 1st Feb to 21st June, so not the entire picture but a reasonable guide in some ways:

123,620 positive cases:
14,359 vaccine status unknown.
8562 with one vaccine dose within 21 days of testing positive.
17,933 with one vaccine dose more than 21 days before testing positive.
10,834 received 2 doses.
71,932 unvaccinated.

Deaths:
257 total.
2 vaccine status unknown.
1 with one vaccine dose within 21 days of testing positive.
44 with one vaccine dose more than 21 days before testing positive.
118 received 2 doses. (2 of whom were under 50, 116 who were 50 or over)
92 unvaccinated.


----------



## marty21 (Jul 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> OK following on from my last post, here are some of the figures from last weeks variant surveillance report. edit - ah I see @2ahts beat me to it but I'll still post this anyway. Its just some of the numbers from the table he mentioned.
> 
> These numbers are all looking at confirmed Delta cases in England from 1st Feb to 21st June, so not the entire picture but a reasonable guide in some ways:
> 
> ...


Thanks for getting the info .


----------



## Badgers (Jul 15, 2021)

Another 48,553 cases.

Freedom day is gonna be epic


----------



## platinumsage (Jul 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> OK following on from my last post, here are some of the figures from last weeks variant surveillance report. edit - ah I see 2hats beat me to it but I'll still post this anyway. Its just some of the numbers from the table he mentioned.
> 
> These numbers are all looking at confirmed Delta cases in England from 1st Feb to 21st June, so not the entire picture but a reasonable guide in some ways:
> 
> ...



Still not a word on comorbidities. People with conditions that class them as vulnerable or extremely vulnerable would like to know whether their risk of death is still elevated following vaccination.


----------



## glitch hiker (Jul 15, 2021)

48k cases today.

I am really dreading catching buses from next week onwards. Unsurprisingly the local bus service isn't going to enforce masks. 

As cases rise there is more likelihood of a given passenger being a plague carrier. If they aren't predisposed to wearing a mask then perhaps it's even more likely.

There are some seriously screwed up (un)intended consequences to this. Forcing people to shield in the name of freedom.

It's the Great Barrington Declaration. Rishi Sunak and Julia HB have finally gotten their wish (although she'll no doubt find something else to whine about for money)


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Another 48,553 cases.
> 
> Freedom day is gonna be epic



It was probably longer, but it feels like only a few weeks ago that the headlines were about Britain's world-leading vaccination progress, not Britain's insane experiment with getting the entire population infected with COVID.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 15, 2021)

Work is opening more desks from Monday, but still only about 30% capacity, and no mandate to return. My team seems to be agreement that we won't talk coming back in until numbers are under some sort of control, so we're probably taking autumn. Wouldn't be surprised if we hold of coming in over winter again.


----------



## 2hats (Jul 15, 2021)

Yossarian said:


> It was probably longer, but it feels like only a few weeks ago that the headlines were about Britain's *world-leading* vaccination progress


----------



## elbows (Jul 15, 2021)

2hats said:


> View attachment 278663


Malta is quite prominent in such vaccine charts.

Here it is in a cases chart (log scale).


----------



## Spandex (Jul 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Freedom day is gonna be epic


Anyone who calls this Monday "Freedom Day" is going straight on my shitlist


----------



## 2hats (Jul 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> Malta is quite prominent in such vaccine charts.
> 
> Here it is in a cases chart (log scale).


Could be an illustration of how you might not be able to reach "herd immunity" if your population is actually mixing all the time with less vaccinated sub-populations, particularly in the face of a variant that drives that HIT much closer to 100%.


----------



## Raheem (Jul 15, 2021)

Spandex said:


> Anyone who calls this Monday "Freedom Day" is going straight on my shitlist
> 
> View attachment 278672


It's VD day. Victory Over Doctors.


----------



## zahir (Jul 15, 2021)

A short documentary about Independent SAGE, made before the delta variant took off.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 15, 2021)

17-year-old niece has just got a positive test, so my brother and family isolating. She's feeling pretty OK so far at least - let's see if bro and his wife's vaccine hold.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 16, 2021)

Chris Whitty warns UK could be plunged back into restrictions in just 5 weeks
					

Speaking ahead of "Freedom Day", the Chief Medical Officer said a spike in hospitalisations could leave the NHS in "trouble again, surprisingly fast"



					www.mirror.co.uk
				




Shocked i tell you


----------



## kropotkin (Jul 16, 2021)

Petcha said:


> So, I decide to go back into the office for one day, the fourth day I've been in since I started 10 months ago. Got a message from my assistant an hour or so ago saying she's tested positive after attending a baby shower on the weekend. We were sitting close for about 9 hours. I've done the home test thing and that was negative. I'm also double vaxxed. Like a lot of young bulletproof people she didnt have her app switched on so i've not been pinged, but do I need to self-isolate now? I do have a stonking headache, but I get those sometimes.
> 
> I've booked a proper test for today.. grrrrrr.. how long does that take? I'm so fucked off at my employers who have been putting subtle pressure on us to go in a couple of times a week. About 10 of us had lunch so I assume that's all of them out now too. We're also expected to return full time, 5 days a week as of Monday.


Yes, you need to isolate for 10 days from the day you were with her. Sorry.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 16, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Chris Whitty warns UK could be plunged back into restrictions in just 5 weeks
> 
> 
> Speaking ahead of "Freedom Day", the Chief Medical Officer said a spike in hospitalisations could leave the NHS in "trouble again, surprisingly fast"
> ...



I've just posted that on the main thread, bit late for him to be speaking out like that now, should have done it a week or two ago.


----------



## LDC (Jul 16, 2021)

Anyone watching the BBC news this morning? Talked about a new study in _The Lancet_ showing very high rates of long term organ damage among admissions to hospital among all covid patients, even younger (<50 years old) age groups. I'm sure 50% of people suffering that was mentioned.

On a quick look I think it's this one, but will correct later if not...





__





						DEFINE_ME
					





					www.thelancet.com


----------



## Petcha (Jul 16, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> Yes, you need to isolate for 10 days from the day you were with her. Sorry.



PCR came back negative. But I'll do what I'm told.

The person I feel most sorry for is the work experience kid we had in, only with us for two weeks but was fully buzzing out at being in an office for the first time. I think a lot of us have forgotten what that feeling was like!

Unfortunately she sat with us at lunch. So she'll be finishing her work experience via Teams. This fucking thing has been so horribly cruel on young people starting out on their lives.


----------



## kropotkin (Jul 16, 2021)

You'd expect it to be negative so soon after exposure either way. I wouldn't have even gone and got one


----------



## Petcha (Jul 16, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> You'd expect it to be negative so soon after exposure either way. I wouldn't have even gone and got one



Well that was what the NHS and my employer advised


----------



## kropotkin (Jul 16, 2021)

Meant to say - good luck. I hope you are ok.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 16, 2021)

> Latest figures from swab tests in the community suggest in England one in every 95 people has the virus - up from one in 160 in the previous week.
> 
> In Scotland, one in every 90 people is estimated to be infected, while in Northern Ireland it is one in 290 and in Wales one in 360.
> 
> The more infectious Delta variant accounts for almost every case.



#worldbeating


----------



## Yossarian (Jul 17, 2021)

Ontario moves to the next stage of reopening today, my much-missed favourite bar is celebrating that and its 4th anniversary with $4 beers and live bands all day. 

The case numbers are low enough to justify it - but until 2 weeks after next Tuesday, I'm only half-vaccinated, and I'm looking at the Delta variant kicking the shit out of Britain and thinking I might hold off at least a couple of months before I do anything that involves a lot of unmasked people indoors.


----------



## Riklet (Jul 17, 2021)

I just disable the bluetooth on my phone when i'm not actually going somewhere.  So basically I just use the app when indoors in close proximity, which tbf is not much at the moment and I'm not visiting friends indoors etc either.  

Sounds annoying being pinged when there's little chance of it being anything. I'd probs self isolate and get a test anyway just in case tho.


----------



## kropotkin (Jul 17, 2021)

Once more into the breach, dear friends. For the fourth (maybe fifth?) time i will run a covid unit again from Monday. Sigh.


----------



## Sue (Jul 17, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> Once more into the breach, dear friends. For the fourth (maybe fifth?) time i will run a covid unit again from Monday. Sigh.


Good luck, kropotkin.


----------



## Supine (Jul 17, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> Once more into the breach, dear friends. For the fourth (maybe fifth?) time i will run a covid unit again from Monday. Sigh.



Best of luck. Hero.

This one is on Butcher Boris and Javid-19.


----------



## MrSki (Jul 18, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> Once more into the breach, dear friends. For the fourth (maybe fifth?) time i will run a covid unit again from Monday. Sigh.


Much respect & thank you.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Jul 18, 2021)

crossthebreeze said:


> I think Sunday - the 10 days start the day after the contact.
> 
> Me and my partner were in close contact with a friend on Tuesday who started coughing on Tuesday evening,  tested positive on a Lft,  and told us immediatly. They ordered a PCR on Tues night but are still waiting for it. Meanwhile we are yet to be contacted by T&T/nhs app and official guidance is we don't need to self isolate until that happens - just social distance!
> 
> ...


An update:
I got a text from. T&T yesterday. 
My partner didn't. 

She had spent more time with the friend who now has covid than I had, he says he gave both contact details. No trace through app because he had Bluetooth switched off. She needs an official notification for work, and she is also CEV.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

elbows said:


> OK following on from my last post, here are some of the figures from last weeks variant surveillance report. edit - ah I see 2hats beat me to it but I'll still post this anyway. Its just some of the numbers from the table he mentioned.
> 
> These numbers are all looking at confirmed Delta cases in England from 1st Feb to 21st June, so not the entire picture but a reasonable guide in some ways:
> 
> ...



118 double vaccinated dying....😳


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

kropotkin said:


> Once more into the breach, dear friends. For the fourth (maybe fifth?) time i will run a covid unit again from Monday. Sigh.



Strength to you.


----------



## prunus (Jul 18, 2021)

crossthebreeze said:


> An update:
> I got a text from. T&T yesterday.
> My partner didn't.
> 
> She had spent more time with the friend who now has covid than I had, he says he gave both contact details. No trace through app because he had Bluetooth switched off. She needs an official notification for work, and she is also CEV.



That sucks.

When your friend’s PCR test (assuming positive) is in the system your partner and probably you too should get pinged by the app, assuming <2m contact for >15 mins, which should do as an official notification for work I’d think.
It is a shambles though.


----------



## gentlegreen (Jul 18, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> 118 double vaccinated dying....😳


 Presumably those unlucky enough to have responded poorly to the vaccine ...

I still don't know if my 5 days of fun with the first AZ was my response to the disabled vector or the spike ...


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> Presumably those unlucky enough to have responded poorly to the vaccine ...



Oh fuck ... that'll be my tribe then.. 😳
Fuckin depressing. 
17 months cocooning.
Double vaccinated. 
Still at risk because of weird immune system. 

Mind you...I think I am more Zen
😁


----------



## prunus (Jul 18, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> Presumably those unlucky enough to have responded poorly to the vaccine ...
> 
> I still don't know if my 5 days of fun with the first AZ was my response to the disabled vector or the spike ...



Some of them, maybe, but some will have been vulnerable in other ways, mainly I would suspect age-related, despite adequate vaccine response, and some will have just been unlucky.

The vaccine, or rather the immune response it engenders, is not a magic shield. It will fail from time to time even in healthy individuals with robust immune systems. And when we’re generating 5 to 6 figures of new infections _per day_ even levels of failure as low as one in a million will show up in the figures.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

Vaccine failure will chip away at public trust..
🙁


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jul 18, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Vaccine failure will chip away at public trust..
> 🙁



Sadly, they were never going to offer 100% protection, frankly it's a miracle that they offer such a high rate of protection, considering it's around only 50% for the flu jab.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Sadly, they were never going to offer 100% protection, frankly it's a miracle that they offer such a high rate of protection, considering it's around only 50% for the flu jab.




That makes me feel a lot better...

😳


----------



## elbows (Jul 18, 2021)

The vaccines are really quite impressive but for various reasons they were still never going to be as protective as to live up to simplistic binary thinking about vaccines. And since authorities obviously want to encourage vaccination, they have always felt the need to play up how effective the vaccines are.

Plus the vaccines were always going to get the best results in terms of stopping death and hospitalisation, and would show their limitations more when it comes to getting infected, ability to transmit the virus to others still.

Plus vaccines still offer protection against Delta but not as much protection against Delta as for the original strain of the virus.

Plus Oxford AstraZenica is not though to be as good at preventing infection with Delta as Pfizer is.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 18, 2021)

elbows said:


> The vaccines are really quite impressive but for various reasons they were still never going to be as protective as to live up to simplistic binary thinking about vaccines. And since authorities obviously want to encourage vaccination, they have always felt the need to play up how effective the vaccines are.
> 
> Plus the vaccines were always going to get the best results in terms of stopping death and hospitalisation, and would show their limitations more when it comes to getting infected, ability to transmit the virus to others still.
> 
> ...


Yup


So the government of cunts should not have banged their #worldbeating drum

Fucking shit show of thieves and cheating cunts


----------



## 2hats (Jul 18, 2021)

elbows said:


> Plus Oxford AstraZenica is not though to be as good at preventing infection with Delta as Pfizer is.


Quite possibly AZD1222 is less* (generally, typically) effective at preventing _infection_ up to the first ~6 months relative to BNT162b2 (modulo seroconversion, age, etc), but after around (a hand-waving) 6 months there will be little in it (for non-convalescents). Both equally effective at preventing serious disease and death.

* note: *less* effective, *not* ineffective.


----------



## Aladdin (Jul 18, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Yup
> 
> 
> So the government of cunts should not have banged their #worldbeating drum
> ...




It's happened here too. 
Everyone in a rush to get vaccinated...which is great...but nobody telling those of us who are vaccinated and  immunocompromised, that we basically have to continue to live  quite cocooned lives and stay masked, because our level of immunity might not cut the mustard.

It's clear that a third dose is being mooted for these patients in the US and UK too I think. 
But how long will that third vaccine last for immunocompromised


----------



## 5t3IIa (Jul 18, 2021)

Advice please? If I spent Friday  afternoon inside and out with someone who then had a positive  PCR on Sat. Must I self isolate?

I haven’t got any symptoms and just did a negative LFT… This person has no app and chose to contact the people they’d seen in the preceding week rather than fill in any T&T paperwork so I won’t get pinged. I imagine my job being difficult about this. What should I do?


----------



## MrSki (Jul 18, 2021)

Isolate.


----------



## 5t3IIa (Jul 18, 2021)

MrSki said:


> Isolate.


I want to 😬 But thinking I’ll need something official for work 😒


----------



## elbows (Jul 18, 2021)

If that happened to me then I'd tell work the truth except I'd probably not mention my contact not having bothered with test & trace, and would instead say you havent been officially contacted by test and trace yet, with an emphasis on how overloaded that system is right now. I would emphasise how much time I'd spent with that person.


----------



## zora (Jul 18, 2021)

If they had a positive PCR test, shouldn't T&T call them to ask about their contacts, rather than them choosing to fill in (or not) some paperwork...* 🤔 *(Genuine question, don't know how the system is supposed to work at the moment).

So I would make sure that the person knows that you would want to and need to be named as a contact if any official contact is made.
Otherwise I would do as elbows says, and your employers would have to be pretty dickish not to accept this (though I do readily accept that there are a lot of dickish employers!)

Apols for the (possible) cross-thread tag, crossthebreeze, aren't you in a similar situation? Any news on this?

Also wonder if there is any official advice around this...
I guess it's Johnson & Co relying on the common sense and public spiritedness of employers again...


----------



## MrSki (Jul 18, 2021)

5t3IIa said:


> I want to 😬 But thinking I’ll need something official for work 😒


Go on the NHS website self isolate & fill in the bits that will give you a certificate.


----------



## Riklet (Jul 18, 2021)

5t3IIa said:


> I want to 😬 But thinking I’ll need something official for work 😒



Might be worth self isolating and ordering a PCR test now anyway? Idk if this is recommended but hey ho. Those LFTs arent as reliable.

Can you work from home next few days?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 18, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Jul 18, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Jul 18, 2021)




----------



## elbows (Jul 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


> ...some modelling edited out by elbows so that this quote isnt full of huge graphics.....


Have you noticed how soon the peak in cases comes in some of their scenarios, including some very good and very bad scenarios?

This means that big clues are coming during the remainder of July as to which of these scenarios will most closely resemble reality. In my mind we are into the zone of the moment of truth for this wave.

Its from this by the way in case anyone wondered what the source was https://acmedsci.ac.uk/file-download/4747802


----------



## zahir (Jul 19, 2021)

A thread on transmission outdoors


----------



## Chilli.s (Jul 19, 2021)

Fuckin Sainsbury's delivery man unmasked at my aging parents home, yeah you're helping them with a delivery (that's your job) but keep yer mask on. cunt


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jul 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


>



liked for the facepalm


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

One of the mobile testing centres in Luton reported 26% positive tests yesterday. We are running around 12% so far today.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


> One of the mobile testing centres in Luton reported 26% positive tests yesterday. We are running around 12% so far today.


just for comparison, how were you doing at the start of the month?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> just for comparison, how were you doing at the start of the month?


Less that 1%


----------



## kropotkin (Jul 19, 2021)

5t3IIa said:


> Advice please? If I spent Friday  afternoon inside and out with someone who then had a positive  PCR on Sat. Must I self isolate?
> 
> I haven’t got any symptoms and just did a negative LFT… This person has no app and chose to contact the people they’d seen in the preceding week rather than fill in any T&T paperwork so I won’t get pinged. I imagine my job being difficult about this. What should I do?


Obviously you need to isolate! How could the answer possibly be anything else!?


----------



## Brainaddict (Jul 19, 2021)

5t3IIa said:


> I want to 😬 But thinking I’ll need something official for work 😒


You seem to be thinking mostly in terms of official processes and I can see why that might seem the practical approach. But it's reasonably likely you have covid right now and maybe that needs to be more your focus. I would not only isolate but get an order of shopping arranged, and orders of other things you might need while ill. Do you have a thermometer and paracetamol to hand for example?


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

Following this accounts tweets today


----------



## 5t3IIa (Jul 19, 2021)

It was a hypothetical, apologies for misleading anyone. You've got to be nice to me as my mum died of covid anf now my mother-in-law has it. I just want to get out of work as I am _upset_.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

Lateral flow tests run out as 'freedom day' sparks huge demand
					

Members of the public can normally order a pack of seven LFTs every day, to be taken at home, without any restriction on supply




					inews.co.uk
				




#worldbeating


----------



## elbows (Jul 19, 2021)

Infect The World
Let them know its Covid time again.

It's Covid time, there's no need to be afraid
At Covids time, we let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world at Covid time
But say a prayer, Pray for the other ones
At Covid time it's hard, but when you're having fun
There's a world outside your window
And it's a world of dread and fear
Where the only water flowing
Is the bitter sting of tears
And the Covid bells that ring
There are the clanging chimes of doom
Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you


----------



## Brainaddict (Jul 19, 2021)

5t3IIa said:


> It was a hypothetical, apologies for misleading anyone. You've got to be nice to me as my mum died of covid anf now my mother-in-law has it. I just want to get out of work as I am _upset_.


I'm sorry to hear that. If they don't have good compassionate leave policies it's probably easier to just call in sick (with non-covid), no? Say you have a stomach bug or something that will give you a few days.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jul 19, 2021)

Brainaddict said:


> I'm sorry to hear that. If they don't have good compassionate leave policies it's probably easier to just call in sick (with non-covid), no? Say you have a stomach bug or something that will give you a few days.


yep, there is a nasty norovirus going round at the moment.
A colleague of mine suffering from it shut the local covid testing centre when his throat swab induced massive spray vomiting.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

My local wards cases are up 75% week on week


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


> One of the mobile testing centres in Luton reported 26% positive tests yesterday. We are running around 12% so far today.


Ended up 21% positive tests  

Also our bins/recycling are overflowing as there are so many refuse workers isolating so that bodes well


----------



## Badgers (Jul 19, 2021)

Should just tattoo a bar code or number on their wrists 









						Arm band calls for those with weak immune systems - BBC News
					

Neil Collingwood's medical conditions mean he is vulnerable to Covid.




					www.bbc.com


----------



## gentlegreen (Jul 20, 2021)

No way did I actually have covid - just my persistent sinusitis plus hayfever - but I fecked up the PCR test - sent it back without registering it.
I've just registered it 5 days late on the off-chance that it still works - I'm guessing that there must be quite a few people who do that.
I'd had some of the symptoms for over a week in any case ..

I'm double-vaxed and live like a monk and have always behaved around others as if I was hideously infectious...

EDIT :-



Dear ********
Birth date: *******
Test date: 15 July 2021
NHS number: ********
Your coronavirus test result is negative. It’s likely you did not have the virus when the test was done.
Keep following coronavirus advice including:


regular handwashing
social distancing
wearing a face covering where recommended


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 20, 2021)

If you catch it somewhere, how long does it take for one of the free lateral flow tests to report a positive result? Hours? Days?


----------



## MrSki (Jul 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> If you catch it somewhere, how long does it take for one of the free lateral flow tests to report a positive result? Hours? Days?


30 minutes.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 20, 2021)

MrSki said:


> 30 minutes.


No, I mean say I caught it on Monday, would a test pick it up on Monday night? Tuesday? Friday? etc.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> If you catch it somewhere, how long does it take for one of the free lateral flow tests to report a positive result? Hours? Days?


Maximum 30 minutes


----------



## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> No, I mean say I caught it on Monday, would a test pick it up on Monday night? Tuesday? Friday? etc.


In about 12 hours but ideally 24 hours to be sure. 

If you have symptoms then arrange a PCR test not a lateral flow.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

Thread below. 

Round and round we go...


----------



## elbows (Jul 20, 2021)

Several people from the business department claimed that, yes, but its been contradicted since.



> Individual businesses will have to contact their relevant government department to apply for any exemption.
> 
> Those deemed eligible, which includes NHS and care staff, will be able to take daily tests instead.
> 
> ...











						Backlash as pinged staff rules called unworkable
					

Exemptions will be "considered on a case-by-case basis", but firms warn time is not on their side.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Thread below.
> 
> Round and round we go...



Not according to the BBC: Covid-19: Crucial for pinged people to self-isolate - No 10


----------



## prunus (Jul 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> If you catch it somewhere, how long does it take for one of the free lateral flow tests to report a positive result? Hours? Days?



Depends - you need to have developed the infection (ie viruses replicating in your cells) for the LFT to detect it.  This can take up to several weeks, but the majority of people will develop an infection (if they are going to) within 10 days (hence the 10 day isolation).

The quickest it can develop is thought to be about 24 hours, but it can probably be even faster in rare cases.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 20, 2021)

Went to the supermarket for first time since 'Freedom day'. They've removed the 'In/Out' sides of the exit and the small queue barriers (haven't seen a queue there since occasionally on a weekend at start of year). About 60% of people still wearing masks - fairly encouraging, but still not much good to vulnerable people.


----------



## Dystopiary (Jul 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Thread below.
> 
> Round and round we go...



I find that guy a bit too clickbaity tbh.


----------



## MrSki (Jul 20, 2021)

Dystopiary said:


> I find that guy a bit too clickbaity tbh.


He has been pretty solid with his posts for the last few years.


----------



## Dystopiary (Jul 20, 2021)

MrSki said:


> He has been pretty solid with his posts for the last few years.


He definitely posts some good info, but I do find him, well, yeah a bit clickbaity sometimes.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Not according to the BBC: Covid-19: Crucial for pinged people to self-isolate - No 10


Read the whole thread


----------



## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

MrSki said:


> He has been pretty solid with his posts for the last few years.


Yup


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Jul 20, 2021)

just been following a discussion on teh tweeter about the merits of train companies encouraging mask wearing.

seems to be a fairly vocal "if i have to wear a mask, i'm not travelling by train" faction and a significant "if twats aren't wearing masks, i'm not travelling by train" faction


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## wemakeyousoundb (Jul 20, 2021)

Puddy_Tat said:


> just been following a discussion on teh tweeter about the merits of train companies encouraging mask wearing.
> 
> seems to be a fairly vocal "if i have to wear a mask, i'm not travelling by train" faction and a significant "if twats aren't wearing masks, i'm not travelling by train" faction


can we say Maskexit yet?


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## Badgers (Jul 20, 2021)

Wonder if we will pass 100 deaths and 50k new cases tomorrow? It seems likely


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## LDC (Jul 21, 2021)

Watched some TV last night; Cummings saying the PM delayed lockdown against scientific advice, which almost certainly killed thousands. Then watched the news showing possibly 4 million dead in India, the world flooded or burning due to climate change, and a billionaire's private trip into space which apparently was awesome.

Fuck's sake.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

Government urged to share Covid data from Euro 2020 final as cases soar among England fans
					

More than 60,000 attended the final but it descended into chaos when thousands more ticketless fans congregated outside before the game




					inews-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org
				






> The Government has been urged to share Covid infection data from the Euro 2020 final immediately after swathes of England fans who attended tested positive for the virus.
> 
> Fans who caught the virus at the game have dubbed it the ‘Wembley variant’, with one member of the England Supporters Travel club telling i last week that “pretty much everybody caught” Covid who was at the game and the suggestion only hundreds got it at the match would be “conservative”.


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## IC3D (Jul 22, 2021)

I do suspect the govt plan is to rapidly infect as many as possible over the summer and hope for the best. Opening up, Wembley, nightclubs and switching off track and trace.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

IC3D said:


> I do suspect the govt plan is to rapidly infect as many as possible over the summer and hope for the best. Opening up, Wembley, nightclubs and switching off track and trace.


It was always the plan


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

Cases holding under 50k per day but there are hardly any rest kits available. Yesterday the number of reported tests dropped 200k so, alongside those people who don't test we are way way behind on reporting of new cases. Also there are a lot of positive people who don't know.


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## existentialist (Jul 22, 2021)

Not quite sure of exactly which thread to put this in, but some of these stories of quarantine security guards abusing their position by propositioning female guests are about the second most unpleasant thing I've read this morning.









						Lone women in Covid quarantine hotels to get female guards
					

The government is responding to continuing complaints of sexual harassment in hotel quarantine.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




The MOST unpleasant thing I've read this morning are the responses from some of the companies, trying to minimise and ignore the concerns of the imprisoned women. Blame-shifting everywhere, with hotels, security guard companies, and DHSC all busily Tefloning up their shoulders, and leaving these women high and dry. It's fucking obscene.


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## existentialist (Jul 22, 2021)

You will note from the article that the DHSC is saying, rather half-heartedly, that it will try to get female guards, but if it can't, it'll just double up on the male guards 

Of course, if they will insist on using companies like Mitie and G4S, not exactly notorious for quality hiring practices, pay, and taking responsibility for things, this kind of thing was almost inevitable. As, I suppose, is the wall of denial, silence, and prevarication. These women (and men) in quarantine are owed a duty of care by the Government, and it clearly doesn't feel at all responsible for enacting that.


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## magneze (Jul 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cases holding under 50k per day but there are hardly any rest kits available. Yesterday the number of reported tests dropped 200k so, alongside those people who don't test we are way way behind on reporting of new cases. Also there are a lot of positive people who don't know.


My vague hope is that we're at some kind of peak.


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cases holding under 50k per day but there are hardly any rest kits available. Yesterday the number of reported tests dropped 200k so, alongside those people who don't test we are way way behind on reporting of new cases. Also there are a lot of positive people who don't know.


Lateral flow tests?

When drilling down to England rather than the UK, the testing section of the dashboard has a graph for number of lateral flow tests conducted. And it looks like the pattern is that its always down on Tuesdays. And I was expecting it to fall anyway because of school holidays beginning in some areas. Will be interesting to see if it goes back up in Wednesday numbers like it normally does.

I doubt this is the only factor behind test numbers reducing, but its a fairly large chunk of the picture which complicates my ability to see what else is going on at the moment via data.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> Lateral flow tests?
> 
> When drilling down to England rather than the UK, the testing section of the dashboard has a graph for number of lateral flow tests conducted. And it looks like the pattern is that its always down on Tuesdays. And I was expecting it to fall anyway because of school holidays beginning in some areas. Will be interesting to see if it goes back up in Wednesday numbers like it normally does.
> 
> ...


Lateral flow centres and home tests. 

Most chemist's round here have run out. Seems nobody can order online. Businesses can no longer get bulk freebies for their staff. 

That, plus schools closing, FreeDumb Day and sunshine makes up the drop. My point is that the case numbers are MUCH lower than they should be when we factor in the delta varient and recent large gatherings.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

For reference we distributed 7.5k home test kit boxes (with 7 individual tests in each) last week in Luton. We had approx 7.5k left on Monday morning and have no eta on more. We ordered 100k and have been told to expect 20k 'soon'


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

Cheers for the interesting info and view from the ground.

I have an open mind about when cases will actually peak, so I cannot really tell the difference between all these different factors that influence number of positive cases reported at the moment, the picture is complex and messy. Even my ability to use Scotland as a vague guide has been hampered by a lack of recent hospital admissions data for Scotland which I would use to validate that their peak was real.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

It is hard to keep up. Central government are close to useless and think every town/county can be managed the same. 

We have now got 'Vacci Taxis' which will take people to and from vaccination centres. They have recently also taken on delivering test kits to unpaid carers and immune compromised people as they can't get any. 

Also the last two weeks of school term we had loads of parents and teachers coming to us as they had run out. Even a few NHS and care home staff are in the same boat.


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## existentialist (Jul 22, 2021)

Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...


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## prunus (Jul 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...



Absolutely. However I have reservations about this ability and competence of this government to be able to pull off such a trick. I think it’s purely fortuitous for them, based on them not planning to increase test supplies in advance of the very predictable increase in demand as a result of their actions.

Ie it’s incompetence, rather than malevolent genius.


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## scalyboy (Jul 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> The Government has been urged to share Covid infection data from the Euro 2020 final immediately after swathes of England fans who attended tested positive for the virus.
> 
> Fans who caught the virus at the game have dubbed it the ‘Wembley variant’, with one member of the England Supporters Travel club telling i last week that “pretty much everybody caught” Covid who was at the game and the suggestion only hundreds got it at the match would be “conservative”.


One of my neighbours just told us she has Covid; she was double jabbed. She thinks she got it from a friend who went to the final.


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...


I dont think they are actually interested in making the numbers look better at this particular stage.

Thats something they might like to achieve in future, but at this stage of this wave such things have been utterly trumped by other priorities.

They have their eyes on a bigger prize - to have a peak and decline that isnt lockdown-induced. And in order to stand some chance of that happening, they left certain brakes in place. Some of those brakes involve testing and contact tracing/the app. As we have seen via the recent emphasis on the 'pingdemic' by the media, the self-isolation stuff is a very big deal in terms of the numbers of people that it affects and the disruption that it causes. But some of that disruption is to the viruses ability to find ever increasing numbers of victims. So the self-isolation stuff, during the peak period of a wave, becames a sort of mini lockdown by stealth. This disruption makes the government look bad, but clearly they felt that they couldnt make the wave planning numbers add up if they removed those brakes at this particular stage. So even though the disruption makes them look really bad, they didnt even want to fiddle with the app sensitivity at this stage despite all the pressure. And I take that as a further indication that they realise that the self-isolation brakes are still very much required at this stage to prevent hospitalisation numbers soaring beyond the limits. They would much, much rather this big disruption and mess for a number of weeks than having to u-turn on key irreversible relaxation pledges by bringing back other forms of brake.

And I think that any temptation to 'fake the peak' via test system limitations is removed by the fact that we'll be able to see the real peak via hospital data later anyway. Plus authorities have not tended to prematurely jump at possible peaks in the case data either, they have tended to use cautious language about peaks and not to describe them as such until a fair amount of time had gone by since the positive test data implied a peak. Scotland was a recent example - they didnt acknowledge the case peak much at all to start with, then used language like levelling off when the numbers had actually been falling for a while, and only in recent days started to talk about the declines. In other words authorities tend to wait until multiple different sorts of data confirm the peak, and arent keen to make fools of themselves by describing something as a peak if theres a fair chance it will later turn out to be an artefact of the testing system rather than a real peak.

Plus the government made a huge deal of how large the case numbers could become in this country, by chucking around figures like 100,000 per day. Now it is possible that they gave a very large number because they were hoping the real number would be lower than that so they could be all triumphant about it. But again they know that the hospitalisation figures and deaths are what really count, so the potential gains from fucking around with case numbers arent very high.

And it makes them look bad when the testing system turns out to be unable to cope. And there are measures such as percentage of tests returning positive which are used to judge such matters and to make educated guesses about reality vs what the daily positive numbers are. And there are infection surveys that use random household testing to demonstrate the scale and direction of travel.


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## scalyboy (Jul 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> The Government has been urged to share Covid infection data from the Euro 2020 final immediately after swathes of England fans who attended tested positive for the virus.
> 
> Fans who caught the virus at the game have dubbed it the ‘Wembley variant’, with one member of the England Supporters Travel club telling i last week that “pretty much everybody caught” Covid who was at the game and the suggestion only hundreds got it at the match would be “conservative”.


If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air? 
Back In 2020 I thought there was some uncertainty as to whether large outdoor gatherings of people were risky - on the one hand Cheltenham and Liverpool-Atletico are believed to have increased infections, but on the other hand I recall reading there were no infection spikes after big anti-vaxxer demos, Bournemouth beach last summer, or BLM events. 
Which is correct? Or is the amount of shouting and singing going to be a factor?


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## sideboob (Jul 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...


🤫 You`re letting everyone in on Japans secret. I was feeling really sick, trouble breathing so I thought I would be reasponsible and get a test done. I couldn`t find anywhere locally to get a test, unless I wanted to pay big money. I`m sure (hopefully) that they`re more accessable in the big cities, but fuck me what a clusterfuck.


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air?
> Back In 2020 I thought there was some uncertainty as to whether large outdoor gatherings of people were risky - on the one hand Cheltenham and Liverpool-Atletico are believed to have increased infections, but on the other hand I recall reading there were no infection spikes after big anti-vaxxer demos, Bournemouth beach last summer, or BLM events.
> Which is correct? Or is the amount of shouting and singing going to be a factor?



In my book Delta transmits more easily in general, and that applies to all settings. Outdoors still safer than indoors, but risk increased by this variant.

Behaviours including singing is an issue. But then so are things such as crowd density and pinch points and travel to and from the event and whether its really all outdoors or only certain parts outdoors.

When judging particular events and images of large groups, I am very heavily influenced byt the current prevalence of the virus. A couple of months ago the number of infected people in the crowd should have been very much smaller than it would be today.


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

Plus in this era of vaccines we might expect a lot more infected people to have milder symptoms than they would have had without vaccines, and be more likely to carry on with their lives instead of geting a test, isolating etc.


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## LDC (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air?



Yes, it is.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> Plus in this era of vaccines we might expect a lot more infected people to have milder symptoms than they would have had without vaccines, and be more likely to carry on with their lives instead of geting a test, isolating etc.


The spreaders ^


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> Cheers for the interesting info and view from the ground.


More from the ground  

East of England have been waiting so long for a 'national testing strategy' that they have given up despite being told that is what is needed. They are just putting together their own. 

Great in principle but this sort of government incompetence is why numbers and strategies are all over the place.


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## scalyboy (Jul 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> In my book Delta transmits more easily in general, and that applies to all settings. Outdoors still safer than indoors, but risk increased by this variant.
> 
> Behaviours including singing is an issue. But then so are things such as crowd density and pinch points and travel too and from the event and whether its really all outdoors or only certain parts outdoors.
> 
> When judging particular events and images of large groups, I am very heavily influenced byt the current prevalence of the virus. A couple of months ago the number of infected people in the crowd should have been very much smaller than it would be today.


Thanks elbows, I was hoping you'd respond to this. Not very reassuring about Delta, but good to be informed nonetheless.


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## 2hats (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air?


A football stadium, or any environment with features obstructing and interrupting the flow of the turbulent boundary layer (urban structures, tall thick vegetation, etc), is not the 'open outdoors'. Infections will quite likely be higher than on a relatively flat open plain or exposed location, in a breeze, and even more so where the density of persons is high and they are engaged in activities which raise spirometric output.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> Thanks elbows, I was hoping you'd respond to this. Not very reassuring about Delta, but good to be informed nonetheless.


It is worth knowing and telling people. At work (outside) we are testing every morning, wearing masks and social distancing. Still have had colleagues (double jabbed) catching it. 

Things like clubs, sports events and such are really bad with the Delta variant. 

Will see if I can find the details for this one. After the Euros St Petersburg recorded it largest number of cases since Covid began. Also a scary % of Finnish fans returning to Finland (few other nations fans travelled there) tested positive.


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## BillRiver (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air?
> Back In 2020 I thought there was some uncertainty as to whether large outdoor gatherings of people were risky - on the one hand Cheltenham and Liverpool-Atletico are believed to have increased infections, but on the other hand I recall reading there were no infection spikes after big anti-vaxxer demos, Bournemouth beach last summer, or BLM events.
> Which is correct? Or is the amount of shouting and singing going to be a factor?



Info coming out of Australia says yes, Delta is more easily transmissible, including outdoors, and with very brief contact (eg going through turnstiles to take up distancing seating at outdoor events).


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

2hats said:


> A football stadium, or any environment with features obstructing and interrupting the flow of the turbulent boundary layer (urban structures, tall thick vegetation, etc), is not the 'open outdoors'. Infections will quite likely be higher than on a relatively flat open plain or exposed location, in a breeze, and even more so where the density of persons is high and they are engaged in activities which raise spirometric output.


Also the matches with people distancing still needed fans to be crowding in stadium corridors, local pubs and public transport etc.


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## BillRiver (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy



CHO in this context stands for Chief Medical Officer (of the state of Victoria).

Eric Feigl-Ding's blue-tick twitter account bio says he is an "Epidemiologist & health economist. Senior Fellow, Federation of AmericanScientists."

Dr Noor Bari is "MBBS BSc Hons Infectious Diseases Emergency Advanced Trainee" in New South Wales.


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## Badgers (Jul 22, 2021)

If the Liverpool game and the cunts at Cheltenham caused a big spike we are lucky the Delta variant was not about.


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## wemakeyousoundb (Jul 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Lateral flow centres and home tests.
> 
> Most chemist's round here have run out. Seems nobody can order online. Businesses can no longer get bulk freebies for their staff.
> 
> That, plus schools closing, FreeDumb Day and sunshine makes up the drop. My point is that the case numbers are MUCH lower than they should be when we factor in the delta varient and recent large gatherings.


Anecdata: ordered some LFT online effortlessly 80 minutes before your post.


scalyboy said:


> Which is correct? Or is the amount of shouting and singing going to be a factor?


singing and shouting definitely increase the likelihood of transmission.


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## scalyboy (Jul 22, 2021)

Wembley was asking for negative test results as a condition of admission, but the video clips showing security overwhelmed and loads of fans charging in without tickets would render that ineffective.
And in any case, "the test needs to be taken within 48 hours of the time stadium gates open (meaning three hours before match kick-off)", so people could've been infected the day after they took the test... short of banning all large events, it's difficult to see how these superspreader events can be avoided in future.


wemakeyousoundb said:


> Anecdata: ordered some LFT online effortlessly 80 minutes before your post.
> 
> singing and shouting definitely increase the likelihood of transmission.


‘Liking’ people’s posts on the subjects of Delta’s increased transmittability and on outdoor infections, but of course I’m not liking the news one bit…

Since everything’s pointing towards the UK building up to another big wave of infection, thanks to this shambolic bunch of crooks in power.

So the hope, I guess, is that the vaccination programme will prevent most people from developing life-threatening Covid, and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. But what of ‘long Covid’?

Like other vulnerable people, I was told to stop shielding ages ago, but now it makes me wonder if I should be again. Although, paradoxically, it now appears that those most at risk are the demographic most likely to be out at clubs, gigs etc, those who were offered the vaccine last … and who were considered - because of their youth and presumed health - to be least at risk.


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> Since everything’s pointing towards the UK building up to another big wave of infection, thanks to this shambolic bunch of crooks in power.



We arent building up to it, we are right in the large part of the wave already and have been for some time. Though exactly what I'd claim does depend a bit on which region of England we are talking about.

I cannot say exactly what stage we are at until we are far enough along the downside of the curve to clearly describe the peak as being in our past. But however large this wave turns out to be, we already reached really stupendous numbers some time ago.


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## scalyboy (Jul 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> We arent building up to it, we are right in the large part of the wave already and have been for some time. Though exactly what I'd claim does depend a bit on which region of England we are talking about.
> 
> I cannot say exactly what stage we are at until we are far enough along the downside of the curve to clearly describe the peak as being in our past. But however large this wave turns out to be, we already reached really stupendous numbers some time ago.


Yes, I see what you mean now, it's already happening  I didn't realise how high the rate had already got. As you say, right in the middle.

And with the abandonment of most restrictions, isn't the UK infection rate bound to continue rising - to its highest point yet?

It's hard for me to see what could start to bring the rate down, quite the opposite in fact. Unless the previously unjabbed (youngest age groups and formerly 'hesitant' people) got vaccinated in large numbers - would that help?

But that's assuming these new infections are largely among unvaccinated people, which may not be the case. For example, my neighbour who tested positive a few days ago is in her 30s, I think, and she’s double-jabbed.

What a shitshow 😡


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## elbows (Jul 22, 2021)

I'm a pandemic bore, I go on about those things all the time. So right now I only offer something in somewhat simplified and condensed form:

Delta variant being more spreadable + relaxation of rules + high numbers of infectious people + single dose of vaccine not as protective against Delta + bad behaviour + risky mass events + Euros socialising + some people not bothering with masks + any loss of immunity due to the passing of time

vs

School holidays + disruption from people self-isolating causing reduced level of mixing between people + people being more cautious because the news of this wave got more serious + nice weather changing behaviours eg people more likely to have good ventilation and meet outdoors + good behaviours + lots of people still wearing masks + less potential victims as time goes on via vaccine-induced immunity + immunity because the person has already caught the virus + no more Euros socialising because its all over.

Not sure right now how many important things I missed off that list. But you probably get the idea. Things arent quite as straight forward as cases just keeping rising until a lockdown, there are other ways for it to hit the limits, some temporary and some a bit more longlasting (hopefully).

Check Scotland for example. Earlier Euros exit, earlier start to school holidays, earlier start to their wave. Some differences to rules and timetable of relaxation of restrictions, And it looks like they peaked weeks ago. To what extent will that be repeated in England? Will things simply keep on improving in Scotland now? Dont have all the answers, but some interesting questions.


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## scalyboy (Jul 23, 2021)

elbows said:


> I'm a pandemic bore


Not at all boring; like many other people here, I’ve appreciated your in-depth and balanced analyses. Give thanks 🙏🏼


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## Knotted (Jul 23, 2021)

Is my workplace normal?

It's frontline work that's been ongoing throughout the lockdowns. There's a few in the office including myself who have been working from home although there's constant pressure to go in. Of those staying in the office/onsite there has been ZERO mask wearing or social distancing and this is just the work place culture now. There's machismo resentment towards home working and resentment towards restrictions. One or two people go on holiday to Spain whenever they can, vaccine take up is good but only because it helps alleviate personal restrictions eg. going on holiday.

I threw my boss out of a meeting yesterday. We had a site audit back in November that restricted access to the meeting room to only two people at a time and officially nothing has changed (senior management are dithering about what rules to impose for everybody to ignore). Anyway the boss came in without a mask as the fourth person and I just told him to get out. He was absolutely furious and tore down the poster the two people only poster but he realised he couldn't come in. And then told him to get another audit done. And he had to agree with purple face rage. Fucking hilarious tbh. Later he was in calm manipulative mode and obviously I was just in a difficult mood again.

Oh yes and a couple of the directors including the CEO have shown up recently without masks or a care in the world. So head office is probably just as bad.

But generally speaking I don't know what to do. There are at least three Covid vulnerable people who work in the office. There are a few people who agree with me but most are either long resigned to it or actively Covid sceptic. So I'm fighting a lone battle. Do I get a union in?


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## Badgers (Jul 23, 2021)

Knotted tell the cuntboss to phone me


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## Brainaddict (Jul 23, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Is my workplace normal?
> 
> It's frontline work that's been ongoing throughout the lockdowns. There's a few in the office including myself who have been working from home although there's constant pressure to go in. Of those staying in the office/onsite there has been ZERO mask wearing or social distancing and this is just the work place culture now. There's machismo resentment towards home working and resentment towards restrictions. One or two people go on holiday to Spain whenever they can, vaccine take up is good but only because it helps alleviate personal restrictions eg. going on holiday.
> 
> ...


That sucks. It seems like different workplaces have just developed different 'cultures' around covid - often dependent on senior leadership. I know someone who was working with psychologists - who are all trained to use their skills to evaluate and moderate workplace behaviour as well as focusing on their own jobs - who were all cramming into tiny meeting rooms without masks throughout the second wave. Hearing that made me despair a bit. Then you hear about big corporates you wouldn't expect to care being really careful with their staff. It all just seems a bit random how workplaces have responded.

But you shouldn't have to put up with that. Getting a union involved would be a good idea if possible.


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## Knotted (Jul 23, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Knotted tell the cuntboss to phone me



He's the type who won't be proactive unless he has to be and he's not an active sceptic and last time I pressed him he was quite good about it - I think he at least understands that he's vulnerable to criticism on this score. And if he does press for rules he won't get backing from his boss and he will get resistance. I'm not particularly fussed about having a barney with him but it's the whole situation. It's like back in the 80's when there wasn't any serious health and safety, it takes will to introduce measures.

Thanks Brainaddict


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## Numbers (Jul 23, 2021)

Brainaddict said:


> That sucks. It seems like different workplaces have just developed different 'cultures' around covid - often dependent on senior leadership. I know someone who was working with psychologists - who are all trained to use their skills to evaluate and moderate workplace behaviour as well as focusing on their own jobs - who were all cramming into tiny meeting rooms without masks throughout the second wave. Hearing that made me despair a bit. *Then you hear about big corporates you wouldn't expect to care being really careful with their staff.* It all just seems a bit random how workplaces have responded.
> 
> But you shouldn't have to put up with that. Getting a union involved would be a good idea if possible.


The firm I work for I have to admit have been on top of this completely.  Tested twice a week, temperature machines on the gates, free masks and hand sanitiser, desks across the entire campus reconfigured to W formation and made agile, if you do attend site you get a new keyboard and mouse, no requirement to attend site for anyone not front office.


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## scalyboy (Jul 23, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Is my workplace normal?
> 
> It's frontline work that's been ongoing throughout the lockdowns. There's a few in the office including myself who have been working from home although there's constant pressure to go in. Of those staying in the office/onsite there has been ZERO mask wearing or social distancing and this is just the work place culture now. There's machismo resentment towards home working and resentment towards restrictions. One or two people go on holiday to Spain whenever they can, vaccine take up is good but only because it helps alleviate personal restrictions eg. going on holiday.
> 
> ...


Is the workplace unionised? How many are members? At any rate I'd get the union involved now - this is out of order, playing macho games with employees health, f*** that.


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## Knotted (Jul 23, 2021)

scalyboy said:


> Is the workplace unionised? How many are members? At any rate I'd get the union involved now - this is out of order, playing macho games with employees health, f*** that.



The workplace isn't unionised, but we work in close collaboration (including sharing the office) with the local council client who I believe are unionised. The client are just as bad as us, but I think there will be a few who aren't happy but unwilling to put their heads above the parapet (and the same with a few of us). I've joined Unison so that I'm on the same page as the council workers. It is a macho work culture unfortunately but it's also a work culture that has absorbed all sorts of health and safety measures over recent decades, so it's not as if attitudes are inflexible.


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## scalyboy (Jul 23, 2021)

Definitely worth contacting them I'd say. I'm in UNISON too and was recently looking at these Covid return to work guidelines, it outlines what legislation an employer is obliged to comply with, in order to keep the workplace safe.


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## MBV (Jul 23, 2021)

Decent proportion of people wearing masks in Sainsburys this evening. Bet both groups are judging each other equally 

All the perspex screening is down.  Definitely stock shortages are evident.


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## glitch hiker (Jul 23, 2021)

So we are 15k less cases today than last week, which is good. I don't know what it indicates, if anything. This week seems to suggest a plateau. But that seems premature.

What is telling IMO is that we are also 1000 more people in hospital than a week ago (and 15 more deaths).

So hospitalisations, which is the sharp end of all this, are increasing


----------



## Raheem (Jul 24, 2021)

BBC news strongly framing ping exemption as a government favour to workers who just want to get on with the job. It's not, is it? It was always open to anyone who wanted to ignore a ping, or not even get the ap, to do just that. The new right is for employers, all the way.


----------



## LDC (Jul 24, 2021)

MBV said:


> All the perspex screening is down.



I've only been in a few shops since Monday, but they all had taken them down. Annoying and shit have they done that, surely leaving them for more protection for staff for a while longer would have been better. Do they think they interfere with their profit that much?


----------



## teuchter (Jul 24, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I've only been in a few shops since Monday, but they all had taken them down. Annoying and shit have they done that, surely leaving them for more protection for staff for a while longer would have been better. Do they think they interfere with their profit that much?


I don't get this either - there seems to be little downside in leaving them up at least for a while. Unless you are someone who wants them gone for symbolic reasons.


----------



## glitch hiker (Jul 24, 2021)

Watched the latest from Dr John Campbell. Some very concerning news regarding the effectiveness of vaccines versus Delta. Linked bnecause it's not very long.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 25, 2021)

> Scientists have warned that the UK has created the perfect conditions by relaxing restrictions - which could see cases reaching 100,000 a day this summer - while large numbers of people don't have protection from both doses of the vaccine











						Covid: Is UK now a breeding ground for new variants?
					

The UK may be entering a "sweet spot" for new variants, with high cases and partial immunity.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




#worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Jul 25, 2021)

Interesting if a bit depressing thread...


----------



## Badgers (Jul 25, 2021)

UK ‘running short on Pfizer vaccine as appointments are cancelled due to supply'
					

Dr Clare Gerada, who sits on the NHS Assembly, claimed that some patients were having their second jab slots pushed back because there is “very few Pfizer” in stock




					www.mirror.co.uk
				






> A doctor has warned Britain is “running short” on the Pfizer vaccine and said appointments are being cancelled due to low supplies.
> 
> Dr Clare Gerada, who sits on the NHS Assembly, claimed that some patients were having their second jab slots pushed back because there is “very few Pfizer” in stock.


----------



## 20Bees (Jul 25, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I've only been in a few shops since Monday, but they all had taken them down. Annoying and shit have they done that, surely leaving them for more protection for staff for a while longer would have been better. Do they think they interfere with their profit that much?


Where I work the screens are staying in place at least until the end of the year. We still have disposable masks available at the store entrance but the security team can no longer ask customers to wear one.
On Monday evening we had a lot of non-regulars, possibly scoping out the store policies on ‘freedom’ day. I saw about 20 customers unmasked. Each evening since then, mask wearing is back to at least 95% and customers are generally saying how relieved they are to still feel safe in our store.
Emails went out to all our loyalty card holders explaining that we still recommended masks, distancing, and hand hygiene, and that we would still be cleaning trolley and basket handles and the other touch points, and all staff have been similarly informed.


----------



## Badgers (Jul 26, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Jul 26, 2021)

FFS


----------



## Nine Bob Note (Jul 28, 2021)

The Overlord of Evil knows the score...












I'm trying to think of a joke referencing the recent MOTU: Revelation bollocks, but I don't want to spoil the awesome photies


----------



## Supine (Jul 28, 2021)

Nine Bob Note said:


> The Overlord of Evil knows the score...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



i saw some stuff about people turning up for vaccinations in fancy dress in Malaysia. I thought it was jokes but maybe not


----------



## Badgers (Jul 30, 2021)

770 UK CV19 Coronavirus deaths since ‘Freedom Day’.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 30, 2021)

Just got the results of my antibody test - negative. So I've never had Covid. Go me


----------



## Sue (Jul 30, 2021)

Just got on the London to Edinburgh train. They screwed up the seat reservations but managed to get a seat. But there's no social distancing going on (though most people are wearing masks). 

It's really busy but I've just told someone the seat next to me's taken as I really don't want to sit next to someone for the next four and a half hours. I'm probably a bad person but ffs. (It's also the first time I've been anywhere since before lockdown #1. Maybe I'm just paranoid...


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2021)

Investigation launched into lack of ‘cheap’ travel Covid tests on government’s website
					

Prices of tests to travel abroad vary from £20 to £575




					www-independent-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2021)

Had enough of experts


----------



## Badgers (Aug 1, 2021)

People still need to be careful, regardless of vaccinations


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 1, 2021)

Vaccination soon. Nervous about it, too nervous to read thread on side effects. Just want it done with. On the plus side, it means day off work.


----------



## Cloo (Aug 2, 2021)

krtek a houby said:


> Vaccination soon. Nervous about it, too nervous to read thread on side effects. Just want it done with. On the plus side, it means day off work.


Good luck, hope you get off as lightly as possible  afterwards


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 2, 2021)

Cloo said:


> Good luck, hope you get off as lightly as possible  afterwards



Thank you!

The better half vocally reacted to the jab, which she never does. That made this one nervous, but in the end, hardly felt it. And it was fast.

Both of us were congratulating each other on the lack of a sore arm. An hour or two later and we both have angry arms. 

But if that's the worst of it, fair enough.


----------



## Cloo (Aug 2, 2021)

Yeah,  I got sore arm that was at it's worst around bedtime of day I had it done,  but went away almost completely within 24 hours. If you get to the morning  without feeling flu-y, you've probably  skipped that but.  I otherwise felt pretty fine but I think I erred in terms of doing a lot of active stuff 3 days later as I was very tired after that for a few days,  so do take it easy even if you feel all right.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2021)

Covid: Lincoln rate highest in England as outbreak linked to club
					

High infection rates are being linked to an outbreak at a city centre nightclub, health bosses say.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## elbows (Aug 3, 2021)

Is there some reason why this thread has ended up as a strange parallel discussion to the main UK thread?

eg I posted about the Lincoln rates being linked to a nightclub Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion


----------



## elbows (Aug 3, 2021)

And thats not a complaint exactly, its just a question I've found myself with more reasons to keep asking myself of late, but had resisted asking anyone else until now.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2021)

elbows said:


> Is there some reason why this thread has ended up as a strange parallel discussion to the main UK thread?
> 
> eg I posted about the Lincoln rates being linked to a nightclub Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion


I seem to have lost that thread.


----------



## elbows (Aug 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> I seem to have lost that thread.


Thats what I was wondering. Not that I mind parallel discussions, I was just a bit confused. I thought maybe I had posted too many graphs and scared you off somehow!


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2021)

elbows said:


> Thats what I was wondering. Not that I mind parallel discussions, I was just a bit confused. I thought maybe I had posted too many graphs and scared you off somehow!


Just posted there. I did not have it on ignore but have not seen it for ages. Assumed a thread merge had happened.


----------



## elbows (Aug 3, 2021)

I have celebrated your return with an excess of graphs. I will not attempt to summarise what you may have missed. Its certainly not as busy a thread as it was earlier in the pandemic, but its still reasonably active.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2021)

Cheers elbows  

I am lacking knowledge on some of the data and science but do have to sit in on a fair number of national Zoom/Teams calls to discuss central/local government work on this. Also I work in Luton (challenging) on both the testing and vaccination projects so have some decent first hand knowledge. 

Also I can see what WE report and what the government submit as the 'numbers' and they are not the same to say the least.


----------



## zahir (Aug 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Also I can see what WE report and what the government submit as the 'numbers' and they are not the same to say the least.


Are you free to say more about this?


----------



## Badgers (Aug 3, 2021)

zahir said:


> Are you free to say more about this?


Not specifically at the moment sadly 

Safe to say they are underrepresented. This is partly down to daily failings of track and trace but reporting past that is inaccurate.


----------



## zahir (Aug 3, 2021)

Fair enough.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Aug 3, 2021)

Don't know for sure if I'm posting this in the right place but . . . this is the latest ACG podcast (which is about the lifting of restrictions and a rise in cases). Recorded on 'freedom day'.









						NEW PODCAST: Rising Cases and Lifting Restrictions - Anarchist Communist Group
					

The latest ACG At the Cafe podcast is now out!    As cases rise and restrictions are lifted, we discuss the current situation focusing on the impact on work and working conditions.    You can hear this at our Anchor FM page




					www.anarchistcommunism.org


----------



## Wilf (Aug 4, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> Don't know for sure if I'm posting this in the right place but . . . this is the latest ACG podcast (which is about the lifting of restrictions and a rise in cases). Recorded on 'freedom day'.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


3 mins in and I've just discovered I've been mispronouncing _Ayn _Rand wrong all these years.


----------



## elbows (Aug 4, 2021)

From now on you can mispronounce it right.


----------



## Apathy (Aug 11, 2021)

Done a home test 2 hours ago and it came back with a very very faint line.  Just done another one but this time all clear.  Ffs dunno wat to make of it


----------



## lazythursday (Aug 11, 2021)

Apathy said:


> Done a home test 2 hours ago and it came back with a very very faint line.  Just done another one but this time all clear.  Ffs dunno wat to make of it


I think generally if there's a faint line it is usually positive. False positives are rare while false negatives are much more common. Get a PCR ordered.


----------



## newme (Aug 12, 2021)

1 out of hospital, 2 more tested positive looking after 4 kids. Negative myself and double jabbed but still a worry. Dad has been turtling for over 2 years? Copd and that's just a death sentence. Dropping off gourmet frozen packs in the freezer is the closest we can get. Brother has it, mum is isolating due to seeing him. *I know its a cliche in Cornwall but fucking tourists, I dropped my holiday plans. *


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 14, 2021)

CDC observational study showing the most significant co morbidities in serious outcomes...
Under 40, hypertension becomes a major factor.


----------



## Sunray (Aug 14, 2021)

Anxiety and fear related disorders at 1.28.  Quite surprising to learn, while it can be pretty disabling psychologically there isn't anything specifically wrong with you.

Elevated adrenaline perhaps?


----------



## stdP (Aug 14, 2021)

Sunray said:


> Anxiety and fear related disorders at 1.28.  Quite surprising to learn, while it can be pretty disabling psychologically there isn't anything specifically wrong with you.
> 
> Elevated adrenaline perhaps?



Stress, particularly long-term, can do a real number on weakening your immune system (elevated levels of cortisol lessen the numbers of white blood cells your body produces for instance) as well as being a factor in many diseases itself (heart problems and diabetes being two big ones).


----------



## _Russ_ (Aug 15, 2021)

Something I can't quite understand: the "_28 days after testing positive_" thing, firstly  if you test positive and end up in ICU do they continue testing you or is it taken that you have Covid and no further testing is done?.
If this is so then must be a significant number of people who survive longer than a month but then succumb and who are not counted as a Covid death

 I'm likely missing something but I havn't seen this made clear.


----------



## MrSki (Aug 15, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Something I can't quite understand: the "_28 days after testing positive_" thing, firstly  if you test positive and end up in ICU do they continue testing you or is it taken that you have Covid and no further testing is done?.
> If this is so then must be a significant number of people who survive longer than a month but then succumb and who are not counted as a Covid death
> 
> I'm likely missing something but I havn't seen this made clear.


There is also a'covid mentioned on the death certificate' figure on the dashboard which last time I looked was over 153000


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Aug 15, 2021)

MrSki said:


> There is also a'covid mentioned on the death certificate' figure on the dashboard which last time I looked was over 153000


155667 at 30th July


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 15, 2021)

So they've announced here that close contacts dont have to isolate if they have been doubly vaccinated. 

Cant help but feel this is a mistake. 

12 to 15 yr olds being vaccinated now...and no plans to vaccinate anyone under the age of 12. So all primary school age kids will head back to school in 2 weeks with  no protection.

And at the same time NPHET saying that they are very concerned at high numbers of covid in the country. 

Mixed messages? 

It's really quite frightening.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 16, 2021)

Just doing the weekly 'figures' for the government and it is a fucking mess of lies 

Fucking frightening state of affairs 

Have been asked how I measure 'success' in the following... 

BAME Community 
HMOs 
Men under 30 
High risk places of employment 
Multi Generational households 

WTF? 

How would you report on this?


----------



## stdP (Aug 16, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Just doing the weekly 'figures' for the government and it is a fucking mess of lies
> ...
> How would you report on this?



May I suggest a time-honoured spunking cock?

In all seriousness though, what are they actually asking you to do? :|


----------



## Badgers (Aug 16, 2021)

stdP said:


> May I suggest a time-honoured spunking cock?
> 
> In all seriousness though, what are they actually asking you to do? :|


I don't know???


----------



## chainsawjob (Aug 17, 2021)

Apols if this has been covered...

I need to provide proof of a negative LFT so I took it and used the .gov report a test thing. So I've now got an email saying I've reported a negative test.

But I was expecting to have to scan the QR code on the test or maybe take a pic of the negative test ( which I've done anyway). Although I did have to input a code number from it.

I mean, I could have just just _said_ my test was negative without doing one. 

Am I missing something?


----------



## Cerv (Aug 17, 2021)

You could have scanned the QR code instead of typing the number. 
But no, you haven’t missed anything. It is on the honour system.

Probably (part of) why they’ve said when the NHS pass becomes mandatory next month for clubs etc that tests won’t count anymore. It’ll be vaccine or exemption only.

Even if they did make you submit a photo of the actual test lines, it’d still be on trust as anyone could just pour the test liquid on to activate without swabbing.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 17, 2021)

chainsawjob said:


> Apols if this has been covered...
> 
> I need to provide proof of a negative LFT so I took it and used the .gov report a test thing. So I've now got an email saying I've reported a negative test.
> 
> ...



No, that is how the self-reporting system works.  I had to do the same thing to go to a football match and its the same policy for music festivals.  Its a bit leaky to say the least as all you have to do is have a lateral flow test so you can record the number.  Actually doing the test and honestly reporting the result is based upon trust.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 17, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> based upon trust.


----------



## chainsawjob (Aug 17, 2021)

Cheers Teaboy


----------



## glitch hiker (Aug 17, 2021)

Bloody hell, 170 deaths reported today. I'm going to assume that's spill over from the weekend not just all today


----------



## elbows (Aug 17, 2021)

glitch hiker said:


> Bloody hell, 170 deaths reported today. I'm going to assume that's spill over from the weekend not just all today



Yeah deaths by date of death give a different picture.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 18, 2021)

The Commons is packed for the Afghan debate, I wonder if covid is circulating in there.


----------



## Mation (Aug 20, 2021)

I went on the bus and tube today for various reasons, armed with my FFP2 mask.

One of a few 'why the fuck did I do this' prompts was a person who got on the tube and sat a couple of seats down from me; no mask; got out a hand fan to flap their covid breath at everyone; and was sniffling and dabbing at their snotty nose with a tissue. I had to move.

I hate this. Hate feeling so hostile to people. Hate the real risk that some don't get or don't believe in or don't care about.

Hate it hate it hate it.

(I can be grown up and practical about managing it some other time.)


----------



## smmudge (Aug 20, 2021)

My wife has been offered antibody test from the Zoe app. She's going to give it a go but sounds pretty horrific!! I mean I'm off to give blood on Thursday but at least I just have to lie there, not err "milk" my finger.....


----------



## Badgers (Aug 20, 2021)




----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Aug 21, 2021)

Apathy said:


> Done a home test 2 hours ago and it came back with a very very faint line.  Just done another one but this time all clear.  Ffs dunno wat to make of it


Also make sure you've not eaten or drunk anything for a while before doing it, as you can actually trigger a positive result using coke, or tomato sauce and other things for cool scientific reasons I can't remember- i think something to do with the PH. A load of kids somewhere in Scotland got off school doing that, legends


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Just got the results of my antibody test - negative. So I've never had Covid. Go me



Have you been vaccinated?

I thought the vaccine produced antibodies?


----------



## existentialist (Aug 22, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Have you been vaccinated?
> 
> I thought the vaccine produced antibodies?


Yes, but they do say on the test paperwork that it's looking for naturally arising antibodies. I have no idea how they distinguish the one from the other...


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Yes, but they do say on the test paperwork that it's looking for naturally arising antibodies. I have no idea how they distinguish the one from the other...



Science.


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 22, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Yes, but they do say on the test paperwork that it's looking for naturally arising antibodies. I have no idea how they distinguish the one from the other...



That's interesting 

Maybe 2hats might throw some light on this..


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 22, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> That's interesting
> 
> Maybe 2hats might throw some light on this..



I assume vaccines produce slightly different antibodies to the various different variants of covid, and they can work out which is which, in a similar way as they tell the different between the various variants. 

Oh, here you go, seems to be the difference between standard antibodies, and spike protein antibodies.



> This test bundle combines our two COVID-19 antibody tests:
> 
> *COVID-19 Antibody Test:* This test looks for COVID-19 antibodies in a blood sample. Antibodies are made by the body in response to the virus. A positive antibody result indicates that you have had COVID-19 in the past.
> 
> *COVID-19 Vaccine Immunity Test:* This test looks for COVID-19 spike protein antibodies in a blood sample. All currently available vaccines use the spike protein to produce an immune response. A positive antibody result indicates that you have produced antibodies in response to the vaccine or past COVID-19 infection.








						Covid-19 Antibody and Vaccine Immunity Test
					






					monitormyhealth.org.uk


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I assume vaccines produce slightly different antibodies to the various different variants of covid, and they can work out which is which, in a similar way as they tell the different between the various variants.
> 
> Oh, here you go, seems to be the difference between standard antibodies, and spike protein antibodies.
> 
> ...




I find that a little confusing..

I took a covid 19 antibody test a few weeks ago.
And this was what the kit said..



It seems to say that spike proteins show in naturally produced antibodies and also in antibodies created in response to the vaccine.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 22, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> I find that a little confusing..
> 
> I took a covid 19 antibody test a few weeks ago.
> And this was what the kit said..
> ...



OK, must be different spike proteins. 



> Natural infection with coronavirus will produce different antibodies. These antibodies can bind to not just the spike, but also to other viral proteins such as the nucleocapsid. Current COVID-19 vaccines in development do not lead to antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein.











						Science of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies
					

Learn the science of COVID-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies and stay up to date on the most current information.




					www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org


----------



## 2hats (Aug 22, 2021)

The two different antibody tests look for nucleocapsid (N) or spike (S1, S2 region). The former assumed to be from natural infection only. Though this won't hold for those immunised with inactivated or attenuated whole virus vaccines (not yet approved in the UK).


----------



## flypanam (Aug 22, 2021)

Mation said:


> I went on the bus and tube today for various reasons, armed with my FFP2 mask.
> 
> One of a few 'why the fuck did I do this' prompts was a person who got on the tube and sat a couple of seats down from me; no mask; got out a hand fan to flap their covid breath at everyone; and was sniffling and dabbing at their snotty nose with a tissue. I had to move.
> 
> ...


Went for a walk today, when strolling down Church Road, CP, I saw a couple in their late 30’s sporting t shirts that said ‘track and trace this’ with a middle finger gesture, the other one had some similar but slightly different message along the line of ‘you’ll not vax me’ I’m starting to despair again and not looking forward to autumn nor winter.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Aug 22, 2021)

flypanam said:


> Went for a walk today, when strolling down Church Road, CP, I saw a couple in their late 30’s sporting t shirts that said ‘track and trace this’ with a middle finger gesture, the other one had some similar but slightly different message along the line of ‘you’ll not vax me’ I’m starting to despair again and not looking forward to autumn nor winter.



Just remember the loons are a minority, amongst the minority of 12.5% yet to have a first jab, the UK is doing a lot better than most counties.


----------



## flypanam (Aug 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Just remember the loons are a minority, amongst the minority of 12.5% yet to have a first jab, the UK is doing a lot better than most counties.


True enough but after reading Epidemics and Society I can’t help feel that unless there is some serious societal change we’re looking five to 7 years of outbreaks and viral mutations.


----------



## _Russ_ (Aug 22, 2021)

We are putting way too much reliance on the Vaccine, its not just the anti-vaxxers that will fuck it up its all those (and there are many) who think they can go around as if its all over because they've been jabbed.
At a rough estimation about 80% of people I know are now behaving like this


----------



## Flavour (Aug 23, 2021)

I have just come back to Italy after a few days in the UK and have developed a nasty dry cough. My 5 day test (lateral flow) came back negative but going to get a pcr tomorrow. Bit paranoid


----------



## Badgers (Aug 23, 2021)

Had a lot (17%) of the staff at the CovidCoalFace and their families positive last few days  

Almost all double vaccinated with free access to PPE and well trained


----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)

So 30,800 new cases reported
Zoe app stating nearly 52,000 cases

174 deaths (ignoring the 'exceptions')



#worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)

On way to Cornwall #superspreader  

Luckily I am away from the other humans 






						Almost 5,000 Covid cases linked to Cornish music and surf festival | Cornwall | The Guardian
					

Organisers of Boardmasters say event had measures in place ‘above and beyond national guidelines’Coronavirus – latest updates




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)

8 March 2021 we recorded 65 deaths and 4,712 new cases and unvaccinated pupils wore masks to protect each other. 

Yesterday 30,838 new cases and 174 deaths. Pupils in England are back to school next week this time without any protection.


----------



## Flavour (Aug 25, 2021)

Flavour said:


> I have just come back to Italy after a few days in the UK and have developed a nasty dry cough. My 5 day test (lateral flow) came back negative but going to get a pcr tomorrow. Bit paranoid



happy to report that I, at least, do not have covid


----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)

Boris Johnson is 'keeping an eye on third wave' but does not plan fresh restrictions
					

Nicola Sturgeon has not ruled out fresh measures in Scotland after a surge in covid cases there




					inews.co.uk
				




#worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Aug 25, 2021)

Cornwall has highest rate of Covid cases in country (but there's more to it)
					

Cornwall is showing the highest rate of new Covid cases out of anywhere in the country.




					www.falmouthpacket.co.uk
				




I am in Cornwall  luckily just house (and beach hut  ) sitting so not hitting pubs or shop's or owt.

There are LOT of places closed


----------



## Badgers (Aug 26, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cornwall has highest rate of Covid cases in country (but there's more to it)
> 
> 
> Cornwall is showing the highest rate of new Covid cases out of anywhere in the country.
> ...


Paywalled but you get the general idea 









						It is perfectly reasonable for Cornwall to ask people to test before they arrive
					

Cornwall’s case rate is near-double that of the wider UK. Ignoring this isn’t responsible, nor will it make the issue go away




					www.telegraph.co.uk


----------



## iona (Aug 27, 2021)

Brighton station so crowded there were loads of police not letting anyone else in when I got back just now


----------



## Badgers (Aug 27, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Aug 27, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cornwall has highest rate of Covid cases in country (but there's more to it)
> 
> 
> Cornwall is showing the highest rate of new Covid cases out of anywhere in the country.
> ...











						Welcome to Cornwall: Covid super-spreader capital of Britain
					

Tom Johnson, an NHS cardiologist, and his GP wife urged their 18-year-old daughter not to go to the Boardmasters Festival in Newquay because if she caught Covid amongst the 50,000 revellers then their holiday to France would be scuppered.However, Sophie had saved up £200 for her ticket and didn’t wa




					www.thetimes.co.uk


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Aug 29, 2021)

Why have the home test kits changed? You don't need to shove it down your throat any more, only up your nose - is that because that's where Delta mostly lives?


----------



## Badgers (Aug 30, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Why have the home test kits changed? You don't need to shove it down your throat any more, only up your nose - is that because that's where Delta mostly lives?


They are changing but a lot of the old 'throat and nose' kits are still about. 

The nose only swabs are not delta specific, merely that testing is improving.


----------



## PERTHBUM (Aug 30, 2021)

Work in a pub and a fellow worker who refuses the jab and keeps telling us who who have had the jab that we are stupid got covid and was hospitalised, we did have a chuckle to be honest.


----------



## Badgers (Aug 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Welcome to Cornwall: Covid super-spreader capital of Britain
> 
> 
> Tom Johnson, an NHS cardiologist, and his GP wife urged their 18-year-old daughter not to go to the Boardmasters Festival in Newquay because if she caught Covid amongst the 50,000 revellers then their holiday to France would be scuppered.However, Sophie had saved up £200 for her ticket and didn’t wa
> ...











						Boris Johnson is warning Devon and Cornwall to 'act responsibility', but his policies left us in this mess
					

The south-west peninsula was doing just fine before the Prime Minister lauded it about at the G7 Summit, removed all Covid restrictions, and permitted 53,000 largely unvaccinated young adults to mosh together in Newquay




					inews.co.uk
				




#worldbeating


----------



## two sheds (Aug 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Boris Johnson is warning Devon and Cornwall to 'act responsibility', but his policies left us in this mess
> 
> 
> The south-west peninsula was doing just fine before the Prime Minister lauded it about at the G7 Summit, removed all Covid restrictions, and permitted 53,000 largely unvaccinated young adults to mosh together in Newquay
> ...


Boardmasters has its own 'festival' Delta variant now


----------



## Badgers (Aug 30, 2021)

> He said information had been skewed by social media and conspiracy theorists and he had not had the vaccine.





> The 40-year-old said his symptoms started with a flu-like feeling, which got progressively worse, and he was eventually admitted to hospital, suffering from breathing difficulties.
> "First thing I am going tell all my family to do is get the vaccine and anybody I see," he said.











						Former Covid sceptic dies in hospital - BBC News
					

Marcus Birks, 40, went on to urge other people to get the Covid vaccine after he was hospitalised.




					www.bbc.co.uk
				




Hindsight is a lovely thing 🙄


----------



## Ming (Aug 31, 2021)

Good channel. He’s Dr Ed Hope who works in A&E. He also does trauma diagnosis of movie fight scenes.


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 31, 2021)

The local pharmacy has offered to give me my free flu jab early - I suppose I should go for it - though for as long as I continue to mask up in the supermarket I'm unlikely to catch it ...
Since I'm hoping to have a social life in the future I suppose I'll need to get used to having the jab every year ...


----------



## Ming (Aug 31, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> The local pharmacy has offered to give me my free flu jab early - I suppose I should go for it - though for as long as I continue to mask up in the supermarket I'm unlikely to catch it ...
> Since I'm hoping to have a social life in the future I suppose I'll need to get used to having the jab every year ...


Yep. Do it. I’m a peer immuniser at work (i give other nurses the annual flu jab). Everyone should get it unless you’ve got a good medical reason not to. Covid-19 is likely an endemic so expect to have a regular repeat jab depending on how it mutates.


----------



## Sunray (Sep 1, 2021)

I was listening to   Dr John Cambell today.

He is saying there has been a shift in the medical and scientific community very recently.
The consensus is saying you are going to meet COVID-19,  its just a matter of time.  Unless of course you don't leave the house and don't have anyone around.

Given you can still get COVID-19 post vaccination, heard immunity isn't possible, its here to stay for the future.  There is no point in the mass testing because its out there, rather than just scaring ourselves with big numbers,  its better to just test sick people like we do for other illnesses such as the flu.  Germany are going to stop free testing soon.


----------



## Tankus (Sep 1, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> The local pharmacy has offered to give me my free flu jab early - I suppose I should go for it - though for as long as I continue to mask up in the supermarket I'm unlikely to catch it ...
> Since I'm hoping to have a social life in the future I suppose I'll need to get used to having the jab every year ...


That just triggered  me to ask  for mine  , I normally get a jab in Oct 
Think I'll be masking well into next year


----------



## gentlegreen (Sep 2, 2021)

No love from Victor and Amy for John Campbell and the media's declaration that "herd immunity is finished"...
Also booster shots and natural infection ...


----------



## Badgers (Sep 3, 2021)

Science

Coronavirus cases are now falling in England, and have been doing so solidly for over a week. Barring some unforeseen calamity, this marks the de facto end of the English epidemic. Let me explain why and what that means.







__





						archive.ph
					





					archive.ph


----------



## Supine (Sep 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Science
> 
> Coronavirus cases are now falling in England, and have been doing so solidly for over a week. Barring some unforeseen calamity, this marks the de facto end of the English epidemic. Let me explain why and what that means.
> 
> ...



Never trust a covid commentator who is 100% sure about what they are saying. Especially if it is Andrew Lilico doing the commentary.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 3, 2021)

Supine said:


> Never trust a covid commentator who is 100% sure about what they are saying. Especially if it is Andrew Lilico doing the commentary.



On his twitter account, he describes himself as 'mainly an economist', so is clearly an expert with covid.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 3, 2021)

Chilling stuff 

‘Worrying’ numbers of pregnant women in intensive care with Covid | Coronavirus | The Guardian


----------



## Badgers (Sep 3, 2021)

Strap in folks


----------



## nagapie (Sep 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Chilling stuff
> 
> ‘Worrying’ numbers of pregnant women in intensive care with Covid | Coronavirus | The Guardian



A friend who's an obstetrician was already seeing unvaccinated pregnant women in her ICU 6 weeks ago. Lots of premature births and the issues that come with that.
One woman was ventilated and the baby's heart rate went into distress but there was nothing they could do because the mother was unconscious so could not give consent for a c section as legally they could only do this if the mother's life was in danger.


----------



## elbows (Sep 3, 2021)

Supine said:


> Never trust a covid commentator who is 100% sure about what they are saying. Especially if it is Andrew Lilico doing the commentary.



If anyone remembers me blathering on some time ago about how I was going to follow a range of voices on twitter that did not have the same pandemic instincts as me, one of them was Lillico. But I only managed to read his output for a couple of weeks because he was a disgusting example of a human being and my mental health was affected by his shitty views on a whole range of subjects. 

The only highlight of that time was that when I first started following him, he was getting nervous because he had just written some awful optimistic bullshit in the fucking Telegraph and within days the case rates had started to go horribly wrong and he started to have regrets. But there wasnt much doubt that he would return to his standard thinking at the first opportunity.

I still dont know what will happen next but at some point in the next few days I will probably summarise some data that tells stories the media dont.


----------



## elbows (Sep 3, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> On his twitter account, he describes himself as 'mainly an economist', so is clearly an expert with covid.


Or as people like him might put it, his brain died with covid, not of covid.


----------



## elbows (Sep 3, 2021)

Having said all that, the stuff he mentions in that article is one of the big reasons I cannot make the sort of predictions I could of a year ago. This holds true even if he is only partially right, and an absence of prolonged periods of rapid exponential growth would certainly change my expectations of government being forced to act. But slow, grinding pressure on the NHS can still have consequences that demand action, and it isnt actually clear that we have achieved what he claims. But its certainly true that circumstances are not the same as a year ago, and this makes it hard for me to describe anything as 'inevitable' at this point, as opposed to this time last year where I ws guided by a bunch of things that appeared to be strong inevitabilities to me.


----------



## pbsmooth (Sep 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Strap in folks
> 
> View attachment 286452




still less than 25% capacity compared to the peak. so 'strap in' seems rather unnecessary, knowing how many more people are now vaccinated or have some immunity.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 3, 2021)

March 2020 - “120 people died” … public - “oh my god…please help us!”

Sept 2021 - “120 people died”… public - “ah well…they had to go sometime I suppose”


----------



## Badgers (Sep 5, 2021)

A large majority of young people are pro-vaccination for Covid 

ONS data July 2021

Not hesitant:

86% of 16 to 17 yr olds
91% of 18 to 21 yr olds
90% of 22 to 25 yr olds





__





						Coronavirus and vaccine hesitancy, Great Britain - Office for National Statistics
					

Hesitancy towards the coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine, based on the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey covering the period 26 May to 20 June 2021.



					t.co


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 5, 2021)

Badgers said:


> A large majority of young people are pro-vaccination for Covid
> 
> ONS data July 2021
> 
> ...



Shame that's not reflected in up-take, for England, under 50% of 16 & 17 year olds, and under 65% of 18 - 24 years old, have had their first jab. 🤷‍♂️


----------



## Badgers (Sep 5, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Shame that's not reflected in up-take, for England, under 50% of 16 & 17 year olds, and under 65% of 18 - 24 years old, have had their first jab. 🤷‍♂️


Yup.

However, it is worth noting that the vaccinations were rolled out by age and until recently only 18+ could be vaccinated. 

In my area we are setting up testing and vaccination points in sixth forms and college's from tomorrow for a month.


----------



## Ninja (Sep 5, 2021)

Hello all, first ever post...

After a year and half of this pandemic this country and many other seem unable (or maybe unwilling) to settle back to true form of normality and one very clear demonstration of this is the vaccines themselves and very worrying.

Back when the vaccines arrived they were heralded as the cavalry coming over the hill, but since have become a nightmare.  It's not the medication itself but the policies built around them notably where based on the idea they will "stop the spread". To be fair to the manufacturers they never made any claims about their products beyond reducing serious illness, and in the UK and other countries - most notably Israel - its very apparent its beyond their capabilities.   

Students are having their social lives taken away from them (maybe their education too), care workers being dictated what should be injected into them, with nurses maybe next and someone in the corridors of power are hellbent on  Digital ID cards.
Despite these limitations, Governments including ours are basing divisive policies on them but for what purpose given its doomed to fail their stated aim?  
Why are people unable to discuss this...Is this a case of "buyers remorse" post vaccination?
Surely its got to be more than the Governement not wanting to perform a u-turn or admit the overplaying the vaccines abilities, or is something darker at play?

A slightly longer post than planned and maybe too controversial or uncomfortable, but hey ho


----------



## Supine (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Hello all, first ever post...
> 
> After a year and half of this pandemic this country and many other seem unable (or maybe unwilling) to settle back to true form of normality and one very clear demonstration of this is the vaccines themselves and very worrying.
> 
> ...



Hello and welcome. The anti vax loon alarm bells are ringing but you seem articulate.

Not sure what your message is. A year ago there were no vaccines and the covid situation was terrible. Vaccines are now being rolled out and making an amazing difference, saving thousands of lives. What’s not to like?


----------



## Sue (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Hello all, first ever post...
> 
> After a year and half of this pandemic this country and many other seem unable (or maybe unwilling) to settle back to true form of normality and one very clear demonstration of this is the vaccines themselves and very worrying.
> 
> ...


Buyer's remorse by whom and about what exactly?


----------



## krtek a houby (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Hello all, first ever post...
> 
> After a year and half of this pandemic this country and many other seem unable (or maybe unwilling) to settle back to true form of normality and one very clear demonstration of this is the vaccines themselves and very worrying.
> 
> ...


----------



## Ninja (Sep 5, 2021)

Supine said:


> Hello and welcome. The anti vax loon alarm bells are ringing but you seem articulate.
> 
> Not sure what your message is. A year ago there were no vaccines and the covid situation was terrible. Vaccines are now being rolled out and making an amazing difference, saving thousands of lives. What’s not to like?


LOL I am aware of the risk of the "anti vax" label being used here but its not I am anti vax at all (they clearly have performed well in their original task), but concerned the policy makers are implementing policies based on something they simply cant achieve nor the manufacturer ever claimed, and amazed I guess no one is discussing the outfall of this.


----------



## krtek a houby (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> LOL I am aware of the risk of the "anti vax" label being used here but its not I am anti vax at all (they clearly have performed well in their original task), but concerned the policy makers are implementing policies based on something they simply cant achieve nor the manufacturer ever claimed, and amazed I guess no one is discussing the outfall of this.



What is the_ outfall_ of this, do you think?


----------



## Ninja (Sep 5, 2021)

krtek a houby said:


> What is the_ outfall_ of this, do you think?


Im not entirely sure what the eventual outfall might be as the situation looks insane even by 2020 standards.
The most immediate and relevant to todays news was another announcement of implementing a vax ID card on nightclub doors  based on this notion without vaccines the clubbers will be spreading virus....except even if vaccinated this is still possible.  Negative test results dont count even if they should inspire more confidence, so why go this route and treat younger people like this?   
If anything Vax IDs for bingo halls frequented by older folk makes more logical sense!


----------



## Badgers (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> LOL I am aware of the risk of the "anti vax" label being used here but its not I am anti vax at all (they clearly have performed well in their original task), but concerned the policy makers are implementing policies based on something they simply cant achieve nor the manufacturer ever claimed, and amazed I guess no one is discussing the outfall of this.


Pffft 

Fuck off


----------



## Supine (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Im not entirely sure what the eventual outfall might be as the situation looks insane even by 2020 standards.
> The most immediate and relevant to todays news was another announcement of implementing a vax ID card on nightclub doors  based on this notion without vaccines the clubbers will be spreading virus....except even if vaccinated this is still possible.  Negative test results dont count even if they should inspire more confidence, so why go this route and treat younger people like this?
> If anything Vax IDs for bingo halls frequented by older folk makes more logical sense!



vaccinated people are significantly less risky when it comes to spreading the virus.

requiring vaccination status is a soft measure to help influence people into getting vaccinated. Proof of negative results is already widely spread this summer with festivals

uptake in older, bingo-ing generations, is already very high.

What outfall are you talking about? What is insane? All seems to be good ideas to me.


----------



## krtek a houby (Sep 5, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Im not entirely sure what the eventual outfall might be as the situation looks insane even by 2020 standards.
> The most immediate and relevant to todays news was another announcement of implementing a vax ID card on nightclub doors  based on this notion without vaccines the clubbers will be spreading virus....except even if vaccinated this is still possible.  Negative test results dont count even if they should inspire more confidence, so why go this route and treat younger people like this?
> If anything Vax IDs for bingo halls frequented by older folk makes more logical sense!


Imagine having to show ID to get into a club. Shocking.


----------



## Ninja (Sep 5, 2021)

Supine said:


> vaccinated people are significantly less risky when it comes to spreading the virus.
> 
> requiring vaccination status is a soft measure to help influence people into getting vaccinated. Proof of negative results is already widely spread this summer with festivals
> 
> ...


The negative result apparently isnt a valid for nightclubs although Im not sure QR code validator app venues might use can actually discriminate between 2 jabs or a test anyway (but dont quote me on that) so this could be a bluff of course.

The outfall might be government/policy makers getting a taste for pursuing laws and regulations that are divisive and deprive targeted people of things that are important to them while bypassing the House of Commons for fear of democracy or scrutiny stopping them.   I dont know what or who might be next on their list. 

Its probably a safe guess U75ers dont have any great love for the present administration, but I'm surprised members here arent more wary of them on this.


----------



## elbows (Sep 6, 2021)

Its no surprise to me that arguments which rely on vague shit about "getting a taste for" gain little traction here.


----------



## elbows (Sep 6, 2021)

And if I wanted to weave some of the desperate pandemic legislation into a larger political narrative, the obvious choice would be something that is very much not a new phenomenon. Which is younger members of society being asked to shoulder more than their fair share of the burden. Happened with paying for university, with the financial crisis and austerity, inevitably happened in various ways in this pandemic because of the nature of jobs that younger people do and their much greater number of social contacts, and the inability of educational settings to remain open at the height of pandemic waves. And looks like it will happen again when it comes to things like funding social care. Part of an even larger multi-decade story about unequal distribution of wealth, and some older generations protecting what they gained from an era of opportunity which has since been rolled back.

The 'getting a taste for' stuff gains limited traction because its so obvious that this governments instincts are to do as little as possible in response to the pandemic, and they only end up thinking the unthinkable temporarily when they think they have no other choice, choosing the 'least harmful to businesses' options from a menu of options that are all harmful to business and incompatible with the standard tory agenda. So people are understandably more focussed on concerns that the government is doing too little in the pandemic, not that they are overreaching. And the extent that they have bypassed 'democracy' and the commons seems quite normal, just continuing a trend seen for decades already. Nothing exceptional there, as we shall see again when they have the usual dull battle on their hands to get the next round of extensions to pandemic legislation through parliament.

In terms of lasting political consequences, apart from strain between generations over matter of who ends up funding stuff the pandemic adds another layer to an existing ideological problem the tories have these days. Which is that there are a number of generations of tories who love the whole small government, small state, market-driven shit, or at least love the myths and rhetoric that goes with that stance. But there have been signs ever since the financial crisis that circumstances this century will require a different approach. One that in some ways has more in common with the pre-Thatcher tory stance, whether that be dressed up as 'one nation conservatism' or the 'post-war consensus'. Stuff where there is a more direct role for state authorities in planning and managing the economy, even if the budget still goes to service providers that are privately owned. I consider it pretty much inevitable that gaining more of a taste for that looks inevitable this century.  The pandemic might accelerate that a bit but its not a strange new direction thats come out of the blue, in many ways its long overdue.


----------



## elbows (Sep 6, 2021)

As for the other stuff you mentioned, its certainly true that the government have been guilty of mixed messages, unsustainable claims, contradictions and sometimes leaving large holes in the picture they paint.

Supine already did a good job of puncturing the overly simplistic binary thinking about vaccines. Its not a question of the vaccines totally eliminating transmission, but rather reducing it, to give just one example.

I can agree with you in so much as the government have deliberately not come cleam about all the implications of the Delta variant. They dont want to cross such bridges unless they have to, and will leave such things as late as possible. So far with Delta they were forced to acknowledge some its implications when they delayed 'freedom day'. But other ramifications have been pushed further out and will only make their presence felt if deemed necessary by circumstances in autumn or winter. And then they will acknowledge such things as part of a sales pitch to renew legislation, impose new restrictions etc.

There was also a problem involving the public being oversold a grotesquely oversimplified version of herd immunity and the benefits of vacination, how much pandemic weight vaccines could reasonably be expected to carry on their own. Only a further test of time including seasons like autumn and winter will really inform everyone about quite what to expect from the new normal. A range of possibilities exist, which is why exact predictions about what will happen next are limited so far. The government have pushed ahead more quickly than it is sensible to do, but eventually they may reach the intended destination, just not as quickly as they have often claimed.

I would suggest that the government have tended to sit somewhere in between expert advisors and the right-wing press in regards these expectations, The likes of Whitty and Vallance were careful not to claim they expected sterilising immunity and total lack of transmission in the vaccine era. The right wing shits in the press preferred to paint a delusional picture of the new normal being the same as the old normal. The government have floated around in between, and are easily buffeted by circumstances, very much including the properties of new variants that emerge.

The government are not relying on vaccines alone. They are relying on a mix of vaccines and infections and public behaviour, with tougher back up options available for the worst moments. Its a numbers game and as time goes on they believe the changing susceptibility picture, both via vaccines and infections, gives them more wiggle room to get the numbers to add up (mostly hospital numbers). They do make a mess of it sometimes because of politics and because they want to have their cake and eat it. Their approach is not without risk given there are cycles of raised expectations followed by dashed hopes. They seem to prefer to lead people on a dance via those cycles to other approaches such as a more honest framing about behaviours we can get away with in summer but not winter, for example. The wheels would probably fall of that wagon of theirs if such cycles repeat indefinitely, so they are ultimately banking on the new normal eventually resembling the old normal to a greater extent than seems possible for the rest of 2021 and early 2022.


----------



## Aladdin (Sep 6, 2021)

Ninja said:


> The negative result apparently isnt a valid for nightclubs although Im not sure QR code validator app venues might use can actually discriminate between 2 jabs or a test anyway (but dont quote me on that) so this could be a bluff of course.
> 
> The outfall might be government/policy makers getting a taste for pursuing laws and regulations that are divisive and deprive targeted people of things that are important to them while bypassing the House of Commons for fear of democracy or scrutiny stopping them.   I dont know what or who might be next on their list.
> 
> Its probably a safe guess U75ers dont have any great love for the present administration, but I'm surprised members here arent more wary of them on this.




It might rain next February 12th.


----------



## Ninja (Sep 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> As for the other stuff you mentioned, its certainly true that the government have been guilty of mixed messages, unsustainable claims, contradictions and sometimes leaving large holes in the picture they paint.
> 
> Supine already did a good job of puncturing the overly simplistic binary thinking about vaccines. Its not a question of the vaccines totally eliminating transmission, but rather reducing it, to give just one example.
> 
> ...


Wow quite an epic post and I where do I start! 
You mention the drift towards lowering living standards for younger generations to placate the elders and the Vax pass is a huge acceleration and demonstration of this if left unchallenged will give a green light for far more of it. Eg NI tax rises on younger working folk?

I disagree the government messaging has been confused and if anything the nudge unit have been very effective in dictating the agenda but helped by a compliant media (irrespective of whether they are right wing or not). So little is being debated, discussed or other ideas explored. 

This same 'nudge unit' have clearly told people vaccines "protect them and the ones they love" and it's clear now the second half is claim too far but can't backtrack on this for fear of being seen taking a U turn on it. Ultimately the drive for vaxpasses is political as it will mainly reassure the oldies - back to your observations.

I'm sure the government are aware that natural immunity will be happening right now but clearly won't recognise it as 'valid' despite it being a real phenomenon of nature.

Can't remember what other points you said now lol


----------



## elbows (Sep 7, 2021)

It is not all about the nudge unit, thats a dull oversimplification.

For a start there are a good number of behavioural science inputs into government that are not the nudge unit. Secondly the government do not always follow their advice. Thirdly the behavioural scientists often have concerns about the counterproductive nature of certain policy options, and spend quite a lot of time talking about those details.

I dont think I have access to any very recent stuff on the certification stuff. I can see stuff from the SAGE behavioural group from last November which looked at some of the behavioural and social considerations of certification. There are plenty of unknowns and concerns in there, some of which the government seem happy to ignore. Funnily enough a lot of those concerns are often centred around the topic of inequalities and perceived inequalities, the very stuff you tend to focus on!



			https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/999172/S0961_SPI-B_Health_status_certification_in_relation_to_COVID-19_Behavioural_and_Social_considerations.pdf
		


More recently than that, I expect renewed government interest in using such things for particular settings ha been sponsored by them getting to see what sort of level of vaccine uptake is emerging for younger age groups. And they were probably envious of the apparent success that France experienced in terms of vaccine uptake once they announced various certificate-based restrictions. Eventually I might find out what behavioural scientists thought of this, and what their lingering concerns were, but there is usuall quite some lag between such discussions happening and the papers becoming public so for now I am stuck with my own imagination and assumptions about that.

Broadly speaking its certainly true that behavioural scientists advice usually involves a heavy emphasis on positive messaging, and its entirely unsurprising that limitations to vaccines when it comes to transmission has not been heavily dwelt on in messages to the public. They dont want to put people off bothering, which is a real concern given that some cannot help but think in binary terms about such benefits, eg defeatism in the face of transmission being reduced but not eliminated by vaccination. I expect that should a moment arrive where government become desperate to get people to behave more cautiously again in order to reduce a very high peak, they will speak more loudly about the limitations and the need to do other things to compensate for such limitations.


----------



## elbows (Sep 7, 2021)

ALso the idea that there is no debate about this is bollocks. There is a 14 page thread here for a start:









						Papers, please - covid passport bollocks
					

Well I guess we'll soon have to carry and show our papers/phones everywhere.  I am 1000% sure that it won't be mishandled or exploited in any way whatsoever.




					www.urban75.net
				




I dont think Ive engaged with that thread much yet because I hadnt really decided what I think about these measures. I can see both sides. What I dont agree with at all are attempts to attach this issue to other entirely unrelated politics and predictions about what else the government might do if they 'get away' with this. Thats utter shit, usually designed to add bogus weight to a persons anti-certificates argument. Better stick to the issues directly related to the certificates, because they have fuck all to do with whether the government can raise NI levels etc.


----------



## Ninja (Sep 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> ALso the idea that there is no debate about this is bollocks. There is a 14 page thread here for a start:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I only mentioned NI (which doesn't impact the retired) as you raised the subject of intergenerational unfairness the other day, and these Vax passes will impact younger generations so surely are related examples of the same issue?
I vaguely remember that doc, and would assume SPI-B advise this and then the nudge unit(s) executes what parts are decided on.


----------



## blameless77 (Sep 7, 2021)

Ming said:


> Yep. Do it. I’m a peer immuniser at work (i give other nurses the annual flu jab). Everyone should get it unless you’ve got a good medical reason not to. Covid-19 is likely an endemic so expect to have a regular repeat jab depending on how it mutates.
> 
> 
> And combined virus tests ongoing


----------



## elbows (Sep 8, 2021)

Ninja said:


> I vaguely remember that doc, and would assume SPI-B advise this and then the nudge unit(s) executes what parts are decided on.



I doubt the nudge unit have a monopoly on the public messaging, and I would tend to see them as one advisory input into the system rather than being the entity that actually executes the comms. 

I believe they were certainly responsible for the 'sing happy birthday while washing hands stuff' thing early on and presumably other gimmicks like that which came later.

But they are the nudge unit, not the shove unit. When looking at possible carrots and sticks to use, lots of the options are far too heavy to be compatible with nudge theory, the stronger stuff runs contrary to the entire concept. So I really dont think the nudge unit is a good fit for people that want to cast an entity in the role of sinister behind the curtain implementer of the heavier shit, their form of manipulation is supposed to be more subtle than that.

For example the wikipedia page for nudge theory has this:



> A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.



I would expect them to have had some input on messaging around vaccines, but I'm far from convinced they are the source of some of the heavy stuff government have been resorting to recently. There hasnt been a fully comprehensive messaging campaign about those new things yet either, and I will certainly pay attention if/when these things come into force and we get to see the messaging tied to the moves laid out more clearly, rather than just hearing random stuff in the press or occasionally falling out of the mouths of ministers. I dont expect it to involve many subtle nudges. And from what we have heard so far, its more likely to be painted as the lesser of two evils 'we are bringing in these certificates as an alternative to closing the nightclubs completely' type stuff.


----------



## IC3D (Sep 8, 2021)

If this govt had a valid healthcare policy it would be piling cash on the NHS. It isn't so get jabbed, get a pass and throw scorn on anyone that won't. Divide and rule.


----------



## teuchter (Sep 8, 2021)

Ninja said:


> Can't remember what other points you said now lol


You seem new to the concept of text based discussion boards.


----------



## MrCurry (Sep 8, 2021)

teuchter said:


> You seem new to the concept of text based discussion boards.


I don’t think he’s that new. A couple of hours after his self-declared “first post ever” he was referring to forum members as “U75ers”. Suggests a certain familiarity with this place.

I wonder how many previous incarnations he’s had.


----------



## pogofish (Sep 8, 2021)

Somebody has left two of these on my desk - Its a soft rubbery device that looks like some kind of sex toy.








Its a microphone steriliser.  Lined with UV-LEDs apparently - And there is a toaty wee one for tieclips!


----------



## Ninja (Sep 8, 2021)

MrCurry said:


> I don’t think he’s that new. A couple of hours after his self-declared “first post ever” he was referring to forum members as “U75ers”. Suggests a certain familiarity with this place.
> 
> I wonder how many previous incarnations he’s had.


Lol it's a public forum anyone can read before signing up 😒


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Sep 8, 2021)

pogofish said:


> Somebody has left two of these on my desk - Its a soft rubbery device that looks like some kind of sex toy.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


3 to 5 minutes turn around time is pretty good, but at £68ish a pop not cheap for large vocal ensembles.
e2a: the other one looks even more sex-toy like, and, it expands...


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Sep 9, 2021)

Have got pins and needles in my left hand that won't go away. Have had it since I woke up today. I mentioned it to the nurse who administered my vaccine on saturday (I happened to have an appointment with her today about something else). She seemed to wonder wether it was anything to do with my vaccine. And I do remember thinking that she seemd to administer my vaccine in an unusual way, it was in my left arm aswell. A GP is gonna phone me about it later at about 4pm.

Edit: Just spoke with the Doc on the phone. He doesn't think it's related to my vaccine.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 9, 2021)

Glad we are an island with tight border control


----------



## _Russ_ (Sep 9, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> Have got pins and needles in my left hand that won't go away. Have had it since I woke up today. I mentioned it to the nurse who administered my vaccine on saturday (I happened to have an appointment with her today about something else). She seemed to wonder wether it was anything to do with my vaccine. And I do remember thinking that she seemd to administer my vaccine in an unusual way, it was in my left arm aswell. A GP is gonna phone me about it later at about 4pm.
> 
> Edit: Just spoke with the Doc on the phone. He doesn't think it's related to my vaccine.


Seriously these GP Phone consultations are getting beyond a joke, I have an ongoing infection issue from last may that is still not resolved it took 3 weeks of fobbing off on the phone before I took myself to A&E to be told I had a Raging infection that 2 types of Oral antibiotics followed by 12 days in hospital on intravenous Antibiotics have controlled but not eliminated and I now have a crater in my left arm that looks like someone spooned out a lump of muscle...OK small fry compared to what a lot have suffered but nonetheless probably avoidable if my GP gave a fucking toss and came out from behind her laptop instead of sitting at home counting all the 12 quid per head vaccine fees her practice is getting courtesy of the hard working Nurses and Auxilliaries


----------



## TopCat (Sep 10, 2021)

Just got a negative result. Yay but am still in bed and feel like shit..


----------



## TopCat (Sep 10, 2021)

TopCat said:


> Just got a negative result. Yay but am still in bed and feel like shit..


I drunkenly shared a joint with a woman I now know to be an anti vaccine type. Imagine my hangover yesterday. Months of shielding has removed my accumulated immunity from bugs. Urgh.


----------



## nagapie (Sep 10, 2021)

Badgers and anyone who might know, I have a friend who needs to take a PCR as she has symptoms. I have one but it's over a year old, still packaged, I'm guessing it won't work?


----------



## Supine (Sep 10, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Badgers and anyone who might know, I have a friend who needs to take a PCR as she has symptoms. I have one but it's over a year old, still packaged, I'm guessing it won't work?



It should have an expiration date printed on it


----------



## nagapie (Sep 10, 2021)

Supine said:


> It should have an expiration date printed on it


Where? I don't see one.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 10, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Badgers and anyone who might know, I have a friend who needs to take a PCR as she has symptoms. I have one but it's over a year old, still packaged, I'm guessing it won't work?


The LFT test kits are good till 2023 so you should be fine


----------



## Badgers (Sep 10, 2021)




----------



## iona (Sep 10, 2021)

Badgers said:


> The LFT test kits are good till 2023 so you should be fine


PCR kits I got for a vaccine study at the start of this year are already out of date, I was given new ones last month and told to bin the ones I had. There should be an expiry date on them somewhere though.


----------



## nagapie (Sep 10, 2021)

iona said:


> PCR kits I got for a vaccine study at the start of this year are already out of date, I was given new ones last month and told to bin the ones I had. There should be an expiry date on them somewhere though.


Shit. We used it and sent it off. I couldn't find an expiry date.


----------



## two sheds (Sep 10, 2021)

I hate looking for expiry dates. They're often in miniature text in obscure places only visible with a magnifying glass and embossed not printed which means you have to catch them just right with the light.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 13, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Sep 13, 2021)

Covid-19: Work-from-home guidance and face masks could be brought back in winter - upday News UK
					

Guidance to work from home and the mandatory use of face masks are likely to be retained as options in the Covid winter plan due to be set out by Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister will tell the nation on Tuesday how the country can learn to live with the virus, underlining how vaccinations will …




					news.upday.com


----------



## Badgers (Sep 13, 2021)




----------



## LDC (Sep 13, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




Ambulatory Care is walk-in acute medicine department btw, take GP referrals of people that need some more treatment that day than a GP can give generally (or need a diagnosis for something that day) and are used partly to avoid admission for things like infections when previously someone might have needed a short stay in hospital. Like a minor injury walk-in centre but for medical conditions, and in a hospital rather than stand alone clinic.

E2A: Just for clarity as it's a fucking confusing name! Means you can walk in and walk out really, not brought in by ambulance.


----------



## Nine Bob Note (Sep 15, 2021)

Lots of colds going around work currently, and the sufferers/carriers dispensing with the masks they've worn throughout Covid because of runny noses


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 15, 2021)

With the latest batch of lateral flow tests my partner ordered came a PCR test as well which she was to do at the same time as the next lateral flow test and of course report the result of the LFT online and send the PCR test back for testing in the lab.

This of course makes sense as an investigation to check how reliable the results from the tests are and how they match up.  So far so good.

What was slightly strange is that she didn't get the PCR result back for over a week.  Fortunately it came back negative but it would have been a bit of a bummer if it was positive, maybe they would have contacted us earlier?  Bit strange though.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 15, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> With the latest batch of lateral flow tests my partner ordered came a PCR test as well which she was to do at the same time as the next lateral flow test and of course report the result of the LFT online and send the PCR test back for testing in the lab.
> 
> This of course makes sense as an investigation to check how reliable the results from the tests are and how they match up.  So far so good.
> 
> What was slightly strange is that she didn't get the PCR result back for over a week.  Fortunately it came back negative but it would have been a bit of a bummer if it was positive, maybe they would have contacted us earlier?  Bit strange though.



Paid PCR?


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Paid PCR?



No.  It came with some NHS lateral flow tests.  I guess it was part of their surveillance on how effective the LFT's are.

Edit: I may have the terminology wrong but it was a test you would get from the NHS if you suspected you had covid, one that needs sending to a lab.  I think they are the PCR ones?


----------



## Chilli.s (Sep 15, 2021)

Housemate just got negative paid pcr test back. Very relieved after doing home based quarantine since friday.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 15, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> No.  It came with some NHS lateral flow tests.  I guess it was part of their surveillance on how effective the LFT's are.


It is unusual for the NHS to be so slow but no unheard of. At the moment schools/colleges/universities are doing PCR rather than bubbles/isolating so the number of PCR tests has increased a lot. 

I doubt the funding for said increase is not enough to cope.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 15, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> No.  It came with some NHS lateral flow tests.  I guess it was part of their surveillance on how effective the LFT's are.
> 
> Edit: *I may have the terminology wrong but it was a test you would get from the NHS if you suspected you had covid, one that needs sending to a lab.*  I think they are the PCR ones?



No, that's an antibody test, no urgency with them, TBH.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 15, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> No, that's an antibody test, no urgency with them, TBH.


Nah, that is a PCR.


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 15, 2021)

Yes, it defo wasn't an antibody test.  It was directly linked to doing a LFT at the same time so they could compare results.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 15, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Yes, it defo wasn't an antibody test.  It was directly linked to doing a LFT at the same time so they could compare results.



Fair enough, it was 'if you suspected you *had* covid', rather than 'have', that made me think it was an antibody test, as that's what they are for.


----------



## platinumsage (Sep 15, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Fair enough, it was 'if you suspected you *had* covid', rather than 'have', that made me think it was an antibody test, as that's what they are for.



 If you where you had had *had* had had *had had* then that would've been clear.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 15, 2021)




----------



## ruffneck23 (Sep 15, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Sep 17, 2021)

Not long till Locktober


----------



## gentlegreen (Sep 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Not long till Locktober


#Locktober seems to have already been taken for some sort of chastity belt thing


----------



## Badgers (Sep 17, 2021)

NHS Covid passes will be mandatory for nightclubs and large events in Wales









						Wales to require NHS Covid passes to attend nightclubs and events
					

Enforcement of mask rules on public transport to be stepped up as coronavirus cases rise




					f7td5.app.goo.gl


----------



## Badgers (Sep 17, 2021)

UK Covid deaths increase by more than 20% in one week as 32,651 cases recorded
					

The latest figures comes ahead of an announcement on international travel, as the Government prepares to slash coronavirus protocols




					www.mirror.co.uk
				




Good time to relax travel restrictions


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> UK Covid deaths increase by more than 20% in one week as 32,651 cases recorded
> 
> 
> The latest figures comes ahead of an announcement on international travel, as the Government prepares to slash coronavirus protocols
> ...



The majority of the travel restrictions are not making this country safer they are just fucking people's livelihoods.  Its a crap system that is long overdue fixing.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Sep 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> UK Covid deaths increase by more than 20% in one week as 32,651 cases recorded
> 
> 
> The latest figures comes ahead of an announcement on international travel, as the Government prepares to slash coronavirus protocols
> ...



Totally misleading, they are quoting increases reported today compared to last Friday, a comparison of just one day to another.

The reported 7-average of deaths in the last week are actually up by +5.1%, not more than 20%.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 17, 2021)

__





						UK scientist warns over relaxation of Covid travel rules | Coronavirus | The Guardian
					

Prof Alan McNally says genome surveillance remains vital, as ministers prepare to overhaul travel rules




					amp.theguardian.com


----------



## Teaboy (Sep 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Yeah, the replacement of the two day test with a LFT does seem questionable.  Then again as far as I can work out no one is really checking whether the test is done or what the result is so maybe the change just reflects the reality on the ground?


----------



## gentlegreen (Sep 18, 2021)

My neighbour and I are fencing our two gardens together (he does it professionally) and it will involve carrying the materials through his house.
They have two small children - one at school, one at daycare - where she also works - and the grandparents are in and out a lot - all vaccinated and I am sure very responsible.

I have zero contact with other people outside of the supermarket , so it will be quite unusual for me if I don't wear a mask in their house ... but I wonder how they would take it ...


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 18, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> My neighbour and I are fencing our two gardens together (he does it professionally) and it will involve carrying the materials through his house.
> They have two small children - one at school, one at daycare - where she also works - and the grandparents are in and out a lot - all vaccinated and I am sure very responsible.
> 
> I have zero contact with other people outside of the supermarket , so it will be quite unusual for me if I don't wear a mask in their house ... but I wonder how they would take it ...


I think your risk of catching it in the 10 seconds it takes to walk through a house is virtually nonexistent.


----------



## gentlegreen (Sep 18, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> I think your risk of catching it in the 10 seconds it takes to walk through a house is virtually nonexistent.


multiple times though carrying fence panels


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 18, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> multiple times though carrying fence panels


How big can a fence really be though. No back gate, I take it?


----------



## two sheds (Sep 18, 2021)




----------



## gentlegreen (Sep 18, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> How big can a fence really be though. No back gate, I take it?


13 panels, similar numbers of posts, bags of concrete ...


----------



## prunus (Sep 18, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> 13 panels, similar numbers of posts, bags of concrete ...



If you have any concerns in either direction, why not just wear a mask?


----------



## l'Otters (Sep 18, 2021)

I’m still keeping a mask on whenever I’m inside a building which is not my home.


----------



## Raheem (Sep 19, 2021)

l'Otters said:


> I’m still keeping a mask on whenever I’m inside a building which is not my home.


Me too, but it's feeling increasingly futile.


----------



## l'Otters (Sep 19, 2021)

I’ve made myself some masks which protect me to some degree so on a personal level, it’s worth it. I’m also doing more than I was in 2020, so hopefully it’s worth doing to protect the people I come into contact with as well.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 22, 2021)

Sad but touching story 









						Remembering my wife through recipes
					

Sabeen died of Covid aged 43. Now her family has created a cookbook to remember her favourite dishes.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## pogofish (Sep 22, 2021)

So, at work I get a call - telling me that one of my colleagues has tested positive.  I have to pick-up the work of another colleague who was due down here this afternoon.  Fine.

Now, the positive colleague's line manager is sitting right beside me and didn't know a thing about it!

Teams calls are a great thing..!


----------



## Badgers (Sep 22, 2021)

Friend of mine down the road is still suffering from Covid since August 24th 

She is an athlete and does several marathons / iron man races. Double vaccinated too. 

Poor lass has problems with her kidneys and is still short of breath. She is signed off work till October for now.


----------



## Johnny Doe (Sep 23, 2021)

Is there any evidence that vaccination weakens natural immunity if you've already had the lurgy? Consiparloon relative is trumpetting this and I can usual find the source and why it's bollocks to her shite in 5 mins but I can't find either for this


----------



## Supine (Sep 23, 2021)

Harry Smiles said:


> Is there any evidence that vaccination weakens natural immunity if you've already had the lurgy? Consiparloon relative is trumpetting this and I can usual find the source and why it's bollocks to her shite in 5 mins but I can't find either for this



There is plenty of evidence that natural immunity plus vaccination results in the best defence you can have.


----------



## Fruitloop (Sep 23, 2021)

LIterally the exact opposite of the case


----------



## Johnny Doe (Sep 23, 2021)

Supine said:


> There is plenty of evidence that natural immunity plus vaccination results in the best defence you can have.


Any links? Thanks


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 23, 2021)

Harry Smiles said:


> Any links? Thanks


Some studies found "superhuman immunity" in people who were infected with COVID and later received an mRNA vaccine - not sure why link below is appearing as a media file but if you click on the headline you will get the text.



Story below links to a few more studies:

_Antibody levels are really variable after recovering from infections, and those at the lower end of the spectrum might be more susceptible to reinfections,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunology at the University of Arizona. “But after a single vaccine in people who have recovered from Covid-19, antibodies skyrocket up, including those that neutralize variants of concern.”_









						Why people who already had Covid should still get vaccinated
					

Do I need to get the vaccine if I had Covid? Hybrid immunity from natural infection plus the vaccine can give even better immune protection from reinfection or breakthrough case.




					www.nbcnews.com


----------



## two sheds (Sep 23, 2021)

Interesting example of 'asking the correct question is more important than getting the correct answer" there. 

A phrase that confused me for a while but I'm often reminded of it after an unsuccessful DIY attempt.


----------



## Supine (Sep 23, 2021)

Harry Smiles said:


> Any links? Thanks



Just tell them a bloke called supine on the internet said so. Its probably as good as their source.


----------



## 2hats (Sep 23, 2021)

Harry Smiles said:


> Any links? Thanks


Hybrid immunity.


----------



## teuchter (Sep 23, 2021)

This week I've come down with a cold for the first time since Feb 2019. Probably no coincidence that it comes after a weekend where i did a few 'risky' things that I've been avoiding until now.

Have to confess on a self interested level i was quite disappointed to get a negative on a lateral flow test as it would be quite good to know I've had it and had it without severe symptoms.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 23, 2021)

Super cold: Is 'the worst cold ever' going around?
					

As more of us mix and the weather gets colder, the common cold is back - and it's flooring people.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Sep 23, 2021)

A few of my staff are really suffering with colds


----------



## Badgers (Sep 24, 2021)




----------



## rubbershoes (Sep 24, 2021)

Badgers said:


> A few of my staff are really suffering with colds



I've had one for a week. My children brought it back from school. 

As I'm WFH, I'm still working. If I was office based, I'd have needed a few days off. 

For the last few days, I've woken up thinking its gone but the symptoms return and I'm on my third hanky by 10am 

Today seems OK so far. Fingers crossed


----------



## Badgers (Sep 24, 2021)

Why was I not told about this???? 









						‘Jabs for kebabs’ — The art of coronavirus vaccine persuasion
					

From sausages to free taxi rides, governments are giving out free stuff to encourage you to take your jab.




					www.politico.eu


----------



## nagapie (Sep 24, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Why was I not told about this????
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Yeah, I didn't get offered any freebies to get jabbed. It sucks being old.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 24, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Yeah, I didn't get offered any freebies to get jabbed. It sucks being old.


I was offered a sticker, but was too affronted to take one


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Sep 24, 2021)

Badgers said:


>




So far not a single one of them is hanging from a lamppost so they've not done too badly all things considered.


----------



## Supine (Sep 24, 2021)

nagapie said:


> Yeah, I didn't get offered any freebies to get jabbed. It sucks being old.



Potentially given life!


----------



## Yossarian (Sep 24, 2021)

Supine said:


> Potentially given life!



"This injection will stop you from dying a painful and terrifying death as a bat virus destroys your lungs."

"Not sure, mate..."

"We'll throw in a free kebab."

"You're on!"


----------



## Cloo (Sep 27, 2021)

Has anyone actually had COVID spotted by lateral flow when they had no symptoms? I know plenty of people where it's confirmed once they are feeling off or downright ill, but I don't think I know anyone who's taken a  test when asymptomatic and found they've got it.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Sep 27, 2021)

Cloo said:


> Has anyone actually had COVID spotted by lateral flow when they had no symptoms? I know plenty of people where it's confirmed once they are feeling off or downright ill, but I don't think I know anyone who's taken a  test when asymptomatic and found they've got it.



My uncle showed up as positive on an LFT with no symptoms, confirmed by a PCR. Although he was taking it because my aunt was showing symptoms (loss of taste and smell mainly with some mild cold type symptoms) not just to check.


----------



## Cloo (Sep 27, 2021)

Having to do son every day this week due to infections in class and a bit traumatic because he really can't stand it - what with the adhd I think he's extra sensitive to having stuff stuck in his face poor sod.


----------



## existentialist (Sep 27, 2021)

Cloo said:


> Having to do son every day this week due to infections in class and a bit traumatic because he really can't stand it - what with the adhd I think he's extra sensitive to having stuff stuck in his face poor sod.


I'm normally pretty stoical about medical stuff being shoved in orifices, but I have found the tonsil'n'nostril thing almost unbearable to do...  And I'm 57.


----------



## Cloo (Sep 27, 2021)

Nephew has positive lft yesterday but was already feeling rough - his older sister had it over summer, so she'll be ok. Brother hoping his and wife's vax holds this time as well.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 27, 2021)

New covid cases today in Germany: 3k, population 83m. New covid cases today in UK: 33k, population 67m.


----------



## Badgers (Sep 27, 2021)

Cloo said:


> Has anyone actually had COVID spotted by lateral flow when they had no symptoms? I know plenty of people where it's confirmed once they are feeling off or downright ill, but I don't think I know anyone who's taken a  test when asymptomatic and found they've got it.


All the time


----------



## Badgers (Oct 3, 2021)

UK might not be over the worst, scientists warn, as Covid case numbers stay high
					

Inoculation programme must be stepped up before the onset of winter




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## elbows (Oct 3, 2021)

Badgers said:


> UK might not be over the worst, scientists warn, as Covid case numbers stay high
> 
> 
> Inoculation programme must be stepped up before the onset of winter
> ...



Since Woolhouse often got on my nerves much earlier in the pandemic for saying things I considered to be unwise that didnt reflect the magnitude of the situation, it is worth noting when even he has concerns about the future.

The extent to which emphasis on vaccination to improve the situation is misplaced depends on how much difference we think boosters are going to make.

Because although the media and experts focus on vaccination is understandable, I dont think its doing justice to the current picture. This picture was always expected because vaccines arent 00% effective and those who have been vaccinated make up such a large percentage of the population these days. But the media are failing to describe the current picture on that front properly, and are reliant on data that stretches over a very large part of 2021, or reports from individual hospitals or trust areas, to tell a story that does not reflect the current reality.

Since I always have an emphasis on telling the stories media etc arent, here is my data summary using official data that covers weeks 34 to 37 of 2021:

Of the 3158 deaths within 28 days of a positive test that the official vaccine surveillance report contains:

33 were unlinked (they couldnt link that persons death to vaccine status data)
730 were unvaccinated
111 had one dose
2284 had two doses

There is also a version for deaths within 60 days of a positive test but I'm not covering those this time.

Data is from https://assets.publishing.service.g...992/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_38.pdf

I will repeat this exercise for hospitalisations and cases shortly.

These diminishing returns may be one reason the authorities dont seem to be as bothered about maintaining vaccination momentum these days. I am bound to say that we need to focus on other ways to reduce the number of infections.

Although please note that vaccines still work, and thats reflected in other versions of this data where the numbers are expressed as rates per 100,000 people.


----------



## elbows (Oct 3, 2021)

8255 cases in the data that required overnight hospitalisation between weeks 34 and 37:

95 unlinked
3220 unvaccinated
383 one dose
4557 two doses

Certainly the burden on hospitals could be reduced if more unvaccinated adults got vaccinated. Its questionable as to how many of those people actually will at this stage though. And under 18's account for 478 of the 3220 unvaccinated in those figures.

Same data source as previous post.


----------



## elbows (Oct 3, 2021)

Now when it comes to positive cases, the numbers are heavily skewed by the very high number of cases in younger age groups. So I better post the full table for those in addition to my totals. Actually since previous data for deaths and hospitalisations tended to be skewed in the other direction, towards older people, I probably should go back and add the full tables to my previous posts about those too.

Again this covers weeks 34 to 37.

680,582 of which:
60,046 unlinked
275,845 not vaccinated
67,187 one dose
277,504 two doses


Same source, https://assets.publishing.service.g...992/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_38.pdf


----------



## Badgers (Oct 3, 2021)

elbows said:


> Since Woolhouse often got on my nerve much earlier in the pandemic for saying things I considered to be unwise that didnt reflect the magnitude of the situation, it is worth noting when even he has concerns about the future.


 Yup ^ someone at PHE told me the same. 


elbows said:


> These diminishing returns may be one reason the authorities dont seem to be as bothered about maintaining vaccination momentum these days. I am bound to say that we need to focus on other ways to reduce the number of infections.



Winter is slowly arriving and inaction is not a viable option. Are they hoping for a spike in revenue across business sectors? Seems to have been the main aim. But it will no doubt cause more long term costs, increase avoidable deaths and drag this whole thing  out for longer 

More masks, especially in schools. More focus on social distancing. Try to actually measure the impact/spread all these large events, like the Marathon today.


----------



## elbows (Oct 3, 2021)

Yeah, though I dont currently have a prediction as to whether they will start to take any of that stuff more seriously again. It will depend which way the data goes, and its still a mixed picture on that front. Whether the school-aged spike diminishes and the extent to which it causes spread upwards into older age groups are things I will keep an eye on. If they start to see really strong signals in regards waning immunity in the data then this may also lead to a change of tone. And they will have gotten party conference season out of the way soon.

I'm hoping to take a fresh look at cases by age group in the main UK thread later today.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 6, 2021)

Niece (13) and sister-in-law (Teaching Assistant) have both got Covid now - it was only a matter of time really, if you're in a school environment.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 7, 2021)

Long (not cheerful) thread this on UK mortality rates. The poster is well respected so not alarmist.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 7, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Long (not cheerful) thread this on UK mortality rates. The poster is well respected so not alarmist.




He's been very selected on the comparisons, there are counties that have done worst than the UK, including the US, Italy, Belgium, Mexico and at least 20 other countries.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 7, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> He's been very selected on the comparisons, there are counties that have done worst than the UK, including the US, Italy, Belgium, Mexico and at least 20 other countries.


It is based on Europe, sorry should have said.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 7, 2021)

Badgers said:


> It is based on Europe, sorry should have said.



Japan & Singapore are in Europe now?   

Not that I am defending the fuck-ups by our government, just pointing out some have actually managed to fuck-up even more.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 7, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Japan & Singapore are in Europe now?
> 
> Not that I am defending the fuck-ups by our government, just pointing out some have actually managed to fuck-up even more.


Ooops


----------



## Yossarian (Oct 7, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> He's been very selected on the comparisons, there are counties that have done worst than the UK, including the US, Italy, Belgium, Mexico and at least 20 other countries.



It makes sense to compare the UK to equally wealthy countries where ability to afford vaccines etc. hasn't affected the death rate - and, if you're looking at what went wrong, to focus on what other countries did right instead of looking at the handful of comparable countries that did worse.


----------



## teuchter (Oct 7, 2021)

He might be right but he doesn't really present any evidence for what he's saying.

For example - on number of critical care beds, I can find this table









						The variability of critical care bed numbers in Europe - Intensive Care Medicine
					

Purpose To quantify the numbers of critical care beds in Europe and to understand the differences in these numbers between countries when corrected for population size and gross domestic product. Methods Prospective data collection of critical care bed numbers for each country in Europe from...




					link.springer.com
				




or more up to date this one



			https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/intensive-care-beds-capacity
		


and I can see that the UK (or England) has quite a low number, but Belgium has a higher number of beds (yet higher number of Covid deaths) and Sweden has fewer beds and fewer deaths. Denmark has a much lower number of Covid deaths than the UK... but appears to have a similar (or lower) number of critical care beds.

And he tells us that the UK has a very different triage approach but no detail to back this up.

So it just seems like someone on twitter with their personal hunches about why the UK did so badly.


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

teuchter said:


> And he tells us that the UK has a very different triage approach but no detail to back this up.
> 
> So it just seems like someone on twitter with their personal hunches about why the UK did so badly.



Did you really pay so little attention to this aspect that you can seriously question this?

People didnt question me when I went on about the 'die at home' aspect of the UK approach. Because it was bloody obvious it was happening, and there was no system to check on the health of people who caught it.  It was a deadly form of hospital demand destruction, and it was blatant at the time.

People were not educated about all the key warning signs to look out for. People were encouraged not to be a burden to the NHS. There were some limited forms of telephone triage that were entirely inadequate and further suppressed demand. In some areas at certain moments the criteria for when emergency responders should admit very ill patients was changed. And in the first wave there was such a lack of testing that plenty of people died at home without even knowing whether they had covid or showing up in the official covid deaths, which is one of the reasons we saw so called 'non-covid' excess deaths reach extremely high levels at just the same time as confirmed covid deaths (=people who were admitted or otherwise tested) reached stunning levels in the first wave.

There are probably a few other aspects to this sorry picture which Im not aware of yet, and the other reason I am ill equipped to make comparisons to other countries in this respect is that I never had the time to check the detail of how other countries approached this.

Here are a couple of his tweets on this matter. And kindly spare us the form of bullshit where experts are reduced to just being some person on twitter with an opinion. Because in this case his research interests involve health systems, with a particular focus during this pandemic on Covid-19 clinical care!


----------



## Badgers (Oct 7, 2021)

Gotta say I will take his qualifications and first hand experience over teuchter


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

One good excuse people have for not understanding that aspect of the UK approach is that the UK press did a great job of not drawing too much attention to it. Its a topic that up and down the system is considered too embarrassing to dwell on, it brings our authorities into disrepute. Easier to hide behind peoples desire to only say positive things about the NHS. This is one of the reasons I always went in hard by twisting their messaging into 'protect the NHS, die at home', the lack of attention to it drove me potty so I thought I'd shout about it in a vulgar manner.

Not that the press paid no attention to it at all, it just never became the central narrative or headline. So they did cover specific tragic stories of people who died at home, especially during times when authorities wanted people to take the threat seriously, eg when we were in lockdowns. And there were a few reports here and there about the criteria for admittance being lowered for a time in some regions. Later, somewhat related topics have occasionally come up since, eg simplistic reliance on home blood oxygen level monitoring when it turned out that people with darker skin tones may not get the right results from the monitoring equipment.

This stuff will form quite a chunk of what I use to judge how much of a whitewash the public inquiry turns out to be. If there isnt much focus on how the health system did on this front then I will cry foul.


----------



## teuchter (Oct 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> Did you really pay so little attention to this aspect that you can seriously question this?
> 
> People didnt question me when I went on about the 'die at home' aspect of the UK approach. Because it was bloody obvious it was happening, and there was no system to check on the health of people who caught it.  It was a deadly form of hospital demand destruction, and it was blatant at the time.



But I have no way to compare this with what happened in other countries. Was the UK unique in taking this approach?

Can we find other countries where they also had high case numbers, where they encouraged people to go into hospital more than the UK did, and we can see some sort of evidence that this improved their outcomes? Or did it lead to hospitals performing even worse, because they were overwhelmed with patients a greater proportion of whom didn't necessarily need to be there?

I'm not commenting on whether or not the UK's policy was the right one, nor am I ignoring the fact that such approaches would not have been necessary if we had higher capacity in the first place. I'm just commenting on the ability to come to conclusions without actually being able to compare the approaches of different countries.

I expect the reasons some countries did worse than others will be incredibly complex and it might never be possible to come to a lot of definitive conclusions. He is making some plausible suggestions about things that, if the UK had a different approach, it might have seen a better outcome, but without giving us comparisons I don't see how we can judge how major these factors were in the context of the bigger picture.

He asks "why has the UK mortality been so high?" and then concludes the thread with two factors (hospital capacity and triage approach). That implies that these were the most significant of all the factors involved. Maybe they were but I don't see that such a conclusion is backed by clear evidence. I am not saying that I think they weren't factors.


----------



## Dogsauce (Oct 7, 2021)

Remember a couple of weeks back when I tested positive on lateral flow and not PCR and reported the same happening to a lot of other people locally?  Seems to have now been recognised and is being investigated:





__





						Lateral flow tests: Health chiefs probe ‘high number’ of positive rapid Covid tests followed by negative PCRs
					





					www.msn.com
				




I did test positive on PCR no.3, other half on her second one after first was inconclusive.

It won’t be a lateral flow fault as I used different batches from different manufacturers (ones I get from work and a pack from the pharmacy) and both types positive.  Could be a PCR issue as the negative tests were from the walk-in centre, positive (mine and other half’s) from mail-in ones.  Both have been symptomatic and still quite unwell.


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

teuchter said:


> I expect the reasons some countries did worse than others will be incredibly complex and it might never be possible to come to a lot of definitive conclusions. He is making some plausible suggestions about things that, if the UK had a different approach, it might have seen a better outcome, but without giving us comparisons I don't see how we can judge how major these factors were in the context of the bigger picture.
> 
> He asks "why has the UK mortality been so high?" and then concludes the thread with two factors (hospital capacity and triage approach). That implies that these were the most significant of all the factors involved. Maybe they were but I don't see that such a conclusion is backed by clear evidence. I am not saying that I think they weren't factors.


Well certainly we first need to unpick a conflation of two different questions in his first two tweets in that thread:

There is overall level of covid mortality across the entire population.

There is the chance of dying if you caught it.

The former will be affected by every pandemic failing, late and inadequate lockdowns etc etc. The latter, which is what he is actually focussing on, eliminates some of those areas and allows us to zoom into what sort of care people who caught it received. It is entirely reasonable to expect that the things he focusses on are a great match for the latter question. Still not quite the whole story though, since we would expect the case fatality rate to be affected by some things beyond the level of clinical care they received, things like the age and prior health of those who caught it.

As for comparisons to other countries, some of his tweets in that thread indicate that he is aware that many other countries focussed on basic capacity (as opposed to ICU capacity) and he explains why this would be expected to make a big difference.

So can I find some things to pick at in the way he expressed himself on this topic? Yes. Do I think these minor criticisms should distract from the failings he is trying to draw attention to? No.

I will try to draw attention to more detailed analysis of these failings whenever I find suitable studies.


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

I certainly need to explore the oxygen saturation levels admission criteria since thats a fairly straightforward metric and highly relevant to the disease caused by this virus.


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

Loads of detail here:

"Restricted access to the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic: Is it time to move away from the rationed clinical response?"





__





						DEFINE_ME
					





					www.thelancet.com
				






> Part of the poor clinical response to COVID-19 in the UK can be traced back to national policies restricting access to healthcare. Early on in the crisis the national response defaulted to a passive clinical approach despite international recommendations to the contrary. UK-wide, patients were advised to stay at home, book a SARS-CoV-2 test, and if concerned consult either an automated online symptom checker or non-clinical telephone triage system. Notably, thresholds for onward referral using these new and unproven triage systems were high.Equally concerning, the subsequent automated safety-net advice given to the patient included ‘how to manage breathlessness at home’ – a practice that would have been inconceivable in 2019. This, what became the national COVID-19 clinical pathway, replaced the more typical GP-led community assessment of the infected, breathless patient.





> As well as clinical contact, oxygen was also rationed. At a national level, regardless of local disease prevalence and even for patients without COVID-19, target oxygen levels were reduced. This departure from our usual standards of care was imposed nationwide without any new evidence or revision to our established pneumonia guidelines. This meant patients with severe COVID-19 could be left at home, or sent home, hypoxic and without any treatment or follow-up. [Some localities did identify this gap in the national response and implemented their own follow-up service for high-risk patients who did not meet the new, higher thresholds for admission.





> The rationale for such a passive, restricted national clinical response to the disease is not entirely clear. It may have been a preemptive rationing of healthcare; an attempt to concentrate limited clinical resources to those in most clinical need. But acute medical problems generally follow a different logic. Any offsetting of the healthcare burden achieved by restricting access to clinical contact early on in the disease is lost when patients - albeit fewer in number - present more severely unwell further on in the course of the disease. A ten minute clinical assessment can quite easily become many hours of clinical time if the opportunity to intervene early is missed. And, a short, uncomplicated hospital stay can quite easily become a complicated and protracted one, if treatment is delayed.



There is much else quotable in that article, but I will skip ahead a bit because one way we can take shortcuts but still gain clues about how our response compares to other nations is to look at international guidelines.



> International guidelines do not support the UK's passive clinical approach to SARS-CoV-2. The WHO issued guidelines in March 2020 recommending a clinical assessment be offered to all patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19. The UK has yet to meet those standards. The WHO also produced similar guidelines directed at ‘resource-restricted’ countries. All four UK nations have failed to meet those standards too. Even now, in the UK, patients with COVID-19 – suspected or confirmed – are still not offered an initial clinical assessment or follow-up, be it remote or otherwise. The public can still order a diagnostic test without clinical supervision, are still triaged through an automated or non-clinical pathway, and astonishingly, are still offered advice (and now a video) on how to manage breathlessness at home without ever having seen or spoken to a doctor or nurse. Of critical concern, at the time of writing, older adults and vulnerable patients are held to the same pathway, despite our awareness of ‘silent hypoxia’ and the mortality rate of the vulnerable and older COVID-19 patients. These standards are substantially below those expected in the UK and internationally, and need to be addressed.



There are a large number of references to other sources which support the claims made in the above quotes but I have removed them for formatting reasons.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

Although I have to say there is at least one mistake in that document. They mention that early in the crisis people were advised to "book a SARS-CoV-2 test" but in the first months there was entirely insufficient testing capacity so even getting tested was not an option for many, and was not part of what the masses were told to do. This didnt change until the first wave was well past its peak.


----------



## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

There is also a forwards-looking concept in that document that is worthy of more discussion:



> Improving the tolerance of society to back- ground levels of SARS-CoV-2 will require an improved clinical response.



Yes I much prefer 'learning to live with Covid 19' to 'learning to die with Covid 19', no matter how much more naturally the latter comes to our authorities.


----------



## teuchter (Oct 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> Well certainly we first need to unpick a conflation of two different questions in his first two tweets in that thread:
> 
> There is overall level of covid mortality across the entire population.
> 
> ...


Yes I noted that conflation when I reread the thread.

So, I looked at a few countries' case rate per 100k population, and deaths per 100k population.

(I know that both numbers are subject to some unreliability when comparing between countries.)

For the UK deaths are at 205 for a case rate of 12k.

You can look at Sweden see that they have a lower death rate (144) for a similar case rate (11k). So they are doing better.

You can also look at Germany and find that their case rate is less than half of ours (5k) and yet their death rate (113) is more than half of ours. So on that particular measure it seems that Germany is doing worse than the UK - if you get Covid you are more likely to die in Germany than you are in the UK (unless I have messed up my numbers somewhere).

You can then look at Belgium and see that they are also doing worse than the UK because they have a slightly lower case rate (10k) and a higher death rate (222).

Finally you can look at Italy and see that they (appear to) have a lower case rate at 8k but they have a higher death rate at 217.

In fact I realise that you can plot "case fatality rate" on the website I often use and it looks like this for Europe. Again unless I have messed up, it actually looks like the UK is doing better than the EU average on that particular measure of how likely you are to die if you get Covid. I'm not saying this is the most important measure, but it's one that's pretty relevant to what he's looking at. Again, the graph contains no information about the different triage approaches in different European countries. If we find that many of the countries that did better than us, also had triage systems that didn't match what the WHO recommends - or we find that many of the countries that did worse than us, did have triage systems that matched what the WHO recommends, then isn't that significant? We need that information too.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

Yes we need to know those things. But also one of the reasons I dont usually attempt this sort of analysis myself is that we also need to understand the differences between countries when it comes to things like how many of the actual cases each country manage to formally identify via testing, and also differences in how deaths are measured.

If my foreign language skills were better then I would have spent a small amount of time much earlier in the pandemic looking at what the official medical advice to people with suspected covid was like in different countries. I still did a tiny bit of this, and the most obvious difference was that I was more likely to find advice such as 'call your doctor' in non-UK countries.


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## teuchter (Oct 7, 2021)

It just seems to me that it's too easy to pick out some figures from other countries to support whatever theories someone has about why the UK has done badly, or how much better it would have been possible to do. There are just so many factors that it is very difficult to pull anything meaningful out. Maybe some statisticians will manage to do something useful in coming years.

It's notable that Sweden appears to have done better on overall deaths and also case fatality rate. Some could try and use this to say that the herd immunity approach worked and we should have done the same here. But I would say that would be a wrong conclusion to come to.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

I'd rather focus on the obvious failings and limitations of the UK approach, of which there are many to choose from. I've been happy to mention other countries approaches when its bloody obvious what they were doing better, or when I'm feeling the need to refute some anti-lockdown bullshit that dubious sections of the press have resorted to on numerous occasions. Shit that often involved entirely false narratives about other countries. And in the first year of the pandemic I certainly had to keep pointing out things such as having an adequate test & trace system not in itself being some tidy alternative to lockdowns, no matter how much the person making such claims wanted to believe that lockdowns were somehow unnecessary. The international comparisons that I have absolutely no regrets about highlighting tended to involve really obvious stuff involving case numbers in countries that acted early, in stark contrast to the late and half-arsed UK approach. Some countries that did well early on caught up with the UKs level of horror because they didnt stay the course, eg most of Europe rushed to reopen whenever they could.

It is indeed incredibly hard to fully unpick all of the different factors in any aspect of this pandemic. This does not dissuade me from pointing out the really obvious and shameful failings in detail.


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## Supine (Oct 7, 2021)

I think there will be PhD’s for decades trying to understand the pandemic and how countries performed.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

Supine said:


> I think there will be PhD’s for decades trying to understand the pandemic and how countries performed.


Yes and they will add naunce and detail. But many of their conclusions will be stuff we could have come up with in less forensic fashion from the start. Most of what I've gone nuts about in the pandemic really isnt that hard to grasp and see the basic truth of, even when precise measurements elude us.

I like the detail, so for example I still find some value in public inquiries even when people roll their eyes at the 'no shit sherlock' non-revelations. What I dont like is when the lack of such firm detail is used as an excuse to look the other way and to quibble in a manner that reveals unpleasant truths about some peoples priorities.


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## Dogsauce (Oct 7, 2021)

There’s all kind of factors - places like Italy were hit early and hard because they weren’t able to develop treatments by the time it arrived, and once hospitals are overwhelmed as they were there deaths shoot up hugely.  There’s also things like social care for the elderly - the proportion of U.K. elderly in care homes is about double that in Italy, so Italy had more vulnerable around in society in multi generational families - had the U.K. protected care homes we may have had fewer deaths. Sweden had about 50% higher than U.K. but did seem to protect them hence lower deaths there. Stuff like this is among many things that make a difference.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

Swedens care home failings were considered to be significant. This article is from last November:









						Swedish watchdog finds serious failures in COVID care at nursing homes
					

Sweden's health watchdog said on Tuesday it had uncovered "serious shortcomings" in COVID-19 care for residents of nursing homes where thousands have died, increasing pressure on the country's unorthodox pandemic strategy.




					www.reuters.com
				




That article includes these figures:



> The watchdog said none of Sweden’s 21 regions had taken sufficient responsibility for the treatment of infected nursing home residents, with a fifth of patients having received no individual assessment by doctors.



I wonder what that figure is for the UK!

Also:



> The watchdog urged regional authorities to carry out measures to improve care and present them no later than Jan. 15 next year and said it would be carrying out a further review of patient records.
> 
> “The lowest level (of care) is quite simply too low,” Wallstrom said. “Even during a pandemic.”


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## teuchter (Oct 7, 2021)

elbows said:


> I'd rather focus on the obvious failings and limitations of the UK approach, of which there are many to choose from.



For sure - in the end I would say the problem with that tweet was not the basic message (here are two things we should have done differently) but that he started it out with the comparison to other, cherry picked countries, which just invites people to argue about the comparisons rather than what he actually seems to want to discuss. In a way it doesn't matter what happened in other countries... if there's a valid point that there are things the UK could and should have done certain things better, then it can stand on its own.


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## elbows (Oct 7, 2021)

I'd be lying if I claimed I'd never done that, and aside from using it to counteract bullshit agendas in the press, I expect I've also done it at times in a desperate bid to provide some wider pandemic context or bypass people who think the UK did a good job of handling the pandemic. But certainly having resorted to such things, it often opens up new cans of worms and areas people will quibble over.


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## Buddy Bradley (Oct 7, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Niece (13) and sister-in-law (Teaching Assistant) have both got Covid now - it was only a matter of time really, if you're in a school environment.


And now daughter (17) has tested positive, after us managing to completely avoid it for over 18 months. Balls.


----------



## _Russ_ (Oct 8, 2021)

Something thats been  at the back of mind for a while, I've heard on here a few times people state that the LFT is not a reliable test in symptomatic cases, which implies its more reliable at finding asymptomatic infections.

I don't understand this


----------



## strung out (Oct 8, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Something thats been  at the back of mind for a while, I've heard on here a few times people state that the LFT is not a reliable test in symptomatic cases, which implies its more reliable at finding asymptomatic infections.
> 
> I don't understand this


It's not reliable at picking up either symptomatic or non-symptomatic cases.

The benefit is in its ability to pick up some of the non-symptomatic cases that normally wouldn't have been tested for at all.


----------



## existentialist (Oct 8, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Something thats been  at the back of mind for a while, I've heard on here a few times people state that the LFT is not a reliable test in symptomatic cases, which implies its more reliable at finding asymptomatic infections.
> 
> I don't understand this


Immunology is hard.


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## _Russ_ (Oct 8, 2021)

Thanks that makes sense, seemed mostly only the poor performance at detecting symptomatic cases has been mentioned giving me a false impression.


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## _Russ_ (Oct 8, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Immunology is hard.


Fuck all to do with understanding immunology


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## existentialist (Oct 8, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Fuck all to do with understanding immunology


That's probably where you're going wrong, then


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 8, 2021)

I've just noticed that my latest batch of lateral flow tests were made by a Chinese company called Acon.  They've got a sense of humour I'll give them that.


----------



## Reno (Oct 8, 2021)

Badgers said:


> New covid cases today in Germany: 3k, population 83m. New covid cases today in UK: 33k, population 67m.


Here in Germany we can only attend indoor entertainment venues like cinemas, theatres, museums and clubs if recovered, vaccinated or tested within 24 hours and from Monday, tests are not free anymore. We also have to register with an app when we enter a venue. Is it a free for all in the UK now ?


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## cupid_stunt (Oct 8, 2021)

Reno said:


> Here in Germany we can only attend indoor entertainment venues like cinemas, theatres, museums and clubs if you are recovered, vaccinated or tested within 24 hours and from Monday, tests are not free anymore. We also have to register with an app when we enter a venue. Is it a free for all in the UK now ?



If varies, IIRC both Scotland & Wales are introducing vaccine passports, but not England, not sure about Northern Ireland.


----------



## Sue (Oct 9, 2021)

A friend has got Covid as has his daughter who was born right at the start of lockdown. 

He's double vaxxed and says it feels halfway between a bad cold and flu -- he has completely lost his sense of taste though.

His daughter is a bit more tired than normal but it looks much like a normal cold.

His partner's tested negative and she's a teacher so... 🤷‍♀️.


----------



## two sheds (Oct 9, 2021)

Private Eye has a story this issue:



> One controversial aspect of Las Vegas-registered Innova Medical Group's multi-billion-pound commercial success in flogging lateral flow tests to the British taxpayer was the rapid assessment, based on a trial in Liverpool, that community testing using the devices was useful.
> 
> Other scientists disagreed, pointing to high rates of missed positive cases and poor methods and information disclosures in the appraisal led by the University of Liverpool
> 
> ... would it be right for that institution to accept a large gift from the company? The University of Liverpool seems to think so. It has just announced a new Pandemic Institute funded by £10m from none other than Innova Medical Group.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 10, 2021)

Still #worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Oct 10, 2021)

Really really good thread regarding coping with Covid and mental health.


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 11, 2021)

Covid Daily Operations for October 10th Ireland.

Frightening.



			https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/newsfeatures/covid19-updates/covid-19-daily-operations-update-2000-10-october-2021.pdf
		


3 general beds left in our local hospital.
No bed in ICU or HDU.

And many of our hospitals are the same.

There are only 12 ICU beds available 😳
In the ENTIRE country

We are fucked as regards health care here.


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## Buddy Bradley (Oct 11, 2021)

The NHS PCR ordering process seems to be broken, at least for ordering multiple tests. I ordered 4 last week (for myself, wife, two kids), and only one arrived. So my wife ordered one for herself, and then two for the kids - bit only one was delivered. Seems that their "you can order multiple tests at once" system is completely broken at the moment - so if anyone is in the same position we are, order them all individually.


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## Badgers (Oct 11, 2021)

Been a very busy testing day at the CovidCoalFace. Sadly very high positive numbers too at nearly 15% 

Almost all positive tests for people in their 20s, the majority of which were women across a range of ethnicities.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 12, 2021)

Shocked I tell thee 

Thousands of lives could have been saved by earlier lockdown, MPs find in report









						'Many thousands' of pandemic deaths could have been avoided, MPs find in damning Covid report
					

Early decisions and advice on lockdowns, social distancing and care homes rank as "one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced"




					f7td5.app.goo.gl


----------



## two sheds (Oct 12, 2021)

not tens of thousands then


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## Badgers (Oct 12, 2021)

two sheds said:


> not tens of thousands then


Indeed


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## elbows (Oct 12, 2021)

Only reason Im not discussing that here is that its already being discussed in the main UK thread and parallel discussions sometimes melt my brain.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 12, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Still #worldbeating
> 
> View attachment 292068


#worldbeating


----------



## Mogden (Oct 13, 2021)

There seems to be a real snaggle on the processing of PCR tests when returned by post as opposed to from a walk in. I had 2 delayed, more than 72 hours, results the other week, and the result I had this morning took 6 days to process!


----------



## Badgers (Oct 13, 2021)

Have had issues with the CovidCoalFace staff working with me. 

We are all casual staff so don't get sick pay  but given the nature of the job anyone testing positive gets full sick pay. However they need to do a PCR test (following positive LFT) before the council will pay them.

Some PCR tests have taken a week to come back. Some not at all  given the nature of the job we can't risk them working so it is a hassle.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 13, 2021)

Dp


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## _Russ_ (Oct 13, 2021)

Sort of related...its Emergency Nurses day (maybe only an Ozzy thing, I dunno), big hugs and thank you to all the nurses


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## Badgers (Oct 13, 2021)

Freedom... 



> Coronavirus daily cases at highest for 12 weeks as 42,776 more infections recorded





> According to the latest figures, 136 more people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, bringing the UK total death toll to 138,080


----------



## Cloo (Oct 13, 2021)

It does feel at the moment a bit like we (as in our household) are feeling a little 'Must catch up with everyone and everything before winter' at the moment. I think the government are going to resist a lockdown at all costs, but can't see myself going to the pub for Christmas drinks exactly. But honestly if I could have even one household round at a time this winter that would be 100% improvement on last year. I foresee a lot of 'dinner parties'


----------



## William of Walworth (Oct 13, 2021)

Cloo said:


> but can't see myself going to the pub for Christmas drinks exactly.


'Dry December'** (or at least most of??) 

**(At least prior to Xmas Eve/Xmas Day/Bocing Day or whichever, anyway??)


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

COVID-19: Winter support package expected for 20 local authorities over coronavirus fears
					

Sky News can reveal that from 22 October, four local authorities including Bolton, Luton, Blackburn with Darwen, and Leicester, will be categorised as areas of "enduring transmission" for COVID and will therefore receive a tailored package to support them until potentially March 2022.




					news.sky.com
				






> Sky News can reveal that from 22 October, four local authorities including Bolton, Luton, Blackburn with Darwen, and Leicester, will be categorised as areas of "enduring transmission" for coronavirus and will therefore receive a tailored package to support them until potentially March 2022


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 14, 2021)

Badgers said:


> COVID-19: Winter support package expected for 20 local authorities over coronavirus fears
> 
> 
> Sky News can reveal that from 22 October, four local authorities including Bolton, Luton, Blackburn with Darwen, and Leicester, will be categorised as areas of "enduring transmission" for COVID and will therefore receive a tailored package to support them until potentially March 2022.
> ...


What’s special about those places which means their transmission is higher?


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 14, 2021)

Badgers said:


> the UK total death toll to 138,080


1 in every 500 people in the country.


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## _Russ_ (Oct 14, 2021)

Badgers said:


> COVID-19: Winter support package expected for 20 local authorities over coronavirus fears
> 
> 
> Sky News can reveal that from 22 October, four local authorities including Bolton, Luton, Blackburn with Darwen, and Leicester, will be categorised as areas of "enduring transmission" for COVID and will therefore receive a tailored package to support them until potentially March 2022.
> ...


Lets face it the whole of the UK is a place of enduring transmission, largely due government policy


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Lets face it the whole of the UK is a place of enduring transmission, largely due government policy


Yeah but there are some super spreader towns/cities for sure. 

Luton is my Covid gig and this week the test centres are getting 8-15% positive tests. That figure is worrying on it's own but bear in mind these are the people who actively come to get tested. Those that do not want to test and most likely are not vaccinated are unknown figures.


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## _Russ_ (Oct 14, 2021)

Badger, except for a week or so at the beginning of October Wales as a whole hasnt gone below 15% positivity since the middle of August, it hit 20% at the end of August and its currently above 17% and climbing again

Cases 522/100,000 and also climbing again

The gap between the media narrative and what is actually happening is 1984-esque


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Badger, except for a week or so at the beginning of October Wales as a whole hasnt gone below 15% positivity since the middle of August, it hit 20% at the end of August and its currently above 17% and climbing again
> 
> Cases 522/100,000 and also climbing again
> 
> The gap between the media narrative and what is actually happening is 1984-esque


My understanding is these figures do not include:

Anyone who tested positive before 
The armed forces 
Emergency services 
Others?


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Badgers said:


> My understanding is these figures do not include:
> 
> Anyone who tested positive before
> The armed forces
> ...



People testing positive once are only counted once, when they first test positive, yes. Despite the likes of Peston complaining about this months ago, I dont think they have changed it. A weekly report does show some indication of number of probably reinfections, but its relatively feeble data.

The rest are things you have obviously deduced based on your own experience and knowledge, but since I've never found such exemptions listed in the official definition of cases I remain entirely unable to verify such claims. And the authorities would be in trouble with the official stats watchdog if it did turn out to be the case without it being mentioned in the extensive descriptions of methodology used for that data. Didnt you used to have vaccinated people on that list? I'm glad you at least removed that one, since rather large numbers of people who have been vaccinated have clearly been testing positive in recent months and show up in official stats.


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Which means I am not entirely ruling out what you are saying, just that I have no means to substantiate it. And its the sort of thing which, if true, I might have expected to come out by now as a result of disgruntled people within the system drawing attention to it in a way that can be probed. Especially if such exemptions amount to very many cases and that data being missing pissed people within the system off.

I suppose other possibilities exist such as those cases still counting, but being sent down a different pathway when it comes to things like contact tracing, and this having caused some confusion if you caught a partial glimpse of that picture but were left with a wrong impression about the resulting data implications. Likewise its also possible that some of the cases you think arent counted are counted in the overall national headline figures figures but might be placed differently when it comes to pillar or test centre or location.

For England we do know that a current weakness of the data stems from the issue with people testing positive via LFTs but negative on PCRs - their LFT positive will be added to the case numbers but will subsequently be removed if the PCR comes back negative.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

It was PHE that said this ^ but it was 6 weeks or so ago


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Well you know me, I'd need to pick over the detail of exactly what was said in order to get tot he bottom of it, and thats not going to happen if its not been published.

I have now found some UK armed forces data for number fo tests and positive tests. It doesnt sound like the system is special, they are reliant on personnel reporting positive cases to the relevant medical military entity in order for their numbers to show up in this particular report. Which if anything suggests the main system doesnt have the ability to identify military cases specifically, which would make it hard for authorities to treat them differently in the data.









						Number of COVID-19 tests in defence and positive cases in the UK Armed Forces 2021
					

Summary statistics on the number of defence personnel who have had a COVID-19 test; and for the UK Armed Forces, the number of positive cases of COVID-19.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## prunus (Oct 14, 2021)

elbows said:


> *People testing positive once are only counted once, when they first test positive, yes.* Despite the likes of Peston complaining about this months ago, I dont think they have changed it. A weekly report does show some indication of number of probably reinfections, but its relatively feeble data.
> 
> The rest are things you have obviously deduced based on your own experience and knowledge, but since I've never found such exemptions listed in the official definition of cases I remain entirely unable to verify such claims. And the authorities would be in trouble with the official stats watchdog if it did turn out to be the case without it being mentioned in the extensive descriptions of methodology used for that data. Didnt you used to have vaccinated people on that list? I'm glad you at least removed that one, since rather large numbers of people who have been vaccinated have clearly been testing positive in recent months and show up in official stats.



(Also Badgers) Can you clarify, if you know; does this mean that no-one re-infected is being counted in the new postive cases per day, even if their first positive tes/infection was say a year ago?  Because if so, that's bonkers surely?


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

prunus said:


> (Also Badgers) Can you clarify, if you know; does this mean that no-one re-infected is being counted in the new postive cases per day, even if their first positive tes/infection was say a year ago?  Because if so, that's bonkers surely?


My last update meeting with PHE they said that. I have no idea if it has changed but it was the case since at least 'freedom day' and possibly before.


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Yeah that hasnt changed, as per the description on the official dashboard:



> People tested positive more than once are only counted once, on the date of their first positive test.



Even with these limitations, the numbers suck today!


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

By the way, just to give a vague idea about the scale of reinfection, using up to the end of August 2021 they have identified about 45,000 possible reinfections, based on at least 90 days gap between positive tests. This data is only updated once a month in the weekly surveillance reports I use as the source of this info ( National flu and COVID-19 surveillance reports: 2021 to 2022 season ). For comparison, in the previous set of data going up to the end of July 2021, the figure they had was around 35,000, so we can assume that they found about 10,000 such cases in August, and so thats the sort of figure thats missing from Augusts positive case totals. I will post about this again when the next set of data is available (in a weeks time if they stay on schedule). These numbers are for England only.

Also quite a lot of reinfections wont be classified as such and so will still show up in the normal daily data. Because they wont be classified as reinfections if the person was infected previously but didnt have access to testing the first time around. Given the lack of testing in the first wave, this probably applies to quite a lot of people.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 14, 2021)

> UK Covid daily cases highest for three months as infections soar by over 45,000.
> 
> The Covid figures, released this afternoon by the Department of Health, show 45,066 new infections in the last 24 hour period - the highest since July 20


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Yeah bad numbers, not that the numbers were previously good. I'm not looking forward to drilling down into recent cases by age group again, but I will either today or tomorrow in the main UK thread.

Just to finish off what I was saying about reinfection numbers, the scale of them is probably also why they've not faced too much pressure to change the system to include reinfected cases in the headline case numbers. Because as I was saying it looks like they found about 10,000 reinfections in August in England, compared to a total number of positive cases (excluding reinfections) of 784,640 for England in the same period. So this undercounting is not going to make a huge difference to the huge overall totals.


----------



## prunus (Oct 14, 2021)

elbows said:


> Yeah that hasnt changed, as per the description on the official dashboard:
> 
> 
> 
> Even with these limitations, the numbers suck today!



I see. I’d always assumed (never assume!) that that meant they would only count 1 test per person per infection - eg one would expect a person with covid in hospital to be tested daily(?), or at least certainly repeatedly, and it makes sense not to count these as ‘cases’. But the idea that a positive test in June 2020 means a positive test in October 2021 is not a new case makes no sense. (I note your figures above that show it’s unlikely to be that significant - even so).


----------



## elbows (Oct 14, 2021)

Yeah I'm not attempting to justify their narrow case definition that ends up excluding reinfected cases from the main figures, I'm just trying to explain it and get some sense of the magnitude. I would have changed it long ago if I were in charge, to avoid bringing the system into further disrepute.

Meanwhile in regards todays case figures and concerns for the future, I've switched back to the main UK thread eg        #42,494


----------



## William of Walworth (Oct 15, 2021)

prunus said:


> *eg one would expect a person with covid in hospital to be tested daily(?), or at least certainly repeatedly*, and it makes sense not to count these as ‘cases’. B



To confirm the above, my recent (extensive!  ) inpatient experiences tell me that I was tested (PCR  ) twice a week throughout both hospital stays. Not daily then, but re-assuringly often, definitely! 

As well as on the day of my first (A & E) admission, on Friday 17th July, the testing days both in Guy's, and after being transferred back to Swansea, were Wednesdays and Saturdays.


----------



## existentialist (Oct 15, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> To confirm the above, my recent (extensive!  ) inpatient experiences tell me that I was tested (PCR  ) twice a week throughout both hospital stays. Not daily then, but re-assuringly often, definitely!
> 
> As well as on the day of my first (A & E) admission, on Friday 17th July, the testing days both in Guys, and after being transferred back to Swansea, were Wednesdays and Saturdays.


If this virus is any cop at all, it'll evolve a variant which doesn't show up in testing on Wednesdays and Saturdays


----------



## Badgers (Oct 15, 2021)

Covid test lab suspended after estimated 43,000 receive wrong result









						COVID-19: Testing suspended at Wolverhampton laboratory after estimated 43,000 people given wrong results
					

NHS Test and Trace estimates 400,000 tests were processed at the Immensa Health Clinic in Wolverhampton and an estimated 43,000 people may have been given an incorrect result.




					f7td5.app.goo.gl


----------



## Badgers (Oct 15, 2021)

Covid cases in England are nearing levels seen at the peak of the second wave









						Covid cases in England are nearing levels seen at the peak of the second wave - upday News UK
					

Covid infection levels in England are getting close to the peak seen at the height of the second wave, Office for National Statistics data shows.




					f7td5.app.goo.gl


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 15, 2021)

Surely this is a third wave then?  In infections anyway.

Is this the wave they tried to provoke over the summer with the ready made 'exit wave' excuse?


----------



## existentialist (Oct 15, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Covid cases in England are nearing levels seen at the peak of the second wave
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Looks like a similar picture in Wales - our numbers are up at December 2020 levels at the moment, and apparently show little sign of falling away (colleague with partner who works at local district hospital - currently has 44 Covid cases, occupying 2 wards).


----------



## elbows (Oct 15, 2021)

Teaboy said:


> Surely this is a third wave then?  In infections anyway.
> 
> Is this the wave they tried to provoke over the summer with the ready made 'exit wave' excuse?


Its been a wave since back then. I've been calling it the third wave because the autumn/winter waves were merged together so I just called those wave 2 collectively, but some people consider those to have been waves 2 and 3 so the one that started this summer would be wave 4 in their book. Whether they will classify this latest phase of the current wave as a distinct wave I wouldnt like to guess. I probably wont be, since this is all part of the wave that began when Delta really got going here and I dont think the number of infections fell to a low enough level since the July peak that I could have begun to consider that wave to be ending, and for whats happening now to count as a new one.


----------



## elbows (Oct 15, 2021)

And if I sound a bit tetchy when discussing this wave and the recent turn of events compared to how its been for months already, Im not pissed off with anyone here specifically. But I am more than dismayed with how perceptions more broadly (including in the press) shifted once we were no longer dealing with continual increases in numbers.

I mean for example I just posted latest version of hospital admissions by age graphs, and they show a worsening picture but its not like the picture was good even before the increases this month.        #42,511 

My only consolation is that whats happened in recent months is a thumb in the eye to the idiots who refused to believe that lockdowns and various other measures and changes to behaviour were responsible for the continual declines seen after the peaks of the previous waves. Declines we havent been treated to this time around. When people were tempted to feel like their actions were pointless in previous waves, I can at least point to whats happened this time as an illustration of what failure really looks like in that particular respect.

edit - oh and on that sort of theme I just found this:









						Why Britons are tolerating sky-high Covid rates – and why this may not last
					

Analysis: as Covid cases reach 40,000 a day, scientists think normalisation is partly to blame for the lack of public reaction




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 15, 2021)

elbows said:


> And if I sound a bit tetchy when discussing this wave and the recent turn of events compared to how its been for months already, Im not pissed off with anyone here specifically. But I am more than dismayed with how perceptions more broadly (including in the press) shifted once we were no longer dealing with continual increases in numbers.
> 
> I mean for example I just posted latest version of hospital admissions by age graphs, and they show a worsening picture but its not like the picture was good even before the increases this month.        #42,511
> 
> ...


Good Guardian article that. I liked that the graphs let you add an extra country for comparison.

Seems like the politicians are taking advantage of the public’s fatigue and acceptance. I do hope people notice the data from other countries and realise it doesn’t have to be that way.


----------



## elbows (Oct 15, 2021)

Well the Guardian article itself may be a demonstration of the changing mood music that will change public impressions of the pandemic in this phase. But since I dont know what exactly will happen next with cases, I shouldnt really try to predict too much on that front right now.


----------



## Dogsauce (Oct 15, 2021)

It’s fucking shit though. Positive cases rising, hearing of loads of people I know getting infected which just didn’t happen with the first two waves. Thousands of people a day are getting properly ill and will take weeks to recover. It’s an unpleasant illness to go through even at a moderate level and leaves you really drained, knackered and depressed. The mrs has been nearly three weeks now not able to leave the house, signed off for at least another two weeks.  I’m struggling on back at work now but it’s fucking me up and there’s a big backlog of things to do that is just getting bigger. So many other people will be going through the same thing, I have a friend who is still suffering eight months on, and has just tested positive again after her five year old brought it home from school.  All this has social and economic effects.  Fuck the complacency about it, it’s inhumane.


----------



## Numbers (Oct 16, 2021)

Got a message from my boss last night to say he’s caught it, from his son who caught it in school.  Both feeing unwell and both positive via PCR.

I spent all day with him on Wednesday, close up at times.  Missus and I have tested negative on an LFT this morning thankfully.


----------



## Dogsauce (Oct 16, 2021)

Numbers said:


> Got a message from my boss last night to say he’s caught it, from his son who caught it in school.  Both feeing unwell and both positive via PCR.
> 
> I spent all day with him on Wednesday, close up at times.  Missus and I have tested negative on an LFT this morning thankfully.


Keep doing those LFTs, it was nine days between my likely exposure and testing positive on an lft.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 16, 2021)

Dogsauce said:


> Keep doing those LFTs, it was nine days between my likely exposure and testing positive on an lft.


Yeah this ^

They are no fun but best to keep doing them. For peace of mind as much as anything. 

At the moment I am doing 12 a week 🙄 which is annoying but keeps me sane. Have seen a lot of positive tested people wandering about maskless of late. 

As posted above it is clearly Covid fatigue. Young people think they are invincible (I was the same that age) and there are a lot of people who HAVE to work so are ignoring it or simply not testing. The teachers I speak with are really beaten down now


----------



## Mation (Oct 16, 2021)

How come we didn't hear more about intravenous oxygen as an alternative to ventilators? (Or did we and it was just me that missed it?)

It occurred to me this morning; googled it and found several links from 2012, when researchers at a Boston children's hospital were using it. But also a couple of covid-related papers from April and May 2020.

An alternative to ventilators to support critical COVID-19 patients (links to a PDF preprint; sorry about the unhelpful line breaks)


> This blood oxygen infusion injection method is much simpler (no moving or
> powered parts) and cheaper than the manufacture and operation of the lung ventilator,
> making it easily available and applicable in many different healthcare environments
> around the world. The correct and optimised IV delivery rate could be determined from
> ...












						Novel therapy for COVID-19 does intravenous ozonated-saline affect blood and tissue oxygenation?
					

Introduction: Adjunctive ozone therapy for COVID-19 is being used successfully in China, Spain, Italy, and South America.  One proposed mechanism is by improving blood / tissue oxygenation thus averting multiorgan system failure due to hypoxia. The purpose of this study was to determine if...




					www.peertechzpublications.com


----------



## dtb (Oct 16, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Covid cases in England are nearing levels seen at the peak of the second wave
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So what?  A covid case is just a positive PCR or lateral flow test.  PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid, it returns a high proportion of false positives and is being withdrawn at the end of December.  Lateral flow is even less reliable.





__





						CDC Planning to Withdraw Request for EUA of SARS-CoV-2 PCR Test | AACC.org
					

After December 31, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will withdraw its request to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus Real-Time RT-PCR diagnostic panel.




					www.aacc.org
				




If cases are such a concern and are rising so rapidly, what was the point of vaccinating everyone?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> So what?  A covid case is just a positive PCR or lateral flow test.  PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid, it returns a high proportion of false positives and is being withdrawn at the end of December.  Lateral flow is even less reliable.



Absolute fucking bonkers claim, you shit for brains freak.



> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That's just the CDC's own PCR test, not one used in the UK, you shit for brains freak.



> If cases are such a concern and are rising so rapidly, what was the point of vaccinating everyone?



Because, it prevents most people from ending-up in hospital & dying, you shit for brains freak.

They are the poster that started this thread...









						Morons Unite For The Freedom To Infect Each Other
					






					www.urban75.net
				




Did I mention they're a shit for brains freak?

* ETA - that thread title was changed by the editor.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> So what?  A covid case is just a positive PCR or lateral flow test.  PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid, it returns a high proportion of false positives and is being withdrawn at the end of December.  Lateral flow is even less reliable.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Prick (soon to be dead)


----------



## Spymaster (Oct 16, 2021)

In fairness, the number of infections isn't a partricularly useful gauge of the severity of the pandemic. Thousands of infections where everyone just sneezes a bit is less concerning than a handful of infections that kills everyone who gets it.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 16, 2021)

Spymaster said:


> In fairness, the number of infections isn't a partricularly useful gauge of the severity of the pandemic. Thousands of infections where everyone just sneezes a bit is less concerning than a handful of infections that kills everyone who gets it.



That is true, although even mild cases can result in long covid, and both hospital admissions and deaths are raising again.


----------



## Supine (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> So what?  A covid case is just a positive PCR or lateral flow test.  PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid, it returns a high proportion of false positives and is being withdrawn at the end of December.  Lateral flow is even less reliable.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It’s solid science like this that makes urban 75 such a useful resource


----------



## Spymaster (Oct 16, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> That is true, although even mild cases can result in long covid, and both hospital admissions and deaths are raising again.



Yes, but that was always going to happen when restrictions ended. Am I right that covid deaths are now fewer than flu deaths, or did I mis-read that?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 16, 2021)

Spymaster said:


> Yes, but that was always going to happen when restrictions ended. Am I right that covid deaths are now fewer than flu deaths, or did I mis-read that?



The UK's 7-day average for reported covid deaths is currently 116 = 42,320 per year, and increasing.

A average year of flu results in around 17,000 deaths.


----------



## elbows (Oct 16, 2021)

Spymaster said:


> Yes, but that was always going to happen when restrictions ended. Am I right that covid deaths are now fewer than flu deaths, or did I mis-read that?


Well flu often comes up when people try to put things into context, but a proportion of those people have really shit agendas and there are many distortions available using basic covid and flu death figures.

Experts wont even agree on what figure it is fair to use for average flu deaths, and this includes all sorts of people within the medical profession having quite different opinions about the typical burden from flu. So it gets very messy and it makes my blood boil when people downplay either flu or covid.

When it comes to the attitude of the authorities and when they feel the need to impose fresh restrictions, deaths are not the primary indicator anyway, hospitalisations are. Covid hospitalisations were reaching levels in July that started to make the authorities shit themselves, but then a peak and decline happened. However the decline was not sustained, and numbers didnt fall to low enough levels to give the authorities shitloads of wiggle room. Therefore if hospitalisations keep rising in the coming weeks, it wont take very long before the mood music from the media and government changes notably and we are back to a situation where it becomes harder for people to get confused about how much shit we are in again. However since I do not know exactly what will happen with case and hospitalisation rises in the coming weeks, I cannot make an accurate prediction.


----------



## elbows (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> So what?  A covid case is just a positive PCR or lateral flow test.  PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid, it returns a high proportion of false positives and is being withdrawn at the end of December.  Lateral flow is even less reliable.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


In addition to everything else you are completely wrong about, if you actually read the article you linked to you will see that they are only withdrawing emergency use stuff for that particular CDC PCR test in the USA because there are a large number of other PCR tests for Covid that have been approved and are in regular use there. The CDC test was given emergency use right near the start because the alternatives didnt exist (or didnt have approval to be used) at the time. So the CDC version of the test was filling in an important gap that allowed authorities there to get on with the critical task of actually detecting Covid cases. It isnt necessary anymore because there are a plethora of approved Covid PCR tests in the market these days.

You havent got a clue, and your sort of ignorance costs lives. Fuck off.


----------



## dtb (Oct 16, 2021)

Increase the number of tests and you'll find more cases, simple.  The UK tests more people than the whole of the EU combined.
If you want to find more positive results then increase the number of cycle thresholds.

For those who don't understand how a PCR test works then here's a clear explanation:



Worth noting that the inventor of the PCR test advised it should never be used as a diagnostic too.


----------



## elbows (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> Increase the number of tests and you'll find more cases, simple.


We didnt find more cases when we imposed a range of restrictions in previous waves, even as we ramped up testing. Instead we got to observe a steady reduction in cases, hospitalisations and deaths.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> Increase the number of tests and you'll find more cases, simple.  The UK tests more people than the whole of the EU combined.
> If you want to find more positive results then increase the number of cycle thresholds.
> 
> For those who don't understand how a PCR test works then here's a clear explanation:
> ...




Oh, the debunked Dr Sam Bailey. 



> Around the video's three-minute, thirty-second mark Bailey says “there are major problems with this diagnostic test, in that it doesn’t test for the virus, it tests for a piece of genetic material that we don’t know the significance of”.
> 
> Thomas Lumley, professor of biostatistics at the University of Auckland told AFP in an email the genetic material the Covid-19 PCR tests for is “of known significance”.
> 
> “The test looks for RNA sequences that are present in the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Covid-19 virus) which are not present in other viruses known to infect humans,” he said in a September 11 email.











						New Zealand doctor makes misleading claims about the country’s PCR testing regime in widely shared YouTube video
					

A video showing a New Zealand-based doctor claiming the PCR testing method for the novel coronavirus does not “actually test for the virus” and is being used inappropriately has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook. The claims are misleading; multiple experts told AFP the PCR test...




					factcheck.afp.com


----------



## 2hats (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> The UK tests more people than the whole of the EU combined.


Oh dear.

Week 40:
Total coronavirus tests (UK) = 5,850,267 (source: gov.uk COVID-19 dashboard).
Total coronavirus tests (EU) =  17,516,954 (source: ECDC).


----------



## Badgers (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> Increase the number of tests and you'll find more cases, simple.  The UK tests more people than the whole of the EU combined.
> If you want to find more positive results then increase the number of cycle thresholds.
> 
> For those who don't understand how a PCR test works then here's a clear explanation:
> ...



You. Fucking. Idiot.


----------



## dtb (Oct 16, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Oh, the debunked Dr Sam Bailey.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Debunked by the fact-checkers funded by big pharma


----------



## two sheds (Oct 16, 2021)

Sounds like TobyJug facts


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 16, 2021)

two sheds said:


> Sounds like TobyJug facts



More like a Dr Jazzz fact.


----------



## Chilli.s (Oct 16, 2021)

The kind of twat that has to check notes


----------



## prunus (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> Increase the number of tests and you'll find more cases, simple.  The UK tests more people than the whole of the EU combined.
> If you want to find more positive results then increase the number of cycle thresholds.
> 
> For those who don't understand how a PCR test works then here's a clear explanation:
> ...




Fuck off twat.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> PCR doesn't distinguish between common, cold, flu or Covid



i call bullshit on that

i've had two PCR tests (one last november and one a month or so back) as both times i've had something involving any combination of temperature, coughing, general crappy feeling which matched some covid symptoms, both tests were negative so i'm assuming both were some sort of flu.

and some people would argue that i'm common as well, and i still didn't get a positive test


----------



## LDC (Oct 16, 2021)

Less bullshit and more just outright lies and misinformation. He's clearly an idiot falling for any old shit he watches on the internet. Fuck off dtb you're a dangerous fucking imbecile, not the free thinking iconoclast you like to imagine.


----------



## _Russ_ (Oct 16, 2021)

Why is this lie spreader being allowed a platform here? ban the little twat


----------



## dtb (Oct 16, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Why is this lie spreader being allowed a platform here? ban the little twat



What lies?  Boris said himself that we test more than the whole of the EU.  So do you believe the government or not?


----------



## two sheds (Oct 16, 2021)

Can't argue with that


----------



## two sheds (Oct 16, 2021)

Johnson is an inveterate liar I'm surprised you don't seem to know this, just to start off with: Video exposing Boris Johnson's 'lies' to Parliament hits 20 million views | The Big Issue

That's supposed to be some sort of Gotcha isn't it  . 'You criticize me for saying the government is exaggerating the covid pandemic - see, see - you don't believe the government either so you're hypocrites and can't criticize me for it and the government _is _exaggerating the covid epidemic qed  '


----------



## Chilli.s (Oct 16, 2021)

dtb said:


> What lies?  Boris said himself that we test more than the whole of the EU.  So do you believe the government or not?


Fuckin hell mate, get a grip


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 17, 2021)

dtb said:


> What lies?  Boris said himself that we test more than the whole of the EU.  So do you believe the government or not?


How many years have you been living under a rock?  You don’t seem to know much about the world around you.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 17, 2021)

MrCurry said:


> How many years have you been living under a rock?  You don’t seem to know much about the world around you.


Trolling or fucking stupid. 

Best ignored


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 17, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Trolling or fucking stupid.
> 
> Best ignored


Yeah, most likely the first. My bad.


----------



## _Russ_ (Oct 17, 2021)

dtb said:


> What lies?  Boris said himself that we test more than the whole of the EU.  So do you believe the government or not?


OK that makes it obvious you are trolling.
A troll can be quite playfull sometimes but the shit you are knowingly throwing around for a laugh might actually fall on the lap of some poor fucker who believes it and that can cause real harm, now fuck off


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 17, 2021)

Spent the day in Bolton, visiting the university with my daughter. Literally saw one (1) other person wearing a mask - despite the signs everywhere and a robot voice at every door telling all visitors to "please wear a mask". Even the staff weren't bothering. It's like everyone's decided that the pandemic is over but someone forgot to take down all those silly posters.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 17, 2021)




----------



## dtb (Oct 18, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Spent the day in Bolton, visiting the university with my daughter. Literally saw one (1) other person wearing a mask - despite the signs everywhere and a robot voice at every door telling all visitors to "please wear a mask". Even the staff weren't bothering. It's like everyone's decided that the pandemic is over but someone forgot to take down all those silly posters.



Good, glad to hear it.  Many people have woken up now and understand the massive fraud that has taken place.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 18, 2021)

dtb said:


> Good, glad to hear it.  Many people have woken up now and understand the massive fraud that has taken place.



Mad as a box of frogs.


----------



## existentialist (Oct 18, 2021)

dtb said:


> Good, glad to hear it.  Many people have woken up now and understand the massive fraud that has taken place.


No, really, they haven't. An overwhelming majority of people in England, when surveyed recently, said that despite Government relaxation of the restrictions, they would continue to wear masks. So dream on...


----------



## dtb (Oct 18, 2021)

existentialist said:


> No, really, they haven't. An overwhelming majority of people in England, when surveyed recently, said that despite Government relaxation of the restrictions, they would continue to wear masks. So dream on...



But the majority of people are not according to the post I responded to above.


----------



## existentialist (Oct 18, 2021)

dtb said:


> But the majority of people are not according to the post I responded to above.


Anecdote is not data.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 18, 2021)

dtb said:


> Good, glad to hear it.  Many people have woken up now and understand the massive fraud that has taken place.


Let's hope the HGV driver problems don't cause any tinfoil shortages.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 18, 2021)

Nearly at 50k per day 

FFS


----------



## Badgers (Oct 18, 2021)

Any update on this?


----------



## elbows (Oct 18, 2021)

Well Johnson dropped the moonshot aspect of the rhetoric very soon after it first came out of his gob.

That level of funding quickly went out of the window, and they convinced themselves that certain forms of testing for events wasnt really necessary in order to implement their unlocking agenda to the timetable they eventually settled on.

The routine use of LFTs in a bunch of contexts is what I tend to think of as the successor to this hype.

I didnt find all this hype and subsequent scaling back of ambition terribly surprising given that they tended to fall back on hype about mass testing whenever we were in the middle of big waves & lockdowns. Its one of the main things they reached for in press conferences of those times, using it to act as a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of managing mood and expectations of the future being better whilst people were living under harsh restrictions. In the second wave/big lockdown we got Moonshot, but there was similar stuff in the first wave too, when by April 2020 they started to dangle the future prospect of mass testing and antibody testing as a saviour, a way out.

Some detail that emerged when Moonshot was first vanishing down the toilet:









						Covid-19: Government shelves plans to invest £100bn in mass testing
					

The UK government has abandoned plans to spend £100bn on a massive expansion of its national testing programme, legal documents have shown.  A letter from government lawyers also reveals that the ambitious Operation Moonshot programme, first revealed in leaked documents seen by The BMJ last...




					www.bmj.com


----------



## Badgers (Oct 19, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 19, 2021)

Outdated map ^ 

The situation is worse now


----------



## 2hats (Oct 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Outdated map ^


----------



## Badgers (Oct 19, 2021)




----------



## 2hats (Oct 19, 2021)

Badgers said:


> The situation is worse now


To add: it may be that we are starting to see clearer signals of previous infection, re-infection, and the shortcomings of the current system in illustrating that, emerging.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

Offshoot of Covid Delta variant on the rise in England
					

UK Health Security Agency monitoring AY.4.2 as daily cases at highest level since late July




					www.theguardian.com
				






> A newly detected coronavirus variant is on the rise in England, with the virus believed to be an offshoot of Delta.
> 
> According to a briefing from the UK Health Security Agency, released on Friday, “a Delta sublineage newly designated as AY.4.2 is noted to be expanding in England”, with the body adding that the variant is being monitored and assessed.
> 
> The report states that in the week beginning 27 September – the last week for which complete sequencing data was available – AY.4.2 accounted for about 6% of sequenced coronavirus cases and is “on an increasing trajectory”.


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 20, 2021)

2hats said:


> View attachment 293392


Of course these maps depend on the testing being done to find the cases. In sweden they’re telling people not to get tested if they’ve been vaccinated, which is a wonderful way to hide the true case numbers since most people are now vaccinated.

Would be fascinating to see a map showing actual case numbers, but we will never see that.


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Offshoot of Covid Delta variant on the rise in England
> 
> 
> UK Health Security Agency monitoring AY.4.2 as daily cases at highest level since late July
> ...


10-15% more transmissible than Delta 😭


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

> Amid rising Covid-19 cases, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, has urged the Government to implement the back-up strategy which involves measures including bringing back mandatory face coverings in public places.
> 
> The NHS Confederation’s warning comes as coronavirus deaths in the UK rose to their highest daily level since early March, while cases are at their highest for almost three months.
> 
> Downing Street said it was keeping a “very close eye” on rising case rates, but added the Prime Minister has “absolutely no plan to introduce Plan B”, which could also involve introducing vaccine passports for nightclub entry.



Nothing we don't already know but 🙄


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58978351
		




> Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng says now is not the time to turn to the government's winter back-up strategy





> Downing Street insists it is not "complacent" about the rising cases and is keeping a close eye on the situation


----------



## Supine (Oct 20, 2021)

A rough estimate that we will all catch covid approximately every 9 years. Lots of provisos on the estimation. Oh joy!


----------



## MrCurry (Oct 20, 2021)

Supine said:


> A rough estimate that we will all catch covid approximately every 9 years. Lots of provisos on the estimation. Oh joy!



That’s cheerful, isn’t it?  20k cases per day in U.K. at any one time, continuously forever. 7,000 deaths per year. Presumably much worse numbers in poorer countries with bad nutrition, healthcare and lower vaccination rates.


----------



## elbows (Oct 20, 2021)

Its one of the reasons I say that increasing the capacity of the health system is a significant aspect of the real & long term version of 'learning to live with Covid'.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

That clears it all up then


----------



## two sheds (Oct 20, 2021)

Sanctimonious fucking way he thanks the health workers while giving reproving looks to condemn bradshaw for not having done the same  

Mealy mouthed cunt.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

Professor Martin Marshall, head of the Royal College of GPs, says the vaccination situation in the UK is "concerning" as immunity from last winter's vaccoine rollout wanes.

"We know that immunity is waning. Six months after you receive the second vaccination we know that immunity is - in some cases - considerably less, it will be different for different people," he told BBC Radio 4's World at One.

Out of the eight million people eligible to get the booster dose at the moment, 3.8 million people have received the jab.

In light of this, he says "the booster vaccination is incredibly important in order to protect individual patients” and “to protect the NHS during a winter that we expect to be really difficult, not just with Covid but with flu and other infections as well".

Prof Marshall says GP surgeries should not go back to administering the bulk of vaccinations as they "simply don't have the capacity to do that”.

However, he adds, "there needs to be much stronger messaging from the centre about the importance of the booster vaccination, and much clearer messaging about where to get it and how to get it"

BBC ^


----------



## dtb (Oct 20, 2021)

So are the injections working or not?


----------



## Sue (Oct 20, 2021)

dtb said:


> So are the injections working or not?


Yes.


----------



## Supine (Oct 20, 2021)

dtb said:


> So are the injections working or not?



No. Fake news.


----------



## two sheds (Oct 20, 2021)

Results are being invented by Big Pharma. The millions of doctors, nurses, researchers worldwide are all in on it for the money


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

Sajid Javid news conference delayed by 10 minutes

#worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Oct 20, 2021)

Fuck's sake. 

As if that will change anything. There is almost zero trust in this disgraced government. 









						Get Covid jab or restrictions more likely, Sajid Javid says
					

Additional measures are not needed in England at this point, the health secretary says.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## dtb (Oct 20, 2021)

Sue said:


> Yes.



But cases and deaths are going up supposedly.  Why is this?


----------



## Supine (Oct 20, 2021)

dtb said:


> But cases and deaths are going up supposedly.  Why is this?



You absolute nugget. Deaths are proportionally much higher in the unvaccinated. All research shows vaccination is significantly safer than natural infection. What is your opinion? Do you wonder why your opinion is at odds with the thousands of people who specialise in understanding the subject matter?


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> So are the injections working or not?


heroin injections have no effects on the pandemic


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> But cases and deaths are going up supposedly.  Why is this?





We, fuck me, the vaccines are working.  

And, the vaccinated tend to have shorter hospital stays, and a lot less die, because their cases are not so severe.

The top three slides via the link below show the total numbers of hospital admissions & deaths are much lower than when we previously had similar levels of cases.



			https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027289/2021-10-20_COVID-19_Press_Conference_Slides_FOR_PUBLICATION.pdf


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 21, 2021)

I know two sheds was being ironic with this post, and two people liked it for that reason, but the third?


----------



## Badgers (Oct 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I know two sheds was being ironic with this post, and two people liked it for that reason, but the third?
> 
> View attachment 293528


Me?


----------



## Supine (Oct 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I know two sheds was being ironic with this post, and two people liked it for that reason, but the third?
> 
> View attachment 293528



The thing that annoys me is that I work in big pharma, I just spent a year working on starting up a vaccine manufacturing process and I DIDN’T SEE A PENNY OF THIS HUSH MONEY!!!


----------



## Badgers (Oct 21, 2021)

elbows said:


> People testing positive once are only counted once, when they first test positive, yes. Despite the likes of Peston complaining about this months ago, I dont think they have changed it. A weekly report does show some indication of number of probably reinfections, but its relatively feeble data.


You might have seen my post on the schools thread. Two colleagues so far this week have + tests. One is triple jabbed, had Covid before and is really unwell. 

New delta? Fuck knows


----------



## dtb (Oct 21, 2021)

Supine said:


> You absolute nugget. Deaths are proportionally much higher in the unvaccinated. All research shows vaccination is significantly safer than natural infection. What is your opinion? Do you wonder why your opinion is at odds with the thousands of people who specialise in understanding the subject matter?



But the majority of people are now jabbed.
All research does not show injection is safer than natural infection for everyone.  In fact, obtaining natural immunity is a much stronger defence for different strains of the virus.


survivors of the 1918 Flu epidemic were tested for their immunity to the 1918 influenza virus 90 years after, and still demonstrated immunity;
people recovered from the 2003 SARS infection demonstrated robust T-Cell responses seventeen years later;
the wide-spread prevalence of high cross-immunity – gained from past common cold infections – further demonstrates the resilience of natural immunity for coronaviruses.









						Robust SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity is maintained at 6 months following primary infection - Nature Immunology
					

The contribution of T cells to the SARS-CoV-2 response remains an important and unresolved question. Moss and colleagues examine T cell and antibody kinetics in a large cohort of patients with COVID-19 and find robust and durable T cell responses.




					www.nature.com
				











						A long-term perspective on immunity to COVID
					

Clinical evidence for long-lasting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection




					www.nature.com
				











						Should people who have recovered from COVID take a vaccine? - PANDA
					

A deep dive into the issue of natural immunity and Covid-19 vaccination. It provides evidence of natural immunity and is impeccably researched.




					www.pandata.org


----------



## dtb (Oct 21, 2021)

Badgers said:


> You might have seen my post on the schools thread. Two colleagues so far this week have + tests. One is triple jabbed, had Covid before and is really unwell.
> 
> New delta? Fuck knows



And you still think the injections work?


----------



## Chilli.s (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> And you still think the injections work?


Well hospitals are reporting far far higher death rates in non vaccinated patients


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> And you still think the injections work?



Yes, for most people, see the graph I've post above, dumb arse.


----------



## Kevbad the Bad (Oct 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Yes, for most people, see the graph I've post above, dumb arse.


Yeah, but you can prove anything with facts.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 21, 2021)

I appears dtb stands for 'dumb thick bastard'.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Oct 21, 2021)

I thought about it but then decided not to bother.


----------



## Supine (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> But the majority of people are now jabbed.
> All research does not show injection is safer than natural infection for everyone.  In fact, obtaining natural immunity is a much stronger defence for different strains of the virus.
> 
> 
> ...



Good post. Although none of what you posted supports what you are saying. Did you skip a few classes at school?


----------



## Teaboy (Oct 21, 2021)

Kevbad the Bad said:


> Yeah, but you can prove anything with facts.



And due to the wonder of the internet we can cross reference scientific facts with what some bloke who knows Nikki Minaj's cousin reckons.

Science and the internet working in tandem.  What a time to be alive.


----------



## dtb (Oct 21, 2021)

Chilli.s said:


> Well hospitals are reporting far far higher death rates in non vaccinated patients



*Increases in COVID‑19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States*

At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplifed, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.





__





						Wayback Machine
					





					web.archive.org


----------



## existentialist (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> So are the injections working or not?


It's not a binary choice. Which should be perfectly evident to anyone who's getting their information from places other than Youtube loonspuds and Facebook knuckleheads.


----------



## two sheds (Oct 21, 2021)

dtb said:


> But cases and deaths are going up supposedly.  Why is this?


There's actually a whole thread for opinions like yours, better if you take the conversation over there. 









						Discussion: UK anti-vaxx 'freedom' morons, protests and QAnon idiots
					

Utter cunts, every last one of them.    Sad to see Festival-Eye Guide have gone full loon but they're getting a deserved roasting on Facebook




					www.urban75.net


----------



## elbows (Oct 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> View attachment 293516
> 
> We, fuck me, the vaccines are working.
> 
> ...



It is indeed important to look at things like 'rates per 100,000' in order to clearly see the very real impact of vaccines against this virus.

I usually feel the need to augment that with a different angle, in order that people can also see clearly how in terms of absolute numbers of hospital patients etc, those who have been vaccinated make up a significant proportion of such cases. The absolute numbers involve high numbers of vaccinated people because vaccines arent 100% effective and a very large percentage of the population have been vaccinated.

Here is a partial selection of some of the recent numbers in that regard. Both stories are told since these tables include absolute numbers and population rates. Its no surprise that government graphs tend to focus on the latter rather than demonstrate the magnitude of the former. And if people dont pay attention to the detail of such charts, they end up with the incorrect impression that a majority of cases being hospitalised are still unvaccinated, which is clearly not the case when we look at the raw numbers. Although I have to take this data with a pinch of salt too because I doubt the totals for the periods concerned match up all that well with the numbers we get in basic daily dashboard hospitalisation data.





From https://assets.publishing.service.g...27511/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-42.pdf

The media dont tend to touch upon those absolute numbers very often, probably in part because dwelling on such figures is considered to potentially result in defeatism, confusion and undermining vaccination campaigns. For example in a recent BBC article about the current situation we read stuff like:



> According to the Intensive Care Society, there are 823 patients with Covid in beds which can provide mechanical ventilation, out of a total of roughly 4,000 adult intensive care beds across the UK. That's way down on the winter peak, when extra wards and hospitals were built to care for the most seriously ill.
> 
> The majority are not vaccinated, Prof Summers said - although precise figures on vaccination status have not been published.



(from Should the government do more to protect the NHS? )

Its true that I havent seen precise figures about intensive care beds and vaccination status, but its possible to make some reasonable assumptions and find clues about that using the figures I mention above.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 21, 2021)

6000 'spare beds' my fucking arse  

Are they in the 48 new hospitals that operation moonshot sorted out? 









						NHS has 6,000 spare beds for Covid patients
					

The NHS still has 6,000 free beds for Covid patients, a health minister said today as he rejected calls for an immediate return to further restrictions.Edward A




					www.thetimes.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Oct 21, 2021)

Scream if you want to go faster folks...


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 21, 2021)

Chilli.s said:


> Well hospitals are reporting far far higher death rates in non vaccinated patients



 A idiot replies...


dtb said:


> *Increases in COVID‑19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States*
> 
> At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplifed, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.
> 
> ...



WTF does this have to do with the post you quoted?

Actually forget it, just fuck off, and go play with some razor blades.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 21, 2021)

Map shows where Covid cases, deaths and hospital admissions are spiking across UK
					

It comes as the Government prepares to rollout a part of its Plan B measures in England's worst-hit areas




					inews.co.uk


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 22, 2021)

The CMO announcer there are cases of Delta Plus here now. 

Seems its even more transmissable that Delta.

This thing is going to run for ages isnt it.


----------



## Supine (Oct 22, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> The CMO announcer there are cases of Delta Plus here now.
> 
> Seems its even more transmissable that Delta.
> 
> This thing is going to run for ages isnt it.



Its been here since july. Don’t worry excessively, its not made it to variant of interest yet let alone variant of concern. In real world terms a bit more transmissibility isn’t necessarily noticeable outside of epidemiology circles. 

And covid is going to ‘run’ for ever. We will learn to live with it just like we do with the hundreds of other nasty bugs that occasionally get us.


----------



## Chilli.s (Oct 22, 2021)

Or it may just blend into the background like Spanish flu did


----------



## dtb (Oct 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> 6000 'spare beds' my fucking arse
> 
> Are they in the 48 new hospitals that operation moonshot sorted out?
> 
> ...



Don't panic we have the Nightingale hospitals.


----------



## existentialist (Oct 22, 2021)

dtb said:


> Don't panic we have the Nightingale hospitals.


I don't think we do any more.


----------



## _Russ_ (Oct 22, 2021)

The beds available thing might actually be true, Here in Wales they opened a new Shiny Hospital at the beiginning of the Pandemic and they have loads of Beds..they just dont have any fucking Staff


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Supine said:


> Its been here since july. Don’t worry excessively, its not made it to variant of interest yet let alone variant of concern. In real world terms a bit more transmissibility isn’t necessarily noticeable outside of epidemiology circles.
> 
> And covid is going to ‘run’ for ever. We will learn to live with it just like we do with the hundreds of other nasty bugs that occasionally get us.



'learning to live with covid' can include learning to live with permanently altered life expectancy figures, permanent changes to the extent of health inequality, and a permanent need for greater health care system capacity.

If it does have a 10% increase in transmissibility compared to Delta then that will likely have implications that become obvious beyond expert circles. However we are still at a stage where the implications of the increased transmissibility of the original Delta are making themselves felt, especially as this will be our first winter with that variant. And actually distinguishing between those effects and the effect of reducing too many other mitigation measures and 'returning to normal' isnt trivial.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 22, 2021)

Delta Plus is taking over here, on the West Sussex coast, which probably goes some way to explain the big increases over the last month, increasing at a quicker pace than the national rate, Worthing is already over the peak we had in July. In fact we have a higher overall rate of new cases, than our next neighbours in Adur district, which has the highest proportion of Delta Plus cases, at 61%.  

It's about 6% nationally.



> Adur, in West Sussex, has the highest proportion of Delta Plus cases where 61 per cent of new cases are down to the new variant.
> 
> In East Lindsey, Lincolnshire, 45.8% of their positive Covid tests are down to this new variant according to the Sanger Institute. Another hotspot where Delta Plus makes up a significant amount of cases is in Torridge, North Devon where 41% of cases are accounted for by the new variant.
> 
> Exeter, Swindon, Gravesham, Aylesbury Vale, Worthing, and the Isle of Wight are other areas where Delta Plus is increasingly prevalent, making up more than a third of cases in all of them.











						New map shows Delta Plus variant hotspots across England as cases rise
					

A newly published map shows where the Delta Plus variant hotspots are across the country as cases and deaths continue to rise but scientists warn the new variant is "unlikely to change the picture"




					www.mirror.co.uk
				




ETA - Adur is basically the towns of Shoreham & Southwick, plus various villages, the largest being Lancing.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Thanks for that info. I didnt have very much to say about 'Delta Plus' until now because although its been on the radar for weeks, I didnt have access to (or at least hadnt stumbled upon) detail beyond the overall '6% of cases' figure.

The use of the term 'Delta Plus' is also fairly new, we were referring to it as AY.4.2 on the mutations thread, and this was first mentioned by 2hats on October 5th: Covid Mutations

Also note the bullshit from the BBCs choice of experts the other day when the BBC were somehow able to make the claim that "Experts say it is unlikely to take off in a big way". Covid Mutations


----------



## quimcunx (Oct 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> 'learning to live with covid' can include learning to live with permanently altered life expectancy figures, permanent changes to the extent of health inequality, and a permanent need for greater health care system capacity.



Another instance of the govt failure to recognise/care that a stitch in time saves nine.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)

Sage scientists advise ministers to begin Plan B including home working









						SAGE scientists tell UK to begin Covid Plan B - including masks and home working
					

Sage evidence showed that Government advice to work from home would be the most effective measure, compared with mask wearing and the introduction of Covid passports




					f7td5.app.goo.gl


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Supine said:


> Its been here since july. Don’t worry excessively, its not made it to variant of interest yet let alone variant of concern. In real world terms a bit more transmissibility isn’t necessarily noticeable outside of epidemiology circles.
> 
> And covid is going to ‘run’ for ever. We will learn to live with it just like we do with the hundreds of other nasty bugs that occasionally get us.



Its now been made a variant under investigation (UK terminology) although the BBC are continuing to repeat what I consider to be ill-advised comments (that I already moaned about) like "unlikely to take off in a big way" in their latest story about it.









						Delta 'Plus' Covid variant may be more transmissible
					

It may be more contagious than Delta, but there is no evidence yet that it causes worse illness, experts say.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				






> A new mutated form of coronavirus that some are calling "Delta Plus" may spread more easily than regular Delta, UK experts now say.
> 
> The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has moved it up into the "variant under investigation" category, to reflect this possible risk.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Sage scientists advise ministers to begin Plan B including home working
> 
> 
> 
> ...



We're ending up having a parallel discussion here to whats being discussed on the main UK thread again, has that thread gone off your radar again like happened before?

I'm only mentioning this now because I've been picking over quite a lot of detail there with rather a lot of quotes, and I dont want to create the impression that I'm ignoring you on this thread but I dont want to repeat all of that detail here either. eg Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion and the subsequent post.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)

Only 49,298 new cases today  



Not great otherwise 

Any news on plan C or D?


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Only 49,298 new cases today
> 
> View attachment 293713
> 
> ...


that'd involve teaching johnson the alphabet and by the time you've finished that the pandemic will be over


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Only 49,298 new cases today
> 
> View attachment 293713
> 
> ...



I always pay more attention to the 7-day rates, so it's good to see the increase in new cases drop from 17.9% yesterday to 15.8% today, but hospital admission have gone up from 15.4% to 19.1%.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I always pay more attention to the 7-day rates, so it's good to see the increase in new cases drop from 17.9% yesterday to 15.8% today, but hospital admission have gone up from 15.4% to 19.1%.



Daily admissions for England are at levels which have caused the number of covid patients in hospital beds to go up by around a thousand in a week.

I'm not doing my own graphs for numbers in hospital beds at the moment but here are the daily admissions since July began.



I havent dared to look at positive cases by age data for this week yet, but in recent weeks its continued to be a good guide as to what will happen to hospitalisations a bit later. So I will take a look again soon.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Also the admissions for England having reached the level of around 900 means I'm not find the latest SAGE modelling about what might happen in England in the months ahead all that useful. Because lots of the graphs they include are already failing to match the admission figures we've seen recently. 





__





						Loading…
					





					assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
				




There are a bunch of models with a bunch of different assumptions so it isnt fair to pick just one as typical, but I'm going to have to pick one anyway just to illustrate what I'm on about.

I suppose I shouldnt be surprised that plenty of these are wrong already - they arent predictions of what will actually happen, they just provide indications of what different model show when they adjust certain specific parameters such as those to do with human behaviour and waning immunity.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Now this one and others like it from the same document do still just about fit if we consider their full confidence intervals (shaded areas) rather than only the central estimates (solid lines). And it would be nice if reality ended up mirroring the falls it features soon. But this particular one may well turn out to be far wide of the mark when it comes to months like December and January. The infection levels after half term will offer some clues about that.


----------



## Sue (Oct 22, 2021)

The numbers in inner London are looking surprisingly good. Maybe everyone's already had it...?!


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 22, 2021)

Sue said:


> The numbers in inner London are looking surprisingly good. Maybe everyone's already had it...?!



Looks like high rates are circulating around London, and moving in.


----------



## Sue (Oct 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Looks like high rates are circulating around London, and moving in.
> 
> View attachment 293724


I'm in a bit that's still light blue  -- we were purple, even dark purple for ages at the latter end of last year so light blue seems like a triumph or something... (I'm guessing it'll likely change...)


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 22, 2021)

Sue said:


> I'm in a bit that's still light blue  -- we were purple, even dark purple for ages at the latter end of last year so light blue seems like a triumph or something... (I'm guessing it'll likely change...)



Worthing was light blue just over a month ago, now we're are that purple spot on the coast, just west of Brighton.


----------



## elbows (Oct 22, 2021)

Sue said:


> The numbers in inner London are looking surprisingly good. Maybe everyone's already had it...?!



Levels of immunity from prior infections is a very real factor which is accounted for in wave modelling, but it has its limits in terms of how much it can be relied on to protect places from bad levels of infection. In the wave a year ago London and the South East did not appear as bad as some other regions and then the Kent/Alpha variant came along and those regions went boom.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Oct 22, 2021)

Seeing that purple wave coming from the west, and now heading down from Kent & Surrey too, brings back memories of watching the Alpha variant heading to us from north Kent back in Dec./Jan., seeing the map slowly going purple across Kent, south into East Sussex, and finally hitting us in West Sussex, before it took over the rest of the country, grim.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 22, 2021)

Following the science...

SAGE scientists tell UK to begin Covid Plan B - including masks and home working 



> Government scientists have told Boris Johnson he needs to act now with Plan B measures if Britain wants to reverse surging Covid cases as we go into winter.
> 
> Advice to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet has been published in minutes of a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) on October 14.
> 
> Ministers were warned that “earlier intervention would reduce the need for more stringent, disruptive, and longer-lasting measures”.


----------



## Nine Bob Note (Oct 23, 2021)

Srsly, telling people they have to wear masks in certain circumstances (kids in school, hairy-arsed adults in supermarkets, cinemas...) costs fuck all, the tories should love it, but the haunted Victorian pencil doesn't think it spreads amongst tories, and that's what counts. It's a shame nanny didn't send him off to a childhood leprosy party for the sake of herd immunity. "Make sure you take part in the pass-the-parcel, little Jacob, I've heard after the initial Drumstick lollies and Monsters-in-my-Pocket, it's stock in Berkshire-Hathaway." The rest of the "I've had enough of covid now, we need to get back to normal" mob might pay attention when their holidays are cancelled by their intended host nations


----------



## Badgers (Oct 23, 2021)

FUCKING CUNTS 









						Covid: Dogs bought in lockdown being abandoned
					

A charity says animals that cannot be sold are disguised as strays so rescue centres take them.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Oct 23, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 24, 2021)

Daily deaths: 72
Daily cases: 39,962
Total cases: 8,773,674
Total deaths: 139,533
Total fully vaccinated: 45,542,207


----------



## gentlegreen (Oct 25, 2021)

Courtesy of TWIV

How saponin from a tree is key to making the protein-based vaccines work.









						The Tree That Could Help Stop the Pandemic
					

The rare Chilean soapbark tree produces compounds that can boost the body’s reaction to vaccines.




					www.theatlantic.com


----------



## Badgers (Oct 26, 2021)




----------



## teuchter (Oct 26, 2021)

Where's the best current info/advice on types of face masks and relative efficacy, with a focus on protection for the wearer?

To help me try and recommend something sensible for a 70-something year old who needs to do a long train journey.


----------



## Supine (Oct 26, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Where's the best current info/advice on types of face masks and relative efficacy, with a focus on protection for the wearer?
> 
> To help me try and recommend something sensible for a 70-something year old who needs to do a long train journey.



Try here



And


----------



## Supine (Oct 26, 2021)

Supine said:


> Try here
> 
> 
> 
> And




Eta the answer is ffp2 / n95


----------



## teuchter (Oct 26, 2021)

Thanks. Yes, had just been looking at that thread but also noting it's a few months old now.

It's basically this, right?





__





						Boots Protective FFP2 NR Face Masks 5s - Boots
					

Buy Boots Protective FFP2 NR Face Masks 5s and Collect 4 Advantage Card Points when you spend £1.




					www.boots.com
				




(and there's not really a reusable option)


----------



## bimble (Oct 26, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Thanks. Yes, had just been looking at that thread but also noting it's a few months old now.
> 
> It's basically this, right?
> 
> ...


yep. I bought those ones from boots for a long journey too. Found them not the easiest to wear and a bit big for my face.
If your friend can find a seat that's not directly close to anybody else that would obviously be best too.


----------



## teuchter (Oct 26, 2021)

Yes, it's a bit pot luck on trains though - sometimes you'll be in a pretty empty carriage but even on a journey predicted not to be busy there's always a chance that suddenly it's quite crowded thanks to another service being cancelled or something like that.

Going to get some of those ones for myself too I think, and see what they are like to wear, and whether they might make me feel more relaxed doing stuff like sitting in a cinema, or whether that's cancelled out with them being uncomfortable to have on for an extended period.


----------



## Cloo (Oct 26, 2021)

It's really varied on trains - no correlation between times and busyness, just pot luck. On Northern line, mask wearing seems to vary between 50-75%. I've been using medical grade disposables for tube, as don't want/need them everywhere.

Been thinking more about gov pinning hopes on 'peaking' before winter and suspecting that even if it does happen, out 'post-peak' winter will be no better (probably still worse) than places with government with any sense, only we'd have had 1000s of people unnecessarily dying in autumn as well. Also it does sound like if it does drop  next month, everyone will spunk the opportunity for a better winter because 'Save Christmas'


----------



## Supine (Oct 26, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Thanks. Yes, had just been looking at that thread but also noting it's a few months old now.
> 
> It's basically this, right?
> 
> ...



You wont normally see them say multi use for liability reasons etc

They look ok but at £2 each you can shop around to get cheaper. Mine work out at 90p each and last for ages (months) when rotated as a pack of ten.


----------



## teuchter (Oct 26, 2021)

The study linked to earlier gives some sort of relative efficacies for different types of mask; if I've understood it properly, a cloth mask might be something around 50%, one of those basic medical ones maybe 60% and a "N95 respirator" 99%. So are those FFP2 ones that eg you can buy at Boots basically equivalent to what they call an "N95 respirator"?

(My image of what a "respirator" is, is based on things I've used for doing building work which are relatively complex things with valves and a rubber seal around the face and so on, not a fabric-type mask)

Also, that study is looking at the effect on what the wearer breathes out rather than what they breathe in. I can see that you could assume to some extent that the effect would be similar in reverse but are there any equivalent studies looking specifically at protection for the wearer?


----------



## gentlegreen (Oct 26, 2021)

The limitation has to be with the fit.
I bought a box of cheap FFP2s that I rotate and hang outside in sunlight as a gesture towards sterilising...

They have a noseclip and collapse and expand reassuringly if I breathe heavily, but today still misted up my glasses - so mods are required - I have facial hair in any case...
I just tried some window sealing strip on one and it made the fit worse as it overpowered the metal clip ...

My exposure is minimal so I would probably have to use a better mask if I mixed with people more ..


----------



## Supine (Oct 26, 2021)

teuchter said:


> The study linked to earlier gives some sort of relative efficacies for different types of mask; if I've understood it properly, a cloth mask might be something around 50%, one of those basic medical ones maybe 60% and a "N95 respirator" 99%. So are those FFP2 ones that eg you can buy at Boots basically equivalent to what they call an "N95 respirator"?
> 
> (My image of what a "respirator" is, is based on things I've used for doing building work which are relatively complex things with valves and a rubber seal around the face and so on, not a fabric-type mask)
> 
> Also, that study is looking at the effect on what the wearer breathes out rather than what they breathe in. I can see that you could assume to some extent that the effect would be similar in reverse but are there any equivalent studies looking specifically at protection for the wearer?



N95 / k95 / ffp2 are all roughly equivalent standards. Within a percentage point or so in different areas. 

They are respirators because there is enough of a seal, and the material is breathable enough, that almost all gas goes through the material and not around the side. That is where the good performance comes in.


----------



## Boudicca (Oct 26, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> The limitation has to be with the fit.
> I bought a box of cheap FFP2s that I rotate and hang outside in sunlight as a gesture towards sterilising...
> 
> They have a noseclip and collapse and expand reassuringly if I breathe heavily, but today still misted up my glasses - so mods are required - I have facial hair in any case...
> ...


I've seen hospital staff use surgical tape across the nose which could work?


----------



## Badgers (Oct 26, 2021)




----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 26, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 294279


but, i note, no lives


----------



## Sue (Oct 26, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> but, i note, no lives


Lives pah .


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 26, 2021)

Went into the office today for the first time since early March 2020. The actual office part was fine, fairly empty, lots of space and ventilation, but the journey to and from work by train, plus having to go out to buy some lunch, stressed me out so much that I won't be going again in a hurry.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 26, 2021)

Loons outside angel tube


----------



## Sue (Oct 26, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> Loons outside angel tube


Oh, it's not affecting the buses is it? Was planning on getting a 38 that way soonish.


----------



## Pickman's model (Oct 26, 2021)

Sue said:


> Oh, it's not affecting the buses is it? Was planning on getting a 38 that way soonish.


Oh no my bus sailed past and all I caught was a few words of something sounding anti-vax tho it might have been Xian nonsense


----------



## Sue (Oct 26, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> Oh no my bus sailed past and all I caught was a few words of something sounding anti-vax tho it might have been Xian nonsense


Oh good. Happy to miss out on anti-vax and religious types


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 27, 2021)

https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/newsfeatures/covid19-updates/covid-19-daily-operations-update-2000-25-october-2021.pdf
		



This shows how bad Ireland is now. 
😕😕


----------



## Badgers (Oct 27, 2021)




----------



## Numbers (Oct 27, 2021)

#worldbeating


----------



## William of Walworth (Oct 27, 2021)

I suspect that Starmer being tested positive just as those terrible numbers emerge, will be seen by some Tories, and some idiots generally, as HIS/Labour's fault, rather than any condemnation of Johnson, or of the Government more generally  

Fuck the electorate etc. ....


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Oct 27, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> I suspect that Starmer being tested positive just as those terrible numbers emerge, will be seen by some Tories, and some idiots generally, as HIS/Labour's fault



well, yes.  sitting just a few feet away from all those twats who won't wear masks...


----------



## existentialist (Oct 28, 2021)

Puddy_Tat said:


> well, yes.  sitting just a few feet away from all those twats who won't wear masks...


Not enough "convivial spirit"


----------



## Badgers (Oct 29, 2021)

A further 43,467 cases of coronavirus have been reported in the UK, according to government figures

Another 186 deaths of people who had tested positive within the previous 28 days in the UK have also been recorded


One in 50 people in England are estimated to have had Covid last week, the ONS says. 

Its survey suggests that 1.3 million people in the UK tested positive last week, the highest number since records began


----------



## _Russ_ (Oct 29, 2021)

In Wales they reckon 1 in 40 have it right now and there are more than 2000 cases of the new delta+ variant that is supposedly a little more transmissible and  nasty than the Old Delta, fucking A


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Oct 29, 2021)

it's half term week so plenty of unmasked parents on the train home with unmasked brats who spent last week in a germ riddled school

hmph


----------



## Badgers (Oct 30, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Oct 30, 2021)

Daily deaths: 166
Daily cases: 41,278
Total cases: 9,019,962
Total deaths: 140,558
Total fully vaccinated: 45,605,920


----------



## zahir (Oct 30, 2021)

I think total deaths in children has now reached 100

ETA:


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Oct 31, 2021)

zahir said:


> I think total deaths in children has now reached 100


What's a child in that context? Under 18? Under 12?


----------



## zahir (Oct 31, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> What's a child in that context? Under 18? Under 12?


Under 18 rather than under 12, but I'm not sure if 18 and 19 year olds would also be included in the figures.


----------



## miss direct (Oct 31, 2021)

I'm ordering lots of packs of lateral flow tests to take to Turkey with me. Easily accessible, free tests aren't available there, and friends of mine were happy to have some the last time I went. Sometimes they are good just as a precaution.


----------



## Badgers (Oct 31, 2021)




----------



## zahir (Oct 31, 2021)




----------



## zahir (Oct 31, 2021)

More on the JCVI minutes.









						The JCVI Speaks:  “Natural Infection in Children Could Have Substantial Long-Term Benefits On COVID-19 in the UK”
					

"There are reasons that children get sick. Getting sick is not a bad thing."In a previous article, I explored what I thought it meant to be anti-vaccine. In that article I wrote, "the core that



					sciencebasedmedicine.org


----------



## Badgers (Nov 2, 2021)




----------



## Numbers (Nov 4, 2021)

Had my first Covid confrontation on the tube today.  Guy opposite me, no mask (like 70% of the carriage) was just coughing without covering his mouth, I asked him politely if he would cover his mouth when coughing, he replied it was none of my business and it wasn’t Covid.  I just replied it’s basic manners regardless.

He kicked off massively with verbals, ranting and raving and spitting and finished with a threat of violence.  I just said go on then, he got up as if he was about to start something, but thankfully he got off, pheww.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 4, 2021)

Numbers said:


> finished with a threat of violence


He had a lucky escape 😉


----------



## Numbers (Nov 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> He had a lucky escape 😉


Not so sure about that mate, it was rather unsettling.  Some people can be such wankers.


----------



## TopCat (Nov 5, 2021)

imminent changes to mask wearing recommendations and possibly an emergency law change.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 5, 2021)

TopCat said:


> imminent changes to mask wearing recommendations and possibly an emergency law change.


?


----------



## TopCat (Nov 5, 2021)

Badgers said:


> ?


Just getting wind of a significant change.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 5, 2021)

TopCat said:


> Just getting wind of a significant change.


Hmmm...


----------



## TopCat (Nov 5, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Hmmm...


Could be wrong...


----------



## Badgers (Nov 5, 2021)

TopCat said:


> Could be wrong...


It is like Brexit all over again 🙄


----------



## TopCat (Nov 5, 2021)

Likely mandatory face mask wearing on transport and indoors in non residential buildings. Some chatter about outdoor wearing. Details may change and are vague.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 6, 2021)

Covid: Booster jabs to open earlier for booking in England
					

The NHS is relaxing booking rules in a bid to speed up the rollout before a "challenging" winter.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## Badgers (Nov 6, 2021)

TopCat said:


> imminent changes to mask wearing recommendations and possibly an emergency law change.











						Government memo reveals new ‘Plan B’ Covid restrictions could be just days away
					

Controls include legally mandated face masks, vaccine passports for nightclubs, and working from home




					www.mylondon.news
				




🤔


----------



## Pickman's model (Nov 6, 2021)

TopCat said:


> Could be wrong...


could be right...


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 6, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Government memo reveals new ‘Plan B’ Covid restrictions could be just days away
> 
> 
> Controls include legally mandated face masks, vaccine passports for nightclubs, and working from home
> ...



That's from two weeks ago, and we are still waiting for the 'immediate roll-out.'


----------



## Badgers (Nov 6, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> That's from two weeks ago, and we are still waiting for the 'immediate roll-out.'


Who fucking knows anymore?


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 8, 2021)

Badgers, You mention your voluntary work at Vaccination centres (many thanks for this), do you know if those giving the jag aspirate before introducing the shot?


----------



## LDC (Nov 8, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Badgers, You mention your voluntary work at Vaccination centres (many thanks for this), do you know if those giving the jag aspirate before introducing the shot?



Guidance is not to aspirate for these vaccinations, or at least was a few months ago. I'd be surprised if it's changed.


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 8, 2021)

Thanks do you know why?
Is it just that the risk of hitting a blood vessel is minimal?, seems to me that its such an easy thing to do and it guarantees you arent in a vessel..why not?

Just that Im a little concerned as my deltoids are fairly developed and I probably have good sized blood vessels there and have heard of some possible bad effects if one is hit


----------



## LDC (Nov 9, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Thanks do you know why?
> Is it just that the risk of hitting a blood vessel is minimal?, seems to me that its such an easy thing to do and it guarantees you arent in a vessel..why not?
> 
> Just that Im a little concerned as my deltoids are fairly developed and I probably have good sized blood vessels there and have heard of some possible bad effects if one is hit



They're not near the injection site, the needle isn't long enough to reach them, and on balance evidence shows aspiration has its own risks and disadvantages. There were some suggestions early on some of the side effects might have been linked to the vaccine going into blood vessels rather than IM, but afaik there's no evidence that was the case.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 10, 2021)

Pet dog contracts Covid in first confirmed case in UK
					

Animal thought to have caught virus from owners, but experts say there is no evidence pets can pass Covid to humans




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## IC3D (Nov 10, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Pet dog contracts Covid in first confirmed case in UK
> 
> 
> Animal thought to have caught virus from owners, but experts say there is no evidence pets can pass Covid to humans
> ...


“Based on the available information to date, the risk of animals spreading Covid-19 to people is considered to be low,” it states   

Thank fuck we could be in a bit of a pickle if animals could give us a coronavirus


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 10, 2021)

You're joking?


----------



## William of Walworth (Nov 11, 2021)

Can someone quickly explain what 'aspirate' means in a vaccination context??

I ask in a bit of a rush to get to bed , but also on the basis that knowledgeable Urbans can be more reliable than random Googling!


----------



## iona (Nov 11, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Can someone quickly explain what 'aspirate' means in a vaccination context??
> 
> I ask in a bit of a rush to get to bed , but also on the basis that knowledgeable Urbans can be more reliabe than random Googling!


Drawing back on the syringe before you give the injection, to make sure the needle isn't in a blood vessel


----------



## William of Walworth (Nov 11, 2021)

iona -- Thank you, I'd never have guessed that .....


----------



## Supine (Nov 12, 2021)

Amazing video. Watch it


----------



## Mation (Nov 13, 2021)

Supine said:


> Amazing video. Watch it



Not bad if you've got some life science background, but it uses terms like ribosome (in-cell protein-making factory) and cytoplasm (in-cell background fluid)  without explanation.

(Or have I underestimated what people generally know..?)


----------



## Supine (Nov 13, 2021)

Mation said:


> Not bad if you've got some life science background, but it uses terms like ribosome (in-cell protein-making factory) and cytoplasm (in-cell background fluid)  without explanation.
> 
> (Or have I underestimated what people generally know..?)



Well, if you hadn’t heard those terms before you have now. So it was educational


----------



## teuchter (Nov 13, 2021)

It doesn't use those terms without explanation. It explains what both of those things are visually. Before watching the video I could not have told you what a ribosome is. Possibly after watching the video I would have forgotten that the thing that takes the MRNA and makes it into something else is called a ribosome; however, the concept that such things exist and the story of what part they play in the broader process has been quite well communicated.


----------



## zahir (Nov 13, 2021)

Endemic covid, a thread


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Nov 13, 2021)

We're out in the Centre:MK today, in Milton Keynes. I'd estimate mask wearing at around 5%, if that, including all the staff working in shops with signs up about masks. Plus everyone is ignoring all the arrows on the floor that are supposed to prevent congestion, so it's unnecessarily packed in some areas.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Nov 13, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> We're out in the Centre:MK today, in Milton Keynes.







Buddy Bradley said:


> I'd estimate mask wearing at around 5%, if that.


----------



## 2hats (Nov 13, 2021)

Supine said:


> Amazing video. Watch it



For recipients of AstraZeneca/J&J, the viral vector version 

 illustrating the additional step.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 16, 2021)

How the UK sleepwalked into another Covid disaster
					

By failing to prevent the rapid spread of coronavirus in schools, Boris Johnson has thrown children and adults to the wolves.




					www.newstatesman.com
				






> Robert Dingwall, a participant of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) was interviewed saying long Covid was largely in the mind. More startling still was the idea that “natural” infection might be beneficial in children. Nobody was using the words “herd immunity” anymore, but the concept was still circulating in relation to youngsters.


----------



## zahir (Nov 16, 2021)

More consequences of living with covid


----------



## elbows (Nov 16, 2021)

Badgers said:


> How the UK sleepwalked into another Covid disaster
> 
> 
> By failing to prevent the rapid spread of coronavirus in schools, Boris Johnson has thrown children and adults to the wolves.
> ...


I like the tone of that article but I get depressed that all we can expect is a few articles like that months later, when its been perfectly possible for people here and elsewhere to rant about this disgraceful pursual of herd immunity via infection in younger people since at least the start of June.


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 17, 2021)

TopCat said:


> imminent changes to mask wearing recommendations and possibly an emergency law change.


...and then you woke up?


----------



## Sue (Nov 19, 2021)

Some friends are going to a karaoke place tonight -- it's quite small with a low ceiling and in a basement. I've made my excuses as seems like exactly the kind of place to be avoiding right now.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 20, 2021)

Only just a couple of hundred over 44k new cases today #worldbeating


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 22, 2021)

Not sure how much weight to give SAGE's predictions these days, but I wonder what the knowledge base in here thinks of the scenarios in the link below?

A Warning About The Future Of Covid-19 From The Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies Of The United Kingdom


----------



## brogdale (Nov 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Only just a couple of hundred over 44k new cases today #worldbeating


Thank goodness the BBC is warning us to watch out for them filthy, infected foreigners across the channel.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 22, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Not sure how much weight to give SAGE's predictions these days, but I wonder what the knowledge base in here thinks of the scenarios in the link below?
> 
> A Warning About The Future Of Covid-19 From The Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies Of The United Kingdom



There's no predictions, just four different scenarios, because no one knows how it may mutant, anything could happen, all options need to be considered and planned for.

I hope for scenario four: 'The Delta variant mutates to become less harmful, similar to the four coronaviruses circulating today, such as the common cold.'


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 22, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> There's no predictions, just four different scenarios, because no one knows how it may mutant, anything could happen, all options need to be considered and planned for.
> 
> I hope for scenario four: 'The Delta variant mutates to become less harmful, similar to the four coronaviruses circulating today, such as the common cold.'


But what do you think about the different levels of expectation giving for the 4 scenarios? they arent  predictions you're right, but they do give them different likelihoods in their view


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 22, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> But what do you think about the different levels of expectation giving for the 4 scenarios? they arent  predictions you're right, but they do give them different likelihoods in their view



They are all possibilities, not anything to add TBH, because...


----------



## teuchter (Nov 22, 2021)

That article is 3 months old.


----------



## gentlegreen (Nov 22, 2021)

To throw the cat among the pigeons, the virologists I follow remain sceptical that the epidemiologists are convincingly able to remove the extrinsic factors and accurately say that any one variant is any more transmissible than any other - recently they even cast doubt on long-established claims of variations in infectivity of any viruses ...


----------



## IC3D (Nov 22, 2021)

I think that report is a realistic balanced assesment of where we are to date. Covid has most definitely got the upper hand it's not being controlled by vaccines, its mutating and evading and we all hope it will become a common cold like the other coronaviruses but I believe it could get worse too.


----------



## existentialist (Nov 22, 2021)

IC3D said:


> I think that report is a realistic balanced assesment of where we are to date. Covid has most definitely got the upper hand it's not being controlled by vaccines, its mutating and evading and we all hope it will become a common cold like the other coronaviruses but I believe it could get worse too.


What do you mean by "not being controlled by vaccines"? Do you not think that they might have something to do with the massive disparity in the ratio of infections to deaths?


----------



## gentlegreen (Nov 22, 2021)

IC3D said:


> I think that report is a realistic balanced assesment of where we are to date. Covid has most definitely got the upper hand it's not being controlled by vaccines, its mutating and evading and we all hope it will become a common cold like the other coronaviruses but I believe it could get worse too.


Vaccines alone were never going to "control" it.


----------



## elbows (Nov 22, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> To throw the cat among the pigeons, the virologists I follow remain sceptical that the epidemiologists are convincingly able to remove the extrinsic factors and accurately say that any one variant is any more transmissible than any other - recently they even cast doubt on long-established claims of variations in infectivity of any viruses ...


It can be hard to perfectly ascertain the role of one factor over another, and there can be a tendency to oversimplify. But ultimately I use dominance as a guide, and there have been several strains already which swept the globe and came to dominate. It is possible for a strain to take off by being in the right place at the right time, but I do tend to think that its reasonable to assume that dominant strains had specific advantages over strains that came before. And authorities are aware that they have to consider 'founder effect' and 'luck' as being potential factors, not every success for a strain of the virus can be presumed to be down to a real fitness advantage of that strain.


----------



## elbows (Nov 22, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Not sure how much weight to give SAGE's predictions these days, but I wonder what the knowledge base in here thinks of the scenarios in the link below?
> 
> A Warning About The Future Of Covid-19 From The Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies Of The United Kingdom


I dont have much to add given that its a large subject that was in focus months ago.

Certainly some of the scenarios they describe are one of the many reasons why I favoured not letting millions of infections occur, since large numbers of infections means more opportunities to mutate. This point comes up a number of times in the SAGE paper.

And this is the original SAGE paper in question:



			https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1007566/S1335_Long_term_evolution_of_SARS-CoV-2.pdf


----------



## Badgers (Nov 22, 2021)

elbows said:


> Certainly some of the scenarios they describe are one of the many reasons why I favoured not letting millions of infections occur, since large numbers of infections means more opportunities to mutate. This point comes up a number of times in the SAGE paper.


At least they are attempting some forward planning. Rather than hastening things to protect landlord's and party donor's massive wealth.


----------



## elbows (Nov 22, 2021)

There was also this bit from an October paper on possible options if they find they need to take other measures to bring numbers down.



> The emergence of a new variant with (partial) vaccine escape properties (Figure 3). Much of the UK’s current population immunity comes from vaccination; a variant that could overcome this immunity would have a fitness advantage and could spread rapidly through the population. As the UK continues to vaccinate and individuals return to pre-COVID rates of mixing there is an increased evolutionary pressure for vaccine escape variants to emerge. Very high prevalence in schools combined with partly vaccinated 12-16 year olds in a highly mixing population provides ideal conditions for vaccine escape emergence.





			https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1029656/S1392_Juniper_Consortium_Control_Options_for_Mitigating_a_Rapid_Rise_in_Infection.pdf


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 22, 2021)

> Very high prevalence in schools combined with partly vaccinated 12-16 year olds in a highly mixing population provides ideal conditions for vaccine escape emergence.


This is a bit of a worry, giving some young uns a single dose could turn out to be a very bad decision (or have they changed the reccomendation for 12-15 year olds?


----------



## elbows (Nov 22, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> This is a bit of a worry, giving some young uns a single dose could turn out to be a very bad decision (or have they changed the reccomendation for 12-15 year olds?


They changed it for 16-18 year olds recently but its still early days for 12-15 year olds getting even a single dose. Maybe they will expand that to two doses when the time comes, not sure.

Its not hard to figure out the logic of various warnings expert groups have given about creating different sorts of ideal conditions for the virus to mutate at various stages of this pandemic. That stuff should show up on their theoretical risks radar and it usually has, but its much harder to know whether such things will actually come to pass or not. I've always felt the need to mention such stuff but I dont have a strong conviction about whether it will actually happen. Indeed I am posting less on the pandemic these days because for now at least it feels like the period where I was lucky enough to deliver prescient warnings and explanations may have passed. I dont think I've been able to do it since alerting people to the possibility of the July peak, and describing how what eventually became known as the 'pingdemic' would act in a similar way to a partial lockdown. Since then things seem much messier and I dont have a clear set of expectations that I can build upon with much certainty. Other than general and obvious stuff about winter.


----------



## William of Walworth (Nov 22, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Not sure how much weight to give SAGE's predictions these days, but I wonder what the knowledge base in here thinks of the scenarios in the link below?
> 
> A Warning About The Future Of Covid-19 From The Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies Of The United Kingdom


Not saying it's not a useful article, but it's worth pointing out that it's dated August 4th. 

Just saying!


----------



## teuchter (Nov 23, 2021)

William of Walworth said:


> Not saying it's not a useful article, but it's worth pointing out that it's dated August 4th.
> 
> Just saying!


Not saying there's _necessarily_ anything wrong with you not reading the thread thoroughly but I did already point this out a few posts up.

Just saying!


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 23, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Not saying there's _necessarily_ anything wrong with you not reading the thread thoroughly but I did already point this out a few posts up.
> 
> Just saying!



He's probably got you on ignore.


----------



## two sheds (Nov 23, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Not saying there's _necessarily_ anything wrong with you not reading the thread thoroughly but I did already point this out a few posts up.
> 
> Just saying!


Not sure you understand how forums quite work yet. People normally read a post, react to a post, and then read the subsequent posts. In which case William wouldn't have seen your post before posting his post. 

hth


----------



## teuchter (Nov 23, 2021)

two sheds said:


> Not sure you understand how forums quite work yet. People normally read a post, react to a post, and then read the subsequent posts. In which case William wouldn't have seen your post before posting his post.
> 
> hth


"Normal" behaviour is not necessarily acceptable behaviour. Especially when we are talking about urban75 posters.

I would like to think I play a part in proactively raising standards in this regard.


----------



## miss direct (Nov 23, 2021)

I'm a few months too young to book my booster. Would be very happy if I could get it before going to Turkey to work on a project in a very cold place where I can't imagine there will be open windows/doors as was possible in the summer. Masks are obligatory there, which helps, but as we'll all be eating/living together, fairly sure any infection will get around quickly.


----------



## William of Walworth (Nov 23, 2021)

William of Walworth said:
			
		

> Not saying it's not a useful article, but it's worth pointing out that it's dated August 4th.
> Just saying!





teuchter said:


> Not saying there's _necessarily_ anything wrong with you not reading the thread thoroughly but I did already point this out a few posts up.
> 
> Just saying!


Missed that earlier post. Wherever it might be


----------



## Sue (Nov 25, 2021)

Interestingly, just got a text from my GP saying 'it's not too late for you or any other eligible people in your household to get your first/second/booster jab.' and including a booking link. They're also having some webinars for people with concerns about the vaccine (split up into concerns about kids 12+, people who're pregnant etc) and you can submit questions in advance. 

I think my surgery is really good and glad they're trying to address what might be some of the reasons why the vaccination rate is v low round here.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 25, 2021)

Just been to Portimao and back on the train in Portugal . 45 mins e/w and everyone wearing a mask on both trips . Plenty of notices explains its compulsory and no mask no train .


----------



## Badgers (Nov 26, 2021)

Cases back over 50k


----------



## Numbers (Nov 26, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cases back over 50k


When was it last over 50k? 
I could Google but thought you/someone might know off the top of their head.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 26, 2021)

Numbers said:


> When was it last over 50k?
> I could Google but thought you/someone might know off the top of their head.



About 5 weeks ago, but single day figures are fairly pointless, as they are up & down all time.

Plus, it's more important to watch hospital admissions & deaths, both still dropping, despite cases going up for around 3 weeks now.  🤷‍♂️


----------



## brogdale (Nov 26, 2021)

Insert appropriate Windsor Davies meme...


----------



## danny la rouge (Nov 27, 2021)

Omicron is in UK.

Two cases of new variant of Covi-19 detected in UK Two cases of new variant of Covi-19 detected in UK


----------



## two sheds (Nov 27, 2021)

Thank god we've got such good track & trace systems built up then 

oh wait


----------



## bimble (Nov 27, 2021)

The bloody Swiss, with their proud neutrality,  they’re putting it to rederendum tomorrow whether to scrap all the restrictions or not just as their case numbers are rising like mad.  My dad (76) just got his second jab there last week. It’s such an odd place, increasingly i think it’s more like Texas than it’s like here. i Am really tired of worrying about my silly parents over there.









						Covid: Swiss back government on Covid pass as cases surge
					

Sunday's referendum is held in a country with one of the lowest vaccination rates in Western Europe.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## elbows (Nov 27, 2021)

Yes I was tempted to comment on that yesterday but then I saw some of the polls for those issues and decided to wait and see which way people actually vote first. And it would be tiresome if my opinion on more direct forms of democracy always came down to people making choices I agree with.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 27, 2021)

danny la rouge said:


> Omicron is in UK.
> 
> Two cases of new variant of Covi-19 detected in UK Two cases of new variant of Covi-19 detected in UK


Slight correction; the authorities can now confirm that testing proves that it's here...probably been here days, if not weeks ago...just like ever other spread.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 27, 2021)

Masks coming back then...


----------



## brogdale (Nov 27, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Masks coming back then...


4 months too late.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Nov 27, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Masks coming back then...


We'll see


----------



## SpookyFrank (Nov 27, 2021)

I see they're going to make everyone do a PCR test on arrival to the UK.

Presumably to make sure this new variant doesn't get, err, back out again?


----------



## elbows (Nov 27, 2021)

SpookyFrank said:


> I see they're going to make everyone do a PCR test on arrival to the UK.
> 
> Presumably to make sure this new variant doesn't get, err, back out again?


Limiting the amount of seeding of the variant is still worthwhile even when there is no prospect of halting it. I was going on about this before the press conference.

Putting some peopl off from travelling is usually part of these sorts of equations too, though they dont go on about that aspect.

I did laugh at this bit from Hugh Pym of the BBCs analysis:



> Cases of the new variant appearing in the UK were inevitable.
> 
> *What was not inevitable was the government’s response*, moving swiftly to tighten rules for those arriving in the country and for the wearing of face coverings in shops and on public transport in England.



I suppose it would be fair to quote the rest of it.



> In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland face coverings are already mandatory on public transport and in some indoor settings. So why not the full Plan B for England with requirements to work from home and the use of vaccine passports in some settings?
> 
> The prime minister’s answer was that more work was needed to determine how rapidly the variant spreads and how effective the vaccines might be – hence the focus on trying to stop cases coming into the UK but holding off on a wider range of domestic restrictions.
> 
> ...



From the 18:07 entry on the BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-59443504


----------



## T & P (Nov 27, 2021)

Even though I of course wouldn’t wish to see anyone dying needlessly, no matter how much of an ‘I told you so’ karma moment it would be, I’m starting to fear this new variant might deliver an unprecedented degree of Darwin Award devastation among the unvaccinated


----------



## elbows (Nov 27, 2021)

T & P said:


> Even though I of course wouldn’t wish to see anyone dying needlessly, no matter how much of an ‘I told you so’ karma moment it would be, I’m starting to fear this new variant might deliver an unprecedented degree of Darwin Award devastation among the unvaccinated



Well there are a number of angles when it comes to deadliness:

Direct stuff - does the new variant make you more likely to end up in hospital or die. Havent heard anything about that for the new strain yet.

Immunity stuff - vaccine-induced immunity is obviously not relevant to the group you mention, but there is also immunity via previous infection. When it comes to deadliness, a strains ability to bypass that immunity needs to be considered in conjunction with the extent to which having already caught it previously and not died offers clues about whether they will die from getting infected again. 

Transmissibility - With past variants it was pointed out that notable changes to transmissibility could have larger implications for numbers of deaths than some changes to the direct deadliness of the new variant. Because increased transmissibility implied far more people catching it, faster spread and more people catching it in a short space of time, overwhelming healthcare. But this point is also messier at this stage because we have to note that we've now gone through many months where a rather large number of people were allowed to catch the virus without new restrictions being brought in to reduce the rates. So presumably rather a lot of unvaccinated people have already placed themselves in harms way this year.

The above does not offer a complete guide as to what lies in store, but just begins to touch on some of the factors.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 27, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> Not sure how much weight to give SAGE's predictions these days, but I wonder what the knowledge base in here thinks of the scenarios in the link below?
> 
> A Warning About The Future Of Covid-19 From The Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies Of The United Kingdom


That's terrifying 😟


----------



## cupid_stunt (Nov 28, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> That's terrifying 😟



Not if my hope comes true for scenario four: 'The Delta variant mutates to become less harmful, similar to the four coronaviruses circulating today, such as the common cold.'


----------



## Badgers (Nov 28, 2021)

Just picked up 20x N95 masks


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 28, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Just picked up 20x N95 masks



Badgers can they be reused? I have a few...can I air them out and get more than one wear out of them.
Thinking mainly of my dad. He is the only one in the house who goes out at all. Not to socualise indoors mind.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 28, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Nov 28, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Badgers can they be reused? I have a few...can I air them out and get more than one wear out of them.
> Thinking mainly of my dad. He is the only one in the house who goes out at all. Not to socualise indoors mind.


I do have (embarrassingly) a mask airing rail  

Ideally these masks are single use but it depends on the usage. I spend 8-10 hours working (public facing) so often they are binned. If you are using them for shops or social stuffs then reuse them. 

A 'responsibly reused' N95 mask is better than a standard surgical disposable mask.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 28, 2021)

Badgers said:


> I do have (embarrassingly) a mask airing rail
> 
> Ideally these masks are single use but it depends on the usage. I spend 8-10 hours working (public facing) so often they are binned. If you are using them for shops or social stuffs then reuse them.
> 
> A 'responsibly reused' N95 mask is better than a standard surgical disposable mask.




That's reassuring.. 
I've been hanging them off the kitchen window to air them.


----------



## zora (Nov 28, 2021)

Question re: delayed/missing test result:
I came down with cold symptoms last Wednesday. LFT negative, but as I was starting to develop a cough, I went for a PCR test. Have been off work since, while a) waiting for result, b) feeling too poorly to go in anyway, and c) wanting to limit spread of whatever it is I have. 
Am starting to feel better, and would probably go back to work tomorrow or Tuesday, but no sign of the test result. 
Website seems to say to contact them if result not received by Day 6 - but if they then tell me the result is lost and I need to retest then, I will have been off for pretty much the full 10 days (for what is likely not covid). 
Should I just try and book another test for today, and tick the box "have been told to retest" or whatever seems applicable, and hope that this will come through more quickly? Or should I try and call the 119 number? (I imagine they'd only tell me to either wait till Day 6, or to retest, if I can even get through).


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 28, 2021)

Re: re-use of N95 masks and other stuff I bought a proper UVC light mnths ago and use that for sterilizing the mask for re-use. It doesnt re-charge the static charge that helps with filtration but at least I know they are pretty sterile.
You need to use the light in a small space so that the ozone level get high enough to get to the areas out of direct light.


----------



## gentlegreen (Nov 28, 2021)

I only use my FFP2s for 20 minutes in shops once or twice a week, so I have been rotating 2 or 3 and hanging them in the south-facing hedge - which has the added benefit that I don't need to unlock the front door if I get half way up the street without one - though I always have several lower-grade masks in my cargo pockets ...
Now there's almost no natural UV available, perhaps I'll increase my rotation ...


----------



## zora (Nov 28, 2021)

zora said:


> Question re: delayed/missing test result:
> I came down with cold symptoms last Wednesday. LFT negative, but as I was starting to develop a cough, I went for a PCR test. Have been off work since, while a) waiting for result, b) feeling too poorly to go in anyway, and c) wanting to limit spread of whatever it is I have.
> Am starting to feel better, and would probably go back to work tomorrow or Tuesday, but no sign of the test result.
> Website seems to say to contact them if result not received by Day 6 - but if they then tell me the result is lost and I need to retest then, I will have been off for pretty much the full 10 days (for what is likely not covid).
> Should I just try and book another test for today, and tick the box "have been told to retest" or whatever seems applicable, and hope that this will come through more quickly? Or should I try and call the 119 number? (I imagine they'd only tell me to either wait till Day 6, or to retest, if I can even get through).


Just answered my own question: I did call 119, and got through to someone straightaway (after going through the lengthy press-option-x-for-this-press-option-y-for-that process, which is totally fair enough).
They seemed to think that they could help me.👍Apparently something had gone wrong with the registration of the test/the link to my contact details, but with any luck I should now receive the test result within the next couple of hours.🤞


----------



## Badgers (Nov 28, 2021)

🤔



> Spain announces ban on unvaccinated Brits entering country as new variant spreads


----------



## _Russ_ (Nov 28, 2021)

If it was my decision what happened in any other country I wouldn't let any of us brits in without an IQ test (set target at >50 and we'd be fucked)


----------



## brogdale (Nov 28, 2021)

_Russ_ said:


> If it was my decision what happened in any other country I wouldn't let any of us brits in without an IQ test (set target at >50 and we'd be fucked)


This is pretty unfunny, borderline ablest shite.


----------



## LDC (Nov 28, 2021)

I really should have more faith in people, but really skeptical that mask wearing etc is going to come back to the needed previous levels. Only robust messaging and enforcement would do it, and we're not going to get either of those are we?


----------



## brogdale (Nov 28, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> I really should have more faith in people, but really skeptical that mask wearing etc is going to come back to the needed previous levels. Only robust messaging and enforcement would do it, and we're not going to get either of those are we?


Nope; not when the regime has already told everyone it's over...we're out of it now.


----------



## Yossarian (Nov 28, 2021)

Sanity 1 cowbell clowns 0









						Swiss voters back COVID-19 law amid surge in infections
					

Early results show two-thirds of voters supported legislation to impose strict coronavirus restrictions.




					www.aljazeera.com


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 29, 2021)

Screenshot from RTE news ... from  a report showing workets in a covid test lab.

Clear message in the photo from the lab technicians 🤔😕😕

Ominous if it's legit.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 29, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Screenshot from RTE news ... from  a report showing workets in a covid test lab.
> 
> Clear message in the photo from the lab technicians 🤔😕😕
> 
> ...




Here is the reddit discussion on it. 
A covid lab worker posts a reply and confirms working very long days for minimum wage and no security.


----------



## Badgers (Nov 30, 2021)

Diary of a Covid Tester part #1

Here we have a free 'Vaxi Taxi' service. Basically the council pays for a cab to take someone for a vaccine, waits while they get it and takes them home afterwards.

Sounds a bit ex/cessive but compared to the cost of NHS treatment it is nothing.

When we had a meeting I suggested 'Jab Cab' would be a good name but someone said 'Vaxi Taxi' would be more fun or something. Usual nonsense.

Just had a 'cease and desist' letter from a lawyer representing a doctor in Surrey who claims the term 'Vaxi Taxi' is her intellectual property and we will be sued. 

FFS


----------



## platinumsage (Nov 30, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Here is the reddit discussion on it.
> A covid lab worker posts a reply and confirms working very long days for minimum wage and no security.




They say they get €16.10 an hour which isn't minimum wage. Doing mass repetitive lab work like that is never going to be enjoyable. I'm sure they're not working in bonded servitude.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Diary of a Covid Tester part #1
> 
> Here we have a free 'Vaxi Taxi' service. Basically the council pays for a cab to take someone for a vaccine, waits while they get it and takes them home afterwards.
> 
> ...


#ToryBritain


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 30, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> They say they get €16.10 an hour which isn't minimum wage. Doing mass repetitive lab work like that is never going to be enjoyable. I'm sure they're not working in bonded servitude.



Oh.. ok. My mistake.  Not minimum wage. It's this....minimum hour contracts...see screenshot.



Maybe lab techs are just not used to working 12 days in a row and not having days off?


----------



## platinumsage (Nov 30, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Maybe lab techs are just not used to working 12 days in a row and not having days off?



12 days in a row is the max that the EU working time directive allows. Of all the circumstances in which employers might utilize it, ramping up pandemic virus testing has to be one of the least objectionable. Obviously it would be nice if they could recruit more staff and give them fewer hours each, but it's impossible to predict testing demand in advance.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 30, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> 12 days in a row is the max that the EU working time directive allows. Of all the circumstances in which employers might utilize it, ramping up pandemic virus testing has to be one of the least objectionable. Obviously it would be nice if they could recruit more staff and give them fewer hours each, but it's impossible to predict testing demand in advance.




I think the person also wrote somewhere...I might have not grabbed it in the screenshot..that there are only 3 facilities in Ireland doing this work. 
The fact they stuck "HELP" on a machine so the rte news watchers would see it..is concerning though.


----------



## platinumsage (Nov 30, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> I think the person also wrote somewhere...I might have not grabbed it in the screenshot..that there are only 3 facilities in Ireland doing this work.
> The fact they stuck "HELP" on a machine so the rte news watchers would see it..is concerning though.



Could be a joke, who knows. I am sure there are other avenues for them to voice concerns - it's not like it's impossible for workers in Ireland to speak to the press. If this was in certain other countries I'd perhaps be more concerned.


----------



## LDC (Nov 30, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> I think the person also wrote somewhere...I might have not grabbed it in the screenshot..that there are only 3 facilities in Ireland doing this work.
> The fact they stuck "HELP" on a machine so the rte news watchers would see it..is concerning though.



It's standard office and workplace joke stuff as well, not sure it should be taken too seriously.


----------



## klang (Nov 30, 2021)

not to say they don't work under very difficult conditions and there shouldn't be ways looked at to improve their contracts, but they lost me when they described their management as 'retarded'.


----------



## Aladdin (Nov 30, 2021)

klang said:


> not to say they don't work under very difficult conditions and there shouldn't be ways looked at to improve their contracts, but they lost me when they described their management as 'retarded'.



Fair enough...


----------



## elbows (Nov 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Diary of a Covid Tester part #1
> 
> Here we have a free 'Vaxi Taxi' service. Basically the council pays for a cab to take someone for a vaccine, waits while they get it and takes them home afterwards.
> 
> ...











						Vaxi Taxi: Free black cab helping vulnerable people get vaccinated | ITV News
					

One of the aims of the service is to help people who have difficulty getting access to healthcare but want to be vaccinated. | ITV News London




					www.itv.com


----------



## PR1Berske (Nov 30, 2021)




----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Dec 2, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> 12 days in a row is the max that the EU working time directive allows.


You can opt out of the working time directive,  usually something that happens under duress


platinumsage said:


> Of all the circumstances in which employers might utilize it, ramping up pandemic virus testing has to be one of the least objectionable. Obviously it would be nice if they could recruit more staff and give them fewer hours each, but it's impossible to predict testing demand in advance.


I mean if you gave them three month contracts there’s obviously a real danger of society collapsing lest they find five minutes to scratch their arse on company time



platinumsage said:


> Could be a joke, who knows. I am sure there are other avenues for them to voice concerns - it's not like it's impossible for workers in Ireland to speak to the press. If this was in certain other countries I'd perhaps be more concerned.


Christ this is urban full time now isn’t it. IT’S NOT CHINA! Yeah but if you go to the press and slag off your employer as a non contracted worker you will be sacked- well, they wouldn’t even need to sack you, just stop giving you hours.


----------



## platinumsage (Dec 2, 2021)

HoratioCuthbert said:


> You can opt out of the working time directive,  usually something that happens under duress



Not in ireland 



HoratioCuthbert said:


> I mean if you gave them three month contracts there’s obviously a real danger of society collapsing lest they find five minutes to scratch their arse on company time



How is that going to help if there’s a sudden surge in testing? You’d still have to ask existing people to work longer hours.



HoratioCuthbert said:


> Christ this is urban full time now isn’t it. IT’S NOT CHINA! Yeah but if you go to the press and slag off your employer as a non contracted worker you will be sacked- well, they wouldn’t even need to sack you, just stop giving you hours.



Yeah i’m sure writing help on your own bench so it’s seen on TV is the best way to alert the media without being sacked.


----------



## LDC (Dec 2, 2021)

There's quite a funny quip in the Guardian live feed talking about whether people should have Xmas parties or not;

"If you are confused, you should probably just make your own decision, which seems to be what the government thinks people should do anyway. Alternatively, you could try the approach that No 10 seems have adopted which is to hold a party, but pretend you didn't."


----------



## elbows (Dec 2, 2021)

Hold a party but dont invite the virus, sorted.

RSVP = Really Secret Virus Party.


----------



## IC3D (Dec 2, 2021)

Sugar Kane said:


> Oh.. ok. My mistake.  Not minimum wage. It's this....minimum hour contracts...see screenshot.
> 
> View attachment 298756
> 
> Maybe lab techs are just not used to working 12 days in a row and not having days off?


Seems like COVID testing is a licence to print money then


----------



## two sheds (Dec 2, 2021)

IC3D said:


> Seems like COVID testing is a licence to print money then


have you been reading up on how the tories work? And I'm sure there's a similar setup in Ireland, if not so bent.


----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Dec 2, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> Not in ireland
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Didn’t say it was nor do I think that’s why they did it. 

How does employing a few more staff help if there’s a surge in testing? Errr slightly more than not employing a few more staff?


----------



## platinumsage (Dec 2, 2021)

HoratioCuthbert said:


> How does employing a few more staff help if there’s a surge in testing? Errr slightly more than not employing a few more staff?



It doesn't actually solve the problem though, unless they employ from the outset enough staff to handle the highest conceivable peak in test demand but only working a 40 hour week. You might not think that would be waste of money but I'm sure you would agree it would be a waste of trained laboratory workers.


----------



## two sheds (Dec 2, 2021)

I'd have hoped there would have been extra contract testers who could move from centre to centre. You'd then hope that they'd be paid properly but I doubt that, too.


----------



## HoratioCuthbert (Dec 2, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> It doesn't actually solve the problem though, unless they employ from the outset enough staff to handle the highest conceivable peak in test demand but only working a 40 hour week. You might not think that would be waste of money but I'm sure you would agree it would be a waste of trained laboratory workers.


It doesn’t really sound like that guy just suddenly had to do overtime this week, he sounds like he’s at the end of his tether. There’s some middle ground to aim for here.


----------



## kalidarkone (Dec 3, 2021)

I'm confused! 
Mdk1 has been ill for a few weeks. We have been lft every 2 days- all negative. 

I then  had contact with a patient found to be positive from a pcr test after a negative lft (don't get me started on the fact that all patients should be pcr tested prior to surgery) a couple of weeks ago (rule at that point was NOT to isolate if you have been vaxxed- which I have)

With the emergence of the Omicron varient and mdk1 reporting a loss of sense of smell and a headache and continuing cough  we both did pcr tests yesterday. Now,waiting for the results. 

If mdk1 results come back positive- won't the isolation window of 10 days already of passed,? Seeing as a positive result can show for 90 days and he has been unwell for 3 weeks. (He is double jabbed)


----------



## Badgers (Dec 4, 2021)

#worldbeating 









						I reused an old PCR test code to take a flight - it shows how shambolic the whole operation is
					

A woman who re-used an old PCR booking reference to get out of paying for a new test when she travelled abroad tells i: 'I wouldn’t have tried it if I was sure that someone would check my result'




					inews.co.uk


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 4, 2021)

Badgers said:


> #worldbeating
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I had to take a mate to a hospital appointment yesterday, so I brought a copy of the 'i' to read whilst waiting, the article in the paper mentioned reasons why PCR test codes could be reused for legit reasons, such as flight changes & others, that they had become aware of a small number of people 'gaming' the system, and were looking to tighten things up to deal with the problem, together with mentions of the possible fines for entering false information.

Somehow all these details are left out of the online article, weird.  🤷‍♂️


----------



## LDC (Dec 4, 2021)

kalidarkone said:


> I'm confused!
> Mdk1 has been ill for a few weeks. We have been lft every 2 days- all negative.
> 
> I then  had contact with a patient found to be positive from a pcr test after a negative lft (don't get me started on the fact that all patients should be pcr tested prior to surgery) a couple of weeks ago (rule at that point was NOT to isolate if you have been vaxxed- which I have)
> ...



Didn't your Trust stick with the stricter isolate even if vaccinated rules? Mine and others I know did.

I think if isolation passed then you are out of it unless you continue to have some of the symptoms (fever iirc). It's only different if you get told that you are a contact of an Omicron case. But worth checking as that's off the top of my head, the rules have changed so much I've given up trying to remember them now and just check the latest guidance.


----------



## kalidarkone (Dec 5, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Didn't your Trust stick with the stricter isolate even if vaccinated rules? Mine and others I know did.
> 
> I think if isolation passed then you are out of it unless you continue to have some of the symptoms (fever iirc). It's only different if you get told that you are a contact of an Omicron case. But worth checking as that's off the top of my head, the rules have changed so much I've given up trying to remember them now and just check the latest guidance.


Thankfully both our tests were negative.


----------



## LDC (Dec 6, 2021)

General misanthropic rant warning....

A friend of a friend who works in the NHS turned their work phone on this morning and saw a text from the weekend from a work colleague saying they'd had a positive contact and should they come to work this morning? Anyway, turns out they'd asked a few random people at their work over messages at the weekend and had been told it's probably OK, so they came into work and saw patients this morning. Then someone with some sense told them to go home and contact infection control, who told them not to be in work. Fucking obviously.

Are people actually total fucking morons? Why are you messaging work mates over the weekend asking important advice like that? Why either do you (a) not know as you should have read the regular covid updates emailed to all staff, or failing that (b) call someone sensible (like your line manager or infection control) first thing Monday morning before you amble in and see patients?

Anyway, apparently the patients they saw don't need to be told as 'everyone was wearing PPE' or something. Honestly I fucking despair sometimes.


----------



## existentialist (Dec 6, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> General misanthropic rant warning....
> 
> A friend of a friend who works in the NHS turned their work phone on this morning and saw a text from the weekend from a work colleague saying they'd had a positive contact and should they come to work this morning? Anyway, turns out they'd asked a few random people at their work over messages at the weekend and had been told it's probably OK, so they came into work and saw patients this morning. Then someone with some sense told them to go home and contact infection control, who told them not to be in work. Fucking obviously.
> 
> ...


Funny, isn't it, how so many people seem to think that THEIR PARTICULAR CASE should represent some kind of exception. Even if the rules aren't clear, you'd kind of hope that medical staff would be aware of the practical realities underlying those rules, and act accordingly.


----------



## LDC (Dec 6, 2021)

Paging Wilf and his boundless optimism about medical staff.


----------



## LDC (Dec 6, 2021)

existentialist said:


> Funny, isn't it, how so many people seem to think that THEIR PARTICULAR CASE should represent some kind of exception. Even if the rules aren't clear, you'd kind of hope that medical staff would be aware of the practical realities underlying those rules, and act accordingly.



And surely also err on the side of better safe than sorry before you get a clear answer. I mean given that the consequences are you infect someone and they die a modicum of caution surely is better? I mean it's a free day off work as well ffs!


----------



## Wilf (Dec 6, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Paging Wilf and his boundless optimism about medical staff.


My store of bounds is decreasing.


----------



## _Russ_ (Dec 6, 2021)

> Anyway, apparently the patients they saw don't need to be told as 'everyone was wearing PPE' or something. Honestly I fucking despair sometimes.



Let me translate that...."FFS dont tell any of the patients that would expose our culpability"


----------



## platinumsage (Dec 6, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> General misanthropic rant warning....
> 
> A friend of a friend who works in the NHS turned their work phone on this morning and saw a text from the weekend from a work colleague saying they'd had a positive contact and should they come to work this morning? Anyway, turns out they'd asked a few random people at their work over messages at the weekend and had been told it's probably OK, so they came into work and saw patients this morning. Then someone with some sense told them to go home and contact infection control, who told them not to be in work. Fucking obviously.
> 
> ...



Strange that no one they messaged knew the right answer. If management are communicating policy by sending out emails that no one reads, they're obviously not doing enough to train staff.


----------



## LDC (Dec 6, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> Strange that no one they messaged knew the right answer. If management are communicating policy by sending out emails that no one reads, they're obviously not doing enough to train staff.



I have to give covid advice at work to patients pretty much every shift, and tbh I always check the latest official guidance as I wouldn't like to get it wrong, and it does change quite regularly and is sometimes a bit different depending on the circumstances. So think it's fair enough in some ways not to have the right thing to do in your brain, but it's pretty simple to check or refer to someone that knows more rather than make it up.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Dec 6, 2021)

I think it's because people are strung out and anxious to a large degree isn't it. They're stressed and on edge and the prospect of missing work when people are relying on you just adds to that. And so people look for a way that it might be ok, and others look to reassure them because that in turn maybe makes them feel a bit less anxious. Obviously from a step back it's the wrong thing to do but it doesn't happen just because people are idiots or twats.


----------



## LDC (Dec 6, 2021)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> I think it's because people are strung out and anxious to a large degree isn't it. They're stressed and on edge and the prospect of missing work when people are relying on you just adds to that. And so people look for a way that it might be ok, and others look to reassure them because that in turn maybe makes them feel a bit less anxious. Obviously from a step back it's the wrong thing to do but it doesn't happen just because people are idiots or twats.



Yeah, I know. The culture around work and not missing it 'off sick' is there and plays a part, especially in the NHS at the moment where staffing is fucked. So, yes, complex reasons etc etc. But I wanted a rant. (And sometimes people are a faith-in-humanity-testing-nightmare...)


----------



## Badgers (Dec 6, 2021)

Had someone (unvaccinated) test positive today. 

Ryanair steward. Moaned a lot that mask wearing is about 50% on the planes. 

Lives in a shared house with 8 other people. 
Was at a gig on Saturday night. 
Cinema Sunday night. 

Not having a go at them but when you crunch the numbers...


----------



## Badgers (Dec 6, 2021)

In other news... 


> Under new rules, close contacts of suspected Omicron Covid cases must now self isolate if they are contacted by NHS Test and Trace, regardless of vaccination status.


----------



## 20Bees (Dec 6, 2021)

I’ve just been pinged with a message saying I was in contact (on Saturday) with someone who has tested positive and to book a PCR test, which I’ve done. I should have taken a screenshot of the message but I didn’t, and now I can’t find it on my phone, it’s not in the notifications. I’m sure it didn’t mention Omicron, I’m sure I would’ve homed in on that, but is there a way of retrieving that message?


----------



## elbows (Dec 6, 2021)

Badgers said:


> In other news...


Yeah that was part of the first rule changes they brought in when Omicron first showed up on the radar, I've gone on about it a few times since but self-isolation rule changes dont seem to generate very much discussion.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 6, 2021)

elbows said:


> Yeah that was part of the first rule changes they brought in when Omicron first showed up on the radar, I've gone on about it a few times since but self-isolation rule changes dont seem to generate very much discussion.


Kinda why I posted it. Literally nobody knows this.


----------



## elbows (Dec 6, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Kinda why I posted it. Literally nobody knows this.


I suspect a bigger deal will be made of it in the press once most infections are assumed to be Omicron, which isnt currently the case.

Some of the anti-restriction tory nutters are aware of it because they started taking out of their arse about the pingdemic again when debating the legislation last week.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 6, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Kinda why I posted it. Literally nobody knows this.



It was all over the news for days, including the right-wing press moaning about another incoming pingdemic. and other reports of how so many people were deleting the NHS covid app to avoid being pinged.  🤷‍♂️


----------



## IC3D (Dec 6, 2021)

Hospitals being full of humans unfortately have to admit COVID patients, they are treated like anyone with an infection risk in a side room on a regular ward, medical and nurse teams will go between them and the other patients Donnig and doffing ppe as they go their merry way. 
Patients (vaccinated or not) can and do become +ve during their stay infecting the beds around them. Visitors come in and out masks on or off constantly, clinicly vulnarble are placed in side rooms to protect from exposure to the gen public. 
HCPs can bear some of the responsibility but the patients and visitors are not wearing ppe and bring in the COVID. 
That's the situation so instead of being outraged at HCPs ,which is quite the thing, perhaps reflect on the weakness in the hospital system which is the general public.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 6, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> It was all over the news for days, including the right-wing press moaning about another incoming pingdemic. and other reports of how so many people were deleting the NHS covid app to avoid being pinged.  🤷‍♂️


Maybe it was but I can assure you none of the great British public I speak to know it.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 6, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Maybe it was but I can assure you none of the great British public I speak to know it.



Which reinforces what I posted on another thread earlier this afternoon -

"Although, increasingly I've become aware of people that just don't bother to keep up with the news, and then moan about being caught out, due to their own ignorance."

I have no idea how you can get across the messaging, if people can't even be bothered to check at least one main TV news bulletin a day. 🤷‍♂️


----------



## Badgers (Dec 6, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> I have no idea how you can get across the messaging, if people can't even be bothered to check at least one main TV news bulletin a day. 🤷‍♂️


This is the battle we have. Have done direct marketing with translations, radio plugs, attended endless events, have an information point manned seven days a week, have three centrally located test centres, roadside signage, put posters up in all the shops, met with various faith leaders who have commucated to their flocks, met with councillors from all wards and many more things beside. Have got stalls at various Christmas events to do more education and testing.

Drop in vaccination centres weekly. Provide free taxi's to and from them for people.

We still have one of the lowest vaccination rates in the UK.

🤷‍♂️


----------



## Numbers (Dec 6, 2021)

Badger them a bit more.


----------



## Numbers (Dec 6, 2021)

Get the Numbers up.


----------



## Numbers (Dec 6, 2021)

^^^^ you and I need a night out mate.


----------



## two sheds (Dec 8, 2021)

__





						Allergic conditions linked to lower COVID-19 infection risk | BMJ
					

Older age, male sex, and other medical conditions not associated with heightened risk ….Unlike Asian ethnicity, obesity, overcrowding, socialising, and people-facing roles People with allergic conditions such as hay fever, rhinitis, and atopic eczema, may have a lower risk of COVID-19 infection...




					www.bmj.com
				




hmmmm


----------



## elbows (Dec 9, 2021)

two sheds said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...


There are some big limitations to that study, including participant numbers and inability to pick apart underlying reasons for the different risk levels they established.

The most obvious one is that people who have attributes that may have led them to think of themselves as being at greater risk were more likely to take steps that gave them a better chance of avoiding being infected.

And its very important to note that the study looked at risk of infection, not risk of severe disease.

I suppose their findings are not shocking to me because I'm aware that older people showed up in far smaller quantities in the daily positive case data than younger groups. And thats not exactly a simple, comforting thought when we consider how many hospitalisations and deaths that lower number of cases in older people led too. If those groups had carried on with their lives more normally in this pandemic, I expect the hospital numbers would have been far more grim than was actually the case, and what was actually the case was quite bad enough already.


----------



## LDC (Dec 9, 2021)

two sheds said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Yeah, I'd pay zero attention to that. There's been loads of small studies or pre-studies suggesting all sorts of things in the last year or so, and lots/most turn out to not be anything significantly important.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 9, 2021)

Bit of a grisly meeting today. There are an increasing number of pregnant women in hospital. Unvaccinated because of concerns for their unborn children's health. Do understand their thinking to some extent, especially given some of the 'advice' that has been handed out to them 

Upshot is that an increasing number of babies are being induced prematurely to protect them. Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are running out of capacity. 

FFS


----------



## teuchter (Dec 10, 2021)

Ventilation!


----------



## MrCurry (Dec 10, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Ventilation!



We should have all bought shares in HVAC plant manufacturers at the start of 2020. They'll surely be one of the only winners of this shit situation.


----------



## Pingety Pong (Dec 10, 2021)

We (=school in NW England) received our CO2 monitors yesterday.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 10, 2021)

Out at a show tonight - the venue required the pass or a negative test to attend, and masks must be worn, but inevitably there are a handful ignoring the rules. The weird thing is, all the blokes not wearing a mask look like Grant Mitchell...


----------



## Badgers (Dec 11, 2021)

Javid advised to take ‘stringent’ Covid measures within a week, leak reveals
					

Exclusive: Health officials say urgent action needed to avoid mass hospitalisations and overwhelming the NHS




					www.theguardian.com
				




FFS


----------



## _Russ_ (Dec 11, 2021)

Even that advice is shit, the 'health officials' (whoever the fuck that is) are advising measures to hopefully keep hospitalisations and deaths just barely below the numbers that would collapse the system, no thought of actually doing a little better and saving more lives...no just the bare fucking minimum to squeek through and Oh you can have another week to think about it...and we all know even that pathetic excuse of a reccomendation wont be taken to heart

Fucked off with the lot of em.


----------



## Mation (Dec 11, 2021)

Pingety Pong said:


> We (=school in NW England) received our CO2 monitors yesterday.


Thank you - that reminds me we're supposed to have some coming at work, but they haven't been mentioned for a few weeks. I'll bring it up again.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 13, 2021)




----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 13, 2021)

been listening to radio 4 and lbc all morning, first time in months. and boy does it sounds grim, we're gonna lockdown again aren't we. 

they are talking a million doses a day in england.


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 13, 2021)

Well at least the hesitant and careless are apparently taking omicron seriously ...

Luckily I'm all jabbed-up and have a stash of FFP2s  and have a fridge full of veggies - perhaps I'll make an extra foray to the supermarket this week seeing as it's cold and veggies will store fairly well in my unheated kitchen area - maybe I'll make an outside cool box ...


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 13, 2021)

lbc talkign about oxford holding a press conferance about somethign they have found out in their research.


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 13, 2021)

they are goign to the oxford press conference now on lbc


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 13, 2021)

no idea waht they are talking about already #science


----------



## LDC (Dec 13, 2021)

Vaccine efficacy discussion. Only caught the end of it, think it was that recent study/data that shows shit protection from 2 doses?


----------



## Cerv (Dec 13, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 300612


I just ordered a home PCR this afternoon. maybe try your luck again?

got pinged today by the app as a close contact from last Weds. it said don't need isolate because have had two doses of a vaccine. I went back into the app to get a screenshot so could share with people I saw that day to let them know, but the app doesn't have anything anymore. I wasn't expecting the big scary red countdown timer like before, but surprised there is nothing about recent contacts as a reminder.


----------



## Dr. Furface (Dec 13, 2021)




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## Badgers (Dec 13, 2021)

Cheers


----------



## Badgers (Dec 13, 2021)




----------



## Sue (Dec 13, 2021)

Badgers said:


>



Vaxxed? Brainwashed more like. Jeez.


----------



## elbows (Dec 13, 2021)

Sue said:


> Vaxxed? Brainwashed more like. Jeez.


Not at all sure which bit of their tweet and your take on it led to that comment?


----------



## Sue (Dec 13, 2021)

elbows said:


> Not at all sure which bit of their tweet and your take on it led to that comment?


I was taking the piss out of antivaxxers but hey.


----------



## elbows (Dec 13, 2021)

Oh, sorry, it wasnt clear to me.


----------



## _Russ_ (Dec 14, 2021)

Still can't order  LFTs online, going to try a couple of pharmacies this morning, need to get some paracetamol in anyway


----------



## StoneRoad (Dec 14, 2021)

Hoping my order of LFT's arrive today.
Only one left in the current box ...
[There's four adults in this household, a box of 7 doesn't cut it ...]

Good job we don't all go out everyday !

When we do go out -  [all boostered, btw] masks, distancing etc are all applied.


----------



## _Russ_ (Dec 14, 2021)

None still at the 2 local Pharmacies I tried (Both had been waiting when I called yesterday afternoon  still waiting, can't say when)


----------



## Cloo (Dec 14, 2021)

We have enough LFTs for this week, but must tell oldest to get one from school if at all possible! Not planning to see other humans an awful lot anyway but it would be helpful to have LFTs available.


----------



## iona (Dec 14, 2021)

Worth checking your local council's website for LFT collection points if other places nearby are running out. Imagine it varies by area but there's a couple here that (I assume) the council are running & don't show up if you search on the main gov.uk website - don't have to go online to get a collection code first, either.


----------



## Knotted (Dec 14, 2021)

Faragists in my office splaining that the old and vulnerable have been through so much that they aren't bothered by the prospect of "Covid sniffles" (and possible death). One of them mentions the office loon who giggles when vaccinated colleagues are hospitalised and his theory that it's all a plot to reduce the worlds population through vaccines. They all guffaw at this, but then one of them pipes up and says "well to be fair that's what David Icke says". The lizard man it seems does indeed give the most bat shit ideas credibility still.

Office centrist dads nod along with all this albeit slightly uncomfortably.

That reminds me, I should start working from home.

Please tell me the rest of the country isn't like this.


----------



## Numbers (Dec 14, 2021)

iona said:


> Worth checking your local council's website for LFT collection points if other places nearby are running out. Imagine it varies by area but there's a couple here that (I assume) the council are running & don't show up if you search on the main gov.uk website - don't have to go online to get a collection code first, either.


Says there's nothing within 30 miles of us, in East London.

I get them through work so not bothered, I was just curious.


----------



## 2hats (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Please tell me the rest of the country isn't like this.


Not amongst my coworkers, but then they might not be an entirely representative sample of the general population, being as they are all either healthcare professionals and/or research staff in biomedical disciplines of various flavours.


----------



## iona (Dec 14, 2021)

Numbers said:


> Says there's nothing within 30 miles of us, in East London.
> 
> I get them through work so not bothered, I was just curious.


Yeah the gov website seems to display that message automatically while it's loading the actual search results atm


----------



## Knotted (Dec 14, 2021)

2hats said:


> Not amongst my coworkers, but then they might not be an entirely representative sample of the general population, being as they are all either healthcare professionals and/or research staff in biomedical disciplines of various flavours.



My lot are ex skilled manual workers who are now supervisors/junior management and started their working life in the 80's. It's not so much that they've absorbed Thatcherite individualism as an ideology, it's more their entire lived experience. With something like Covid where you have to act collectively to counter it, it is a situation that's entirely outside of their understanding of how the world works and they'll hunt for reasons to believe it's absurd. Similar thing with climate change.


----------



## Sue (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Faragists in my office splaining that the old and vulnerable have been through so much that they aren't bothered by the prospect of "Covid sniffles" (and possible death). One of them mentions the office loon who giggles when vaccinated colleagues are hospitalised and his theory that it's all a plot to reduce the worlds population through vaccines. They all guffaw at this, but then one of them pipes up and says "well to be fair that's what David Icke says". The lizard man it seems does indeed give the most bat shit ideas credibility still.
> 
> Office centrist dads nod along with all this albeit slightly uncomfortably.
> 
> ...





Knotted said:


> My lot are ex skilled manual workers who are now supervisors/junior management and started their working life in the 80's. It's not so much that they've absorbed Thatcherite individualism as an ideology, it's more their entire lived experience. With something like Covid where you have to act collectively to counter it, it is a situation that's entirely outside of their understanding of how the world works and they'll hunt for reasons to believe it's absurd. Similar thing with climate change.


Me and my immediate colleagues stated work in the 90s in three different countries (including one in the former Soviet bloc and one in the US) and we don't have the views your colleagues apparently do because we're not fucking idiots. 🤷‍♀️


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2021)

People who started their working lives in the 80s, the era of the _miners' strikes_, have no understanding of working collectively in an attempt to counter a situation


----------



## Cloo (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Faragists in my office splaining that the old and vulnerable have been through so much that they aren't bothered by the prospect of "Covid sniffles" (and possible death). One of them mentions the office loon who giggles when vaccinated colleagues are hospitalised and his theory that it's all a plot to reduce the worlds population through vaccines. They all guffaw at this, but then one of them pipes up and says "well to be fair that's what David Icke says". The lizard man it seems does indeed give the most bat shit ideas credibility still.


My dad's (71, diabetic) view is that he's had a full life and he'll take his chances and things shouldn't be shut down for everyone else in order to protect him - but not everyone, probably not even most people, are going to feel that way!


----------



## Knotted (Dec 14, 2021)

weepiper said:


> People who started their working lives in the 80s, the era of the _miners' strikes_, have no understanding of working collectively in an attempt to counter a situation



Obviously there's more to the 80's than Thatcherism, but non of these guys had any involvement with the miners strike. I don't think any of them have had any involvement with strike action. Most of them would have worked hand to mouth for small sub contractors with no benefits at all or any union presence but for price work where they could make a reasonable sum of money if they put the effort and hours in (and that's the way it still is in this industry except for the big central government operation). And obviously they've all worked their way up to a small degree. The general ethos is of embittered acceptance of the way the world is with the government (in this case) gone a bit mad and authoritarian on them. But then they're used to that with council rules and bureaucracy and health and safety and all the "PC gawn mad". So they'll accept the Covid rules but mouth off about them. (The anti-vax conspiranut guy is different case with a different background). The real hardcore anti-vaxers and Covid sceptics are therefore much worse, but there's a few shades of shocking before you even get to that.


----------



## Knotted (Dec 14, 2021)

Cloo said:


> My dad's (71, diabetic) view is that he's had a full life and he'll take his chances and things shouldn't be shut down for everyone else in order to protect him - but not everyone, probably not even most people, are going to feel that way!



I think what triggered this little exchange was one of them meeting an 80 year old woman with this attitude. So they had a sample size of one to base it on.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 14, 2021)

Cloo said:


> My dad's (71, diabetic) view is that he's had a full life and he'll take his chances and things shouldn't be shut down for everyone else in order to protect him - but not everyone, probably not even most people, are going to feel that way!



But, it's not about him, lockdowns are introduced to stop hospitals being overwhelmed, like in Kent back in January.

I lost my cousin Sue back in January, because there was no available ventilator in Kent, she passed away whilst they tried to find somewhere to ship her out to.



> Kent patients are going as far as Bristol and Leeds, more than 230 miles away. It emerged earlier this week that some patients had already been sent to hospitals in Portsmouth and Southampton.











						Kent hospitals ‘overwhelmed’ as ICU bed occupancy hits 137%
					

Exclusive: ‘There are people on the wards that ideally we would like in intensive care but we don’t have capacity,’ clinician tells The Independent




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 14, 2021)

People seem to forget, or deny, what happened in Kent earlier this year, I don't.

RIP Sue.


----------



## PR1Berske (Dec 14, 2021)

Covid passports passed by MPs, just now, 369 to 126


----------



## Calamity1971 (Dec 14, 2021)

PR1Berske said:


> Covid passports passed by MPs, just now, 369 to 126


Bigger rebellion than first thought !


----------



## Cloo (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> I think what triggered this little exchange was one of them meeting an 80 year old woman with this attitude. So they had a sample size of one to base it on.


Yeah, I mean there will be a few misanthropes like my dad, but I don't think it's especially respresentative.


----------



## Knotted (Dec 14, 2021)

Cloo said:


> Yeah, I mean there will be a few misanthropes like my dad, but I don't think it's especially respresentative.



I wouldn't say that was misanthropic. Misplaced stoicism, perhaps.


----------



## PR1Berske (Dec 14, 2021)




----------



## DietCokeGirl (Dec 14, 2021)

Is it ever, ever going to end? Where is the bloody hope in the future in any of this? Is this just it now, forever? Proper had enough of it all.


----------



## Edie (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Obviously there's more to the 80's than Thatcherism, but non of these guys had any involvement with the miners strike. I don't think any of them have had any involvement with strike action. Most of them would have worked hand to mouth for small sub contractors with no benefits at all or any union presence but for price work where they could make a reasonable sum of money if they put the effort and hours in (and that's the way it still is in this industry except for the big central government operation). And obviously they've all worked their way up to a small degree. The general ethos is of embittered acceptance of the way the world is with the government (in this case) gone a bit mad and authoritarian on them. But then they're used to that with council rules and bureaucracy and health and safety and all the "PC gawn mad". So they'll accept the Covid rules but mouth off about them. (The anti-vax conspiranut guy is different case with a different background). The real hardcore anti-vaxers and Covid sceptics are therefore much worse, but there's a few shades of shocking before you even get to that.


That describes a lot people I know and most in my extended family


----------



## Edie (Dec 14, 2021)

DietCokeGirl said:


> Is it ever, ever going to end? Where is the bloody hope in the future in any of this? Is this just it now, forever? Proper had enough of it all.


Just try n not sweat it. I know it sucks but a) we have a vaccine which is incredibly effective in it’s stated aim of reducing serious illness and death and b) the restrictions are pretty lightweight, just wear a mask, wfh if possible and show your vaxxed if you go to a big gathering.

I think there’s risk in over stressing about it. You’ll do your head in. (Not you in particular DietCokeGirl just everyone).


----------



## stdP (Dec 14, 2021)

Knotted said:


> Please tell me the rest of the country isn't like this.



Have you perhaps somehow found yourself working for GB News or a small media outfit publishing stories to youtube and facebook? :/


----------



## PR1Berske (Dec 14, 2021)




----------



## sojourner (Dec 14, 2021)

There were people handing out 1 pack of LFTs per person outside the Tesco this morning, when you couldn't get them anywhere else round here. Don't understand why, but grateful I could get hold of some.


----------



## Aladdin (Dec 14, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> People seem to forget, or deny, what happened in Kent earlier this year, I don't.
> 
> RIP Sue.



Sorry a about your cousin.. 

They are the same here.....Short memories... they dont want to believe that the pandemic is not over. 

It'll keep going because of idiots.


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Dec 15, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> But, it's not about him, lockdowns are introduced to stop hospitals being overwhelmed, like in Kent back in January.
> 
> I lost my cousin Sue back in January, because there was no available ventilator in Kent, she passed away whilst they tried to find somewhere to ship her out to.
> 
> ...


This has been the biggest misunderstanding I've encountered on a near daily basis throughout all this. The idea that lockdowns and masks aren't working to stop infections. I'm still surprised how many people don't understand that they're not designed to stop infection, but are in fact meant to slow the spread of it so health services aren't overwhelmed by a tsunami of infection. 

I also encounter a lot of attitudes that Knotted mentioned (loons not withstanding). People begrudgingly accept restrictions but think they're stupid because they haven't been directly or have only been mildly effected by covid. Most of this comes down to piss poor messaging from the top and making light of it right from the start. 

My condolences to your cousin.


----------



## Cloo (Dec 15, 2021)

I just managed to pick up 2 at local chemist - I had a code but Tesco pharmacy had big sign saying 'No LFTs, no delivery date' so I though 'Shit, probably going to have to forget it and hope some more turn up before we run out', but then saw as I walked home what looked like someone picking them up in small chemist opposite end of the road, so I went in and she said each household could have 2. We're not planning on doing a whole heap of seeing people but I think that should be enough to get us through next week or two at least as definitely thinking test before seeing anyone.


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 15, 2021)

DietCokeGirl said:


> Is it ever, ever going to end? Where is the bloody hope in the future in any of this? Is this just it now, forever? Proper had enough of it all.


feeling that


----------



## Cloo (Dec 15, 2021)

I know - I guess we have to bear in mind this is only our second winter with it, but it will gradually recede into the background, though I know it feels a long way off.


----------



## elbows (Dec 15, 2021)

Doctor Carrot said:


> This has been the biggest misunderstanding I've encountered on a near daily basis throughout all this. The idea that lockdowns and masks aren't working to stop infections. I'm still surprised how many people don't understand that they're not designed to stop infection, but are in fact meant to slow the spread of it so health services aren't overwhelmed by a tsunami of infection.


Surely some of this is only a semantic difference.

Lockdowns and various guidance and other measures were very much designed to reduce the number of people getting infected. It is true that back when the UK government was persuing a doomed initial plan early in the first wave, they tried to justify their slack response by saying they were just trying to push down on the curve to spread the number of infections out, rather than try to suppress the wave. However that plan was abandoned quite quickly and we instead had stricter measures that pushed number of infections down to a very low level by June 2020. Its true that we didnt have an eradication policy so did not continue with that mission past a certain point, but still ended up having to repeat the cycle when another scary wave emerged. Many millions of people who would otherwise have been infected were spared from infection in those waves as a result of the restrictions and peoples behavioural changes.

However the vaccine era enabled thw UK government to return to something more closely resembling their original plan. So the approach to the delta wave was different, some measures such as massive number of people told to self isolate did stop the size of the wave from growing past a certain point, but then they were content to let the number of infections continue for months and months at a very high rate, but one that was not still doubling all the time.

I'm not a fan of the Delta-era plan. However it has happened to provide one useful demonstration that can deal with one crap stance and misconception that some people made use of in the previous waves. Clearly our lockdowns were rather late in the UK, and this caused plenty of people who were not fans of lockdowns to claim that those lockdowns made no difference to the peaks of those waves, because they came too late to reduce the peak that would have happened anyway. I dont think thats true, but it was sometimes hard to prove it. However because of the way Delta was allowed to persist at high levels, we can demonstrate via wave shape data what the effects of strong restrictions were on case numbers in the earlier waves AFTER the peaks of those waves. Cases in those earlier waves kept on coming down, and that didnt happen with Delta because we didnt have strong restrictions in place to get R below 1 for a prolonged period.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 15, 2021)

Absolute fucking prick of a cab driver just refused to put a mask on to bring me back from the garage (brakes fucked on car), even though I told him I had a heart condition and only had booster yesterday. He was about 26ish, 'exempt' (fuck off), hadn't tested recently 'didn't need to', and then tried to chat fucking merrily away! He apologised when we got to destination, so I just said 'worth keeping a mask in for vulnerable passengers' and got the fuck out. Still fuming. The lying selfish fucking prick.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 15, 2021)

Just rang the shitty firm and told them I'm never using them again. Rang another firm and they were lovely! One booked for the morning, note on my number requesting that driver wear a mask.


----------



## MrCurry (Dec 15, 2021)

sojourner said:


> Just rang the shitty firm and told them I'm never using them again. Rang another firm and they were lovely! One booked for the morning, note on my number requesting that driver wear a mask.


You should have added that if you come down with covid in the next week you’ll be taking legal action against their firm, as it’s their liability if he’s spreading covid around, rather than than the driver personally.  Obviously not practical in real world terms, but might at least raise the chance of them doing something about him.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 15, 2021)

MrCurry said:


> You should have added that if you come down with covid in the next week you’ll be taking legal action against their firm, as it’s their liability if he’s spreading covid around, rather than than the driver personally.  Obviously not practical in real world terms, but might at least raise the chance of them doing something about him.


I did ring to complain, but the gobshite on the phone said cos they're all self-employed, there's nothing they can do.


----------



## MrCurry (Dec 15, 2021)

sojourner said:


> I did ring to complain, but the gobshite on the phone said cos they're all self-employed, there's nothing they can do.


Typical taxi firm level of care then 😢


----------



## Mation (Dec 16, 2021)

I was interested yesterday to see a covid-denying, anti-vax colleague wearing a mask all day, and properly, for the first time. They usually only wear it, dicknosed, if there's a chance the head of department might see them. They also said something about wishing for a time when people weren't infected by a horrible virus. First time they've acknowledged it as real, afaik.

Another colleague, whose attitude has been 'I wouldn't mind getting it - I could do with a couple of weeks off - ha ha' said that 'asymptomatic cases are the most dangerous'.

Omicron seems to have shit them up.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

Why is Omnicron so scary to the anti-vaxxers? What’s changed their minds?


----------



## prunus (Dec 16, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Why is Omnicron so scary to the anti-vaxxers? What’s changed their minds?



Because it’s everywhere and controls all the background processes.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

prunus said:


> Because it’s everywhere and controls all the background processes.


Eh?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

my employer has just got a load of these in:

They’re nose only like the Flowflex ones Gov.uk were sending out when you ordered online, but obviously from a different supplier


----------



## prunus (Dec 16, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Eh?



Poor niche joke based on omni- meaning every, in particular in this case in ‘omnipresent’, and -cron, a program running on some computers, particularly servers, that schedules and runs automated processes in the background, and combining this misinterpretation of the misspelling with the standard loonspuddery thinking of the antivaxxer, leads to this being why they’re so scared of omicron.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

(That’s not my hand btw  )


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 16, 2021)

Is anyone else's anxiety spiking super-hard as things feel like they're starting to spiral out of control again?


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 16, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Is anyone else's anxiety spiking super-hard as things feel like they're starting to spiral out of control again?


yep a little, now and then


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

BigMoaner said:


> yep a little, now and then


I was alerted as if this was a response to me


----------



## BigMoaner (Dec 16, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> I was alerted as if this was a response to me


what shot did you get


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

BigMoaner said:


> what shot did you get


Pfizer, maybe you edited but the software still thinks you were quoting me


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 16, 2021)

BigMoaner said:


> what shot did you get


Pfizer, maybe you edited but the software still thinks you were quoting


----------



## strung out (Dec 16, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Pfizer, maybe you edited but the software still thinks you were quoting


Looks like your shot is malfunctioning. First the alert, now a double post.

You might need a reboot.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 16, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Is anyone else's anxiety spiking super-hard as things feel like they're starting to spiral out of control again?


Yes. I'm trying hard not to let it, but it fucking is and I hate it.

Orang Utan  - I got a pack of those too, and the method is slightly different. You have to leave the stick in the solution for a minute after swirling it.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 16, 2021)

Anyway, cabbie this morning was bloody lovely, said he wished all customers would pre-request that the driver wear a mask, cos he's sick to death of passengers trying to get in without a mask, telling him he doesn't need to wear one, and mithering him to take his off!! We had a grand conversation


----------



## Numbers (Dec 16, 2021)

sojourner said:


> Anyway, cabbie this morning was bloody lovely, said he wished all customers would pre-request that the driver wear a mask, cos he's sick to death of passengers trying to get in without a mask, telling him he doesn't need to wear one, and mithering him to take his off!! We had a grand conversation


We had to get a plumber around recently and when they arrived (there was 2) I asked them to put on a mask but they said they were exempt (2 youngish healthy lads), I said you're not coming in unless you wear a mask so there was a bit of a Mexican standoff in the doorway.  I declined their services and they still tried to charge us for the call-out charge, lol.. go fuck yourselves.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 16, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Is anyone else's anxiety spiking super-hard as things feel like they're starting to spiral out of control again?


Trying to keep a lid on it
But it's bubbling.


----------



## LDC (Dec 16, 2021)

Numbers said:


> We had to get a plumber around recently and when they arrived (there was 2) I asked them to put on a mask but they said they were exempt (2 youngish healthy lads), I said you're not coming in unless you wear a mask so there was a bit of a Mexican standoff in the doorway.  I declined their services and they still tried to charge us for the call-out charge, lol.. go fuck yourselves.



Yeah, it's hard not to notice there seem to be lots of women in relationships with young men who have serious health conditions as she's wearing a mask and the man isn't so _must _be medically exempt...


----------



## sojourner (Dec 16, 2021)

Numbers said:


> We had to get a plumber around recently and when they arrived (there was 2) I asked them to put on a mask but they said they were exempt (2 youngish healthy lads), I said you're not coming in unless you wear a mask so there was a bit of a Mexican standoff in the doorway.  I declined their services and they still tried to charge us for the call-out charge, lol.. go fuck yourselves.


Good on you! I should have refused to get in. I will if it happens again.


----------



## Cloo (Dec 16, 2021)

In town yesterday for first time in a few weeks and a sense that people are actually taking it seriously.  At an exhibition and didn't see anyone without a mask, which I think is a first in a public place.


----------



## LDC (Dec 16, 2021)

Cloo said:


> In town yesterday for first time in a few weeks and a sense that people are actually taking it seriously.  At an exhibition and didn't see anyone without a mask, which I think is a first in a public place.



Yeah, a difference I've noticed is the amount of people wearing masks in outside areas. Even at the height of other peaks I don't think saw that so much?


----------



## Cloo (Dec 16, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Yeah, a difference I've noticed is the amount of people wearing masks in outside areas. Even at the height of other peaks I don't think saw that so much?


I dunno I think people do it a lot when it's cold.

When I first got on the tube there was 1 3rd of carriage where no one sitting there was wearing a mask and everyone who was wearing masks sat in the other two sections. By centre of town I think almost everyone in carriage was wearing.


----------



## campanula (Dec 16, 2021)

O FFS, I have the 'rona. I went for a test yesterday after feeling a bit dodgy all weekend. Not seriously expecting a positive...and oddly, sweetheart is still coming up negative. Aaaaannnnd immediately, that slight sore throat is now feeling a heap more noticeable. And I am definitely more achy now than I was 30 minutes ago (pre=test results).I am also in a bit of turmoil about sweetheart. It's not like we have a large house and can isolate within it...we spent all last night snuggled under the quilt so I can't really see any value in sleeping on the sofa and having all the windows open in the (already) freezing house.

Christmas fucked too.


----------



## sojourner (Dec 16, 2021)

Oh campanula , what a fucking rotten situation for you. Lots of love and sympathy to you xx


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Dec 16, 2021)

Only solidarity will get us out of this mess! - Anarchist Communist Group
					

Article from the website of our comrades at No Safety No Work:    At No Safety No Work (NSNW), we have consistently argued that “We Are Not Safe Until We Are All Safe!” Unless we apply the principle of universal solidarity to our management of the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid) pandemic, we will be stuck in...




					www.anarchistcommunism.org


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Dec 16, 2021)

Numbers said:


> We had to get a plumber around recently and when they arrived (there was 2) I asked them to put on a mask but they said they were exempt (2 youngish healthy lads), I said you're not coming in unless you wear a mask so there was a bit of a Mexican standoff in the doorway.  I declined their services and they still tried to charge us for the call-out charge, lol.. go fuck yourselves.


What a pair of arrogant cunts. Nice one for refusing them entry and ultimately their business. I shouldn't be amazed that there's still wankers playing the 'I'm exempt' card and thinking you'll just accept it but I am. Mind you it's funny to see their reaction when you don't. I'll never forget the look on one bloke's face when he said '_I'm exempt_' and I replied '_but you're not though are you,' _it was very similar to this:


----------



## two sheds (Dec 16, 2021)




----------



## Sue (Dec 17, 2021)

Not sure how much this reflects their age etc demographic as a whole but this is pretty .

'The EFL also released figures about vaccination among its players as a quarter of players remain unvaccinated and are refusing to get a jab. This compares with 59% who are double-jabbed, with 19% either single-jabbed or willing to take the vaccine.%









						Premier League calls off six more games due to Covid but rejects pleas for break
					

The Premier League was forced on Thursday to postpone six matches because of Covid but insisted it was determined to continue with the season despite calls for a ‘firebreak’ suspension




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 17, 2021)

What rotten luck, campanula - hope it’s a mild case and you recover quickly


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 17, 2021)

Doctor Carrot said:


> What a pair of arrogant cunts. Nice one for refusing them entry and ultimately their business. I shouldn't be amazed that there's still wankers playing the 'I'm exempt' card and thinking you'll just accept it but I am. Mind you it's funny to see their reaction when you don't. I'll never forget the look on one bloke's face when he said '_I'm exempt_' and I replied '_but you're not though are you,' _it was very similar to this:


I know how tempting it is to express disbelief but you really don’t know if you could be calling out someone with a hidden disability, so be careful


----------



## Petcha (Dec 17, 2021)

If someone wants a bit of a Covid giggle... this is quite good.


----------



## Cloo (Dec 17, 2021)

I just did an LFT as I was a little concerned whether I was just experiencing a temperature as the long tail end of a bad cold from last week, or if it could be 'rona, especially given sweaty nights (which have been bad this week) have been mentioned as characteristic of Omicron, but looks like it's just end of the cold. I also haven't slept properly for the best part of a week and couldn't quite tell if I'm lack-of-sleep tired or viral tired. But I'm not meeting with anyone until Monday and just wanted the doubt out of the way.


----------



## Doctor Carrot (Dec 17, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> I know how tempting it is to express disbelief but you really don’t know if you could be calling out someone with a hidden disability, so be careful


You're right but I was certain this cunt didn't have a hidden disability because I'd politely asked him on two separate occasions before I confronted him to wear a mask and he didn't say anything. In fact on both occasions he said he'd wear one next time. He also buys tobacco every visit and tried to claim he had a lung condition as reason for his exemption.


----------



## Sue (Dec 18, 2021)

I went to see my friends' new baby tonight  I'm all vaxxed up and working from home and LFTed before I went.

But my friend's brother and wife are anti-vaxxers and he's about to tell them they're not comfortable with them visiting. It's v probably about to get v difficult.


----------



## MrCurry (Dec 19, 2021)

What is a “brace” in the context of surgical face masks?


----------



## miss direct (Dec 19, 2021)

Maybe it's the metal bit that goes round your nose and helps it fit better?


----------



## two sheds (Dec 19, 2021)

Not two of them then as my first thought


----------



## MrCurry (Dec 19, 2021)

miss direct said:


> Maybe it's the metal bit that goes round your nose and helps it fit better?


Yeah, just googled it.









						Mask Braces Help Your Mask Fit Better, and Make It More Effective Against COVID-19
					

The CDC says this device reduces air leakage from around the edges of your mask. Here's where to buy it—and how to make your own.




					www.popularmechanics.com
				




some kind of plastic frame that fits over the top and squeezes it against your face to improve the fit. Strange I’m only learning about these so far into a pandemic, would’ve thought they’d be all the rage if they are cheap and improve protection


----------



## crossthebreeze (Dec 19, 2021)

Sue said:


> I went to see my friends' new baby tonight  I'm all vaxxed up and working from home and LFTed before I went.
> 
> But my friend's brother and wife are anti-vaxxers and he's about to tell them they're not comfortable with them visiting. It's v probably about to get v difficult.


My sister and her partner have the same issue with one of the partner's sisters family seeing their new baby. It's not just that the sister and boyfriend are covid-deniers, unvaxxed, anti-masking and anti-social-distancing, but her kids have not had their childhood vaccinations at all!


----------



## zahir (Dec 19, 2021)

A fair point here I think.


----------



## cuppa tee (Dec 19, 2021)

who saw this coming ?



			https://r/twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1472516137690804226[
		


]


----------



## elbows (Dec 19, 2021)

zahir said:


> A fair point here I think.




Yes, I make points like that. In the form of stuff like: When it comes to healthcare we need to spend a greater proportion of GDP on it, and increase capacity. Problem is things have been going in the other direction for a long time and the pandemic has depleted capacity further. And the priorities of the UK establishment suck. And they just cant be bothered to do other stuff properly, the situation in schools was a disgrace compared to what was done in many countries. The press in the UK dont help either, they play into the shit priorities, the distortions, the ugly games. 

And I dont know for how many years we could be stuck in the same pandemic loop before changes to some of the above would properly come onto the agenda. And in the meantime various parameters of the pandemic probably will change, including more treatment options and a different population immunity picture, providing further reasons for the establishment to ignore the other stuff for longer.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Game changer


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Game changer
> 
> View attachment 302005


That's a very strange picture of the queen, she looks plasticised


----------



## T & P (Dec 20, 2021)

So since the NHS says we should report negative lateral flow tests as well as positive, I decided to do so today.

There’s a QR code printed on the test strip thingy, so I assumed it would at the least take me to the government’s Covid website, and since I ordered the test kit from my government Covid account, perhaps even link it to my profile automatically. So I pointed my phone camera to get things rolling.

I guess I was naive of me to expect that much. On the plus side, I now know how many Libyan dinars £11m will buy me


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Since when were we supposed to report results?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Since when were we supposed to report results?


Always


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Always


 Seriously? It doesn’t say owt on the tests iirc!


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2021)

T & P said:


> So since the NHS says we should report negative lateral flow tests as well as positive, I decided to do so today.
> 
> There’s a QR code printed on the test strip thingy, so I assumed it would at the least take me to the government’s Covid website, and since I ordered the test kit from my government Covid account, perhaps even link it to my profile automatically. So I pointed my phone camera to get things rolling.
> 
> ...


Just Google 'report Covid test' and you'll find it. The QR code is just the test ID number (which is also printed on the test)


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Seriously? It doesn’t say owt on the tests iirc!


So you read the instruction booklet?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> So you read the instruction booklet?


Have only read it once but will go have a look at one


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Report a COVID-19 rapid lateral flow test result
					

Report your result after using a COVID-19 rapid lateral flow test. Find out what your result means and what you must do.




					www.gov.uk


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Have only read it once but will go have a look at one


Focus on the page titled 'Report Your Results'


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2021)

I've been dutifully reporting every one (twice a week for me and the kids, for ages). They could do with speeding up the process/reducing the number of clicks needed tbh.


----------



## Supine (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Seriously? It doesn’t say owt on the tests iirc!



You don’t remember correctly


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Focus on the page titled 'Report Your Results'


i swear it wasn’t on there when I did my first test! The one I’ve just got out of a newer test has REPORT ALL YOUR TEST RESULTS TO THE NHS on a banner at the bottom of every page!
Either it wasn’t there at first or I must have just assumed that it only meant positive results. Either is as likely as the other 
Either way, they need to be a bit clearer somehow, so divs like me get the memo.


----------



## T & P (Dec 20, 2021)

weepiper said:


> Just Google 'report Covid test' and you'll find it. The QR code is just the test ID number (which is also printed on the test)


Didn’t know that. But the actual number is printed underneath, so the QR code seems a bit pointless. I guess it makes copying and pasting possible and saves having to type the number manually, though in my case it’s an unfortunate coincidence that it triggered Google to provide me with an exchange rate, and filled my phone screen with shit loads of additional numbers


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> i swear it wasn’t on there when I did my first test! The one I’ve just got out of a newer test has REPORT ALL YOUR TEST RESULTS TO THE NHS.
> Either it wasn’t there at first or I must have just assumed that it only meant positive results. Either is as likely as the other


It always has been


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Report a COVID-19 rapid lateral flow test result
> 
> 
> Report your result after using a COVID-19 rapid lateral flow test. Find out what your result means and what you must do.
> ...


Cheers, need to find my nhs number now!
I suppose you can’t backdate any if you haven’t recorded any of those codes?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Cheers, need to find my nhs number now!
> I suppose you can’t backdate any if you haven’t recorded any of those codes?


You don't need your NHS number but can easily find that online here

You can backdate one day


----------



## T & P (Dec 20, 2021)

Just done mine. It’s highly irritating that after logging in you still have to provide no fewer than 4-5 answers to questions they most certainly know. That’s bound to put off some people. What’s the of logging in securely if you have to confirm your ethnic background, address and gender every single time?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Cheers, need to find my nhs number now!
> I suppose you can’t backdate any if you haven’t recorded any of those codes?


You could cheat it a bit by adding an extra result each day (8am and 8pm for example) but would need to have the test cartridges from past tests. 

It is no biggie mate.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> You don't need your NHS number but can easily find that online here
> 
> You can backdate one day


I don’t think I can even backdate one day as the kit from yesterday is all in the bin as instructed/imagined. 
I’ve got the NHS in my NHS app already. Wish I could remember it like all the other important numbers, but somehow it never stays


----------



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2021)

T & P said:


> Just done mine. It’s highly irritating that after logging in you still have to provide no fewer than 4-5 answers to questions they most certainly know. That’s bound to put off some people. What’s the of logging in securely if you have to confirm your ethnic background, address and gender every single time?


Set up an NHS account and you don't have to anymore.


----------



## T & P (Dec 20, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Set up an NHS account and you don't have to anymore.


Ah. I did it through the government website. I have an NHS account, good to know.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Wish I could remember it like all the other important numbers, but somehow it never stays



For reasons I can't explain, I can remember my old NHS number (the one in the format ABCDE 12) but not the current 10 digit one.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

Puddy_Tat said:


> For reasons I can't explain, I can remember my old NHS number (the one in the format ABCDE 12) but not the current 10 digit one.


I can remember about half a dozen mobile numbers, loads of obsolete phone numbers, my bank card and account details, as well as old obsolete ones, my NI number and lots of obsolete passwords, but not my NHS number, people’s birthdays or whatever boring shit someone just said to me


----------



## PR1Berske (Dec 20, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> Seriously? It doesn’t say owt on the tests iirc!


If you report a negative result you get the email that can be used to get you into pubs etc


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2021)

PR1Berske said:


> If you report a negative result you get the email that can be used to get you into pubs etc


Ah ok, that’s not been an issue so far. Though have only been in 4 pubs in two years!


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 21, 2021)

Orang Utan said:


> I can remember about half a dozen mobile numbers, loads of obsolete phone numbers, my bank card and account details, as well as old obsolete ones, my NI number and lots of obsolete passwords, but not my NHS number, people’s birthdays or *whatever boring shit someone just said to me*



So, someone on here is going to have to remind you to report your result, every time you do a LFT?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 21, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> So, someone on here is going to have to remind you to report your result, every time you do a LFT?


Probably, still haven’t got round to doing last night’s!


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 21, 2021)

Bristol has turned purple !
My sainted bubble is now doing worse than the suburban boondocks up the road


----------



## Miss-Shelf (Dec 21, 2021)

I'm feeling vindicated in wearing a good mask when visiting nursery settings in the last couple weeks.  I felt like a fool being the only person wearing a mask and a bit mean on small children to be so masked up all morning but my students are reporting that they and majority of staff in two nurseries have had covid and I didn't get it 

if I get covid now,  it won't be from those nursery visits


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 21, 2021)

gentlegreen said:


> Bristol has turned purple !
> My sainted bubble is now doing worse than the suburban boondocks up the road
> 
> View attachment 302129



Worthing is still light purple for a couple of more hours, I am sure it'll turn to dark purple today, as we're on 792.9 cases per 100k.


----------



## girasol (Dec 21, 2021)

Wow, one by one, lots of people I know have been testing positive for Covid, including myself  My symptoms seem to be pointing towards Omicron - mad sneezing, runny nose and lightly fatigued...  I'm triple vaccinated + flu vaccine but in the end Xmas will be spent at home with husband, not seeing relatives, but at least all the vaccines make me feel confident that I won't end up hospital (fingers crossed)...  I hope this is over quickly and maybe New Year will be a big party?  If almost everyone I know is getting it now, then why not party for NY?

I took a test yesterday, then one today to confirm (Lateral flow) and took a PCR test this morning.  Wondering if that would count as 3 covid cases in the stats or just 1.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 22, 2021)

PCR testing is #worldbeating at the moment


----------



## Badgers (Dec 22, 2021)

National shortage of self test kits at the moment. They are (for now) available for order online. Almost all the pharmacies have none available round here.


----------



## Ĝasper (Dec 22, 2021)

What's the latest on the origin story of covid? I've been reading the Lancet journal, and the past 2 editions have got articles by Richard Horton casting doubt on the zoo topic theory, and implying legitimacy for the Wuhan lab leak theory (deliberate or accidental), even though this theory seems to have started with Donald Trump.





__





						DEFINE_ME
					





					www.thelancet.com
				








__





						DEFINE_ME
					





					www.thelancet.com


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 22, 2021)

Badgers said:


> So you read the instruction booklet?


Librarians never have as much time to read as they'd like


----------



## elbows (Dec 22, 2021)

Ĝasper said:


> What's the latest on the origin story of covid? I've been reading the Lancet journal, and the past 2 editions have got articles by Richard Horton casting doubt on the zoo topic theory, and implying legitimacy for the Wuhan lab leak theory (deliberate or accidental), even though this theory seems to have started with Donald Trump.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


We dont know, its not clear if we will ever know.

Both possibilities were always plausible but the mainstream decided to write one possibility off as a conspiracy theory. However there was an about-face (in May 2021 if I remember correctly) and the mainstream had to acknowledge that the lab accident theory was actually possible and not something that should have been dismissed.

There is a dedicated thread for this: 

Origins of SarsCoV-2 virus, does it matter & why?


----------



## l'Otters (Dec 22, 2021)

Home PCR test question: 

I ordered a home test kit post exposure ping, there were no walk in options at that point but it suggested checking back later. 

I did check back later and a slot had come up so I went to the walk in. 

Home test kit arrived 2 days later. 

Can someone else use this test kit? 
As I’ve had negative PCR, and have finished isolation so don’t need it myself. 

Whereas a friend’s nephew has tested positive & she is waiting on a home test kit… can she use mine as it’s available right now?


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 22, 2021)

Doctors describe their personal family gatherings strategies ...


----------



## Raheem (Dec 22, 2021)

l'Otters said:


> Home PCR test question:
> 
> I ordered a home test kit post exposure ping, there were no walk in options at that point but it suggested checking back later.
> 
> ...


Yes, anyone can use your test kit.


----------



## l'Otters (Dec 22, 2021)

Raheem said:


> Yes, anyone can use your test kit.


Thanks


----------



## Raheem (Dec 22, 2021)

Raheem said:


> Yes, anyone can use your test kit.


Or possibly not.

Apologies if my confident assertion has caused all manner of palaver.

It has to be used by the person it is registered to. So someone else can use it if it is not registered to you. They are not usually pre-registered (you have to do it yourself), but apparently/possibly not always.

l'Otters


----------



## Badgers (Dec 23, 2021)

Immensa: Month delay before incorrect Covid tests halted
					

Court papers show discrepancies at Immensa's laboratory were flagged as early as mid September.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




#worldbeating


----------



## Badgers (Dec 23, 2021)

Any predictions for today's new cases? 

I am calling 118k


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 23, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Any predictions for today's new cases?
> 
> I am calling 118k



Close, it's 119,789.


----------



## elbows (Dec 23, 2021)

And Scotlands numbers were too low yesterday due to an issue so they've fixed them.

And I cannot report on latest hospital situation yet because, to quote the dashboard....



> Due to a processing delay, the update does not include new healthcare data for England. Data will be added later.


----------



## teuchter (Dec 23, 2021)

elbows said:


> And Scotlands numbers were too low yesterday due to an issue so they've fixed them.
> 
> And I cannot report on latest hospital situation yet because, to quote the dashboard....


Although my local NHS trust, which was previously showing admissions only up to the 12th, seems to be showing up to the 19th now.


----------



## LDC (Dec 23, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Any predictions for today's new cases?
> 
> I am calling 118k



Crystal balls! That or you've been fiddling those tests to win some pandemic sweepstake!


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 23, 2021)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Crystal balls!



How do you know?


----------



## elbows (Dec 23, 2021)

teuchter said:


> Although my local NHS trust, which was previously showing admissions only up to the 12th, seems to be showing up to the 19th now.


Yes the weekly publication of per trust data does seem to have made it to the dashboard, unlike the regional and national figures.

I got the latest London figure from the NHS website instead, and its not very different to yesterdays so I'm now getting ready to take a mini Christmas break from all my usual waffle. Unless there is anything which requires comment in tomorrows figures, I'll resume at some point from next Tuesday when hospital data publication resumes, or even later if there is nothing that adds notably to the picture straight away.

(that NHS source I mentioned: Statistics » COVID-19 Hospital Activity )


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 27, 2021)

Well, balls.  almost two years of literally never going anywhere and it still found me.

Edit: also just realised this means I'm going to still be in isolation for my wife's birthday.


----------



## PR1Berske (Dec 27, 2021)

The "don't test and it all goes away" idiots are flooding comment sections again.


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 28, 2021)

My sinusitis is winding me up again.
Not just headaches, but intermittently a slightly sore throat and an actual snotty nose ...
No way could I have caught ANYTHING given my lifestyle.
I'm certainly not doing another swab test.

I woke up on Saturday feeling sufficiently crap that I might have cried-off my sister's germ warfare experiment in any case - given that it involved cycling there ...

Things generally improve when I sit up ...


----------



## gentlegreen (Dec 28, 2021)

PR1Berske said:


> The "don't test and it all goes away" idiots are flooding comment sections again.


I'm sure that must explain why my liberal bubble has become plague island whereas Toryland up the road is two levels down ...


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 29, 2021)

My Mum's just tested positive, after negative tests every day up to now. It's annoying how, even when your entire family is being super-careful and testing every time before seeing anyone, it can still come out of nowhere.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 29, 2021)

> Home Covid testing kits and PCR testing appointments temporarily ran out online in parts of the UK on Wednesday morning, as the system was overwhelmed by demand for a third day running.
> 
> No home PCR test kits for the public or key workers were available to book on the Government website for several hours, while PCR test centre appointments also ran out in England and Northern Ireland.
> 
> Lateral flow home testing kits were also unavailable on Wednesday morning but deliveries resumed around midday.











						PCR appointments, home tests and lateral flows temporarily run out for third day in a row
					

Pharmacies have also reported struggling to meet demand for lateral flow home testing kits




					inews.co.uk
				




In my case we have just enough till the 30/31st of December with a delivery 'expected' on the 05th of January. Last delivery was 2 days late and only contained 30% of what we ordered.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 29, 2021)




----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Dec 29, 2021)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 303597
> 
> 
> View attachment 303598


I had that message when I ordered some last Thursday, then 5 minutes later I managed to order some. YMMV


----------



## Badgers (Dec 29, 2021)

Cheers for this advice...


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Dec 29, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Cheers for this advice...
> 
> View attachment 303609


Friendly pharmacist was advising to order some online back on December 11th and the stocks were already patchy there.


----------



## l'Otters (Dec 29, 2021)

Like getting a booster vaccine at this point will help protect anyone who’s planning to go to a party in two days’ time


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Dec 29, 2021)

l'Otters said:


> Like getting a booster vaccine at this point will help protect anyone who’s planning to go to a party in two days’ time


Well, it might make you feel a bit shit so you don’t go to the party and lessen your chance of catching it


----------



## Badgers (Dec 29, 2021)

Over 183k new cases 

Disgraced Prime Minister de Pfeffel Johnson can take us to 250k by year end. You can count on him for this.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Dec 29, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Over 183k new cases
> 
> Disgraced Prime Minister de Pfeffel Johnson can take us to 250k by year end. You can count on him for this.


Pah!
Still trailing behind the glorious revolutionnary republic of petty France


----------



## elbows (Dec 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Over 183k new cases
> 
> Disgraced Prime Minister de Pfeffel Johnson can take us to 250k by year end. You can count on him for this.


Cant count on his regime to provide the number of tests that would be required to hit such a milestone as that.


----------



## stdP (Dec 30, 2021)

elbows said:


> Cant count on his regime to provide the number of tests that would be required to hit such a milestone as that.



I'm sure his regime would never be so blatantly stupid as to set about a task that was so ill-thought out as to be physically impossible, and then blame the public for the ensuing disaster because they didn't do what they were told. Not these guys. Nope.


----------



## Aladdin (Dec 30, 2021)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Is anyone else's anxiety spiking super-hard as things feel like they're starting to spiral out of control again?


Yes. A lot


----------



## Badgers (Dec 30, 2021)

> Almost eight million lateral flow test kits will be made available to pharmacies between today and New Year's Eve, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has announced.











						COVID: Millions of lateral flow tests to be delivered to pharmacies in time for New Year's Eve
					

The big rise in coronavirus cases has increased demand for tests, and it appears the government is struggling to keep up. People hoping to celebrate New Year are now promised that millions of tests will be delivered to pharmacies in the coming days.




					news.sky.com
				




Good news 🤔

8 million tests is around 1.14m boxes of test kits.

Due to recent shortages a lot of people/businesses have run out. As an example I had to supply kits to Boots as their staff could not get any, let alone their punters.

In Luton alone we were giving out 6-8k per week through December. That was limiting distribution to one box per person. Whilst Luton had suffered a lot and has a low vaccination take up it is well behind Lambeth and other London wards.

Population of UK - 67m
Population Luton - 218k


----------



## 20Bees (Dec 30, 2021)

I ordered a pack of tests last week, for collection from a local pharmacy.
This morning I’ve tried the three nearest towns and there are none available anywhere. 
The Lloyds pharmacy said they’d heard the library had had a delivery. The library is closed on Thursdays.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 30, 2021)

Staff getting abuse because the public can't pick up FREE test kits 😡


----------



## LDC (Dec 30, 2021)

Suddenly loads of people I know are testing positive on LFTs inc. some older relatives (both mid 80s) who have been very careful for the last 2 years and who tested positive today. It's fucking everywhere - not surprisingly tbh.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 30, 2021)




----------



## Badgers (Dec 30, 2021)

#worldbeating 









						Welsh government loans England 4m more Covid tests
					

Wales has now loaned the NHS in England 10m lateral flow test kits as ministers scramble to secure supplies




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> #worldbeating
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Mate, do you not follow the UK covid news thread? Only you are duplicating posts about news, here, on the chat thread.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 30, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> Mate, do you not follow the UK covid news thread? Only you are duplicating posts about news, here, on the chat thread.


no


----------



## Numbers (Dec 30, 2021)

Badgers said:


> no


x 2


----------



## Badgers (Dec 31, 2021)

Are those... 

NHS kits? 🤔

Where has Greedi Sunak been recently? 🤔


----------



## cupid_stunt (Dec 31, 2021)

Badgers said:


> Are those...
> 
> NHS kits? 🤔
> 
> Where has Greedi Sunak been recently? 🤔




My first thought was it's probably just a stock photo, when I click on it, most the replies are saying that too.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 31, 2021)

cupid_stunt said:


> My first thought was it's probably just a stock photo, when I click on it, most the replies are saying that too.


Would it surprise you if it was the case?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 31, 2021)

Lot of this about...


----------



## Badgers (Dec 31, 2021)




----------



## Aladdin (Dec 31, 2021)

Did not know where to put this. Painted by an Irish artist.

It had a profound effect on me..as I know that the nurses and doctors working with covid patients here have been extremely caring..
And our government has yet to properly recognise them. Very often...too often the ICU and Covid ward nurses and doctors were the last human touch that patients had.

I think that alone should make any thinking, caring, feeling person think twice about ignoring restrictions or avoiding vaccines.


It does make me angry when our stupid politicians today, actually agreed with the Chief Medical Officer who has advised that households not meet up tonight for new year celebrations...not even 2 households. Our CMO has been extraordinarily on tbe ball. But our stupid Minister for health came out with bullshit today...told everyone that government regulations agreed prior to Christmas allowed for 4 households to meet indoors
 Yet he said he agreed with Dr Holohan....today... like get off the fence and realise this is a health issue not a political one. 

Anyway.
Here is the painting.  I probably am thinking about people I know who work in ICU and with Covid patients. Those people who are extraordinary....and to whom we all owe so much.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 31, 2021)




----------



## Sue (Dec 31, 2021)

Badgers said:


>



Stupid. Though a night out in Carlisle...  🤣


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 1, 2022)

Professor Luke O Neill...
Trinity college Dublin.
Immunologist.
Recently recovered from Covid and fully vaccinated plus boostered.

Says it'll all be over by Summer and we will be living with covid and fully back to normal by end of this year.
Says the new anti virals are great.
Says we will get booster vaccines for vulnerables.
Not bothered by potential new variants..don't worry peeps..

This is the guy who said a few months ago that once we were vaccinated that we coukd just go live our lives as normal ..









						Luke O’Neill says life will return to normal within 12 months after game-changer
					

“By the time we get to March and April, it will be a different story entirely – watch"




					www.irishmirror.ie
				





Nohing to worry about ... long covid?? Not a problem...
Prof O Neill seems to have gone a bit batshit crazy since his recovery.


----------



## Mation (Jan 2, 2022)

What's happened to the Worldometers site? (Here, for the UK.)

For me, it's only showing today's data and the option of yesterday's, if I click on the date (both on phone and laptop).

Clicking 'More news' leads to nothing but more adverts.

It had been showing the past 7 days (with a click for each day)...


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 2, 2022)

Mation said:


> What's happened to the Worldometers site? (Here, for the UK.)
> 
> For me, it's only showing today's data and the option of yesterday's, if I click on the date (both on phone and laptop).
> 
> ...


these things are best ignored....
it's like weighing yourself - what good will come of it?


----------



## Mation (Jan 2, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> these things are best ignored....
> it's like weighing yourself - what good will come of it?


Why?

Edit: ah. Yeah, maybe


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 2, 2022)

Mation said:


> Why?
> 
> Edit: ah. Yeah, maybe


i dunno, it just seems another route for anxiety to make itself known


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 3, 2022)

Managed to order some tests this morning


----------



## Ĝasper (Jan 3, 2022)

Went for my booster and got turned away. Needless bureaucracy.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 3, 2022)

Ĝasper said:


> Went for my booster and got turned away. Needless bureaucracy.



Why, there must have been a reason?


----------



## Ĝasper (Jan 3, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Why, there must have been a reason?


No proof of 1st and 2nd jabs. Done in EU. Phone out of battery.

In hindsight, I could have just gone and asked for "my first jab"


----------



## shifting gears (Jan 3, 2022)

Ĝasper said:


> Went for my booster and got turned away. Needle-less bureaucracy.



Fixed for you 😉


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 3, 2022)

Ĝasper said:


> In hindsight, I could have just gone and asked for "my first jab"


Seems reasonable - and there are some who would envy you the two bonus boosters later on


----------



## Badgers (Jan 4, 2022)

New Covid variant with 46 mutations worries experts in France
					

IHU covid variant France meaning




					www-independent-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org
				




🙄🤔


----------



## Badgers (Jan 4, 2022)

218k new cases then. 
Spain is worse! 



Good to see this news from our Prime Minister. 

Sadly there are no tests available for key workers. We supply the care homes, emergency services and key workers in Bedfordshire and have none at all. Last two orders have been late and (at most) only half the requested kits. Should have had a delivery today but now delayed till (hopefully) Saturday. 

Even NHS staff round here can't get them. It is another massive fuck up by our beshitted government.


----------



## Ax^ (Jan 5, 2022)

hmm news this morning that they are planning to remove the need for asymptomatic to self isolate

the fuck


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 5, 2022)

Ax^ said:


> hmm news this morning that they are planning to remove the need for asymptomatic to self isolate
> 
> the fuck



Not sure where you are getting that from.

The actual reports I've heard/read is that they are considering dropping the requirement of asymptomatic people from taking a PCR test, as currently the isolation clock starts from the date of the PCR rather than from the initial LFT, so it would just reduce the isolation period by a few days, assuming they still have negative LFTs on day 6 and 7.



> The rules around Covid testing and isolation could be eased slightly in a bid to reduce staff shortages which are severely affecting key industries, The Telegraph has reported.
> 
> The plans, drawn up by health officials and expected to be announced on Wednesday, will mean those who test positive on lateral flow tests will no longer be required to take a confirmatory PCR test, which delays their isolation start date.
> 
> PCR tests will be limited to symptomatic cases only, leaving those who don’t have symptoms - making up more than one third of cases - with fewer days in isolation and an earlier return to work.











						Staff shortage crisis could see relaxation of Covid testing rules | ITV News
					

The plans could mean those with a positive lateral flow test would not need a confirmatory PCR test if they are asymptomatic. | ITV National News




					www.itv.com


----------



## Ax^ (Jan 5, 2022)

mumbles from the bbc breakfast show will see if it raises it head again later today


does appear the Tory are on the fuck people,business first route atm


----------



## existentialist (Jan 5, 2022)

Ax^ said:


> mumbles from the bbc breakfast show will see if it raises it head again later today
> 
> 
> does appear the Tory are on the fuck people,business first route atm


TBF, it's "appeared" like that since Day 1


----------



## Badgers (Jan 5, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Not sure where you are getting that from.
> 
> The actual reports I've heard/read is that they are considering dropping the requirement of asymptomatic people from taking a PCR test, as currently the isolation clock starts from the date of the PCR rather than from the initial LFT, so it would just reduce the isolation period by a few days, assuming they still have negative LFTs on day 6 and 7.
> 
> ...


Shame there are hardly any tests available.


----------



## IC3D (Jan 5, 2022)

Unfortunate timing the lack of testing available over the last couple of weeks.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 5, 2022)

IC3D said:


> Unfortunate timing the lack of testing available over the last couple of weeks.


Perhaps disgraced Prime Minister de Pfeffel Johnson should have realised this?


----------



## existentialist (Jan 5, 2022)

IC3D said:


> Unfortunate timing the lack of testing available over the last couple of weeks.


"Unfortunate" is the understatement of the year!


----------



## LDC (Jan 5, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Not sure where you are getting that from.
> 
> The actual reports I've heard/read is that they are considering dropping the requirement of asymptomatic people from taking a PCR test, as currently the isolation clock starts from the date of the PCR rather than from the initial LFT, so it would just reduce the isolation period by a few days, assuming they still have negative LFTs on day 6 and 7.
> 
> ...



Does make sense, especially with a shortage of PCRs, treat a positive LFT as positive, no need to confirm with a PCR.

The person on the news this morning was good though, pointed out the use of language is important and to stop calling it a _relaxation _of the testing regime as people then think things are getting better/easier/slacker and behave accordingly.

Feeling fucked off this morning with all this, especially the media coverage, might try and type a rant out later....


----------



## IC3D (Jan 5, 2022)

existentialist said:


> "Unfortunate" is the understatement of the year!


Deliberate?


----------



## existentialist (Jan 5, 2022)

IC3D said:


> Deliberate?


Yes, I deliberately said that "'Unfortunate' is the understatement of the year!"


----------



## BigMoaner (Jan 5, 2022)

confused by teh current news on bbc. ministers are thinking of changing the rules so you "don't need a PCR as confirmatory" to end the isolation period.

well it was my understanding that the 10 days start on symptoms start, and if you start testing negative on LFTs on day 6 and 7 you can end the isolation period. no pcr required.

and on day 10, you can just end it no matter whethere you have or havent a pcr, and even if your lfts are still testing positive (and you have no high temperature).

what is this confirmatory PCR about - i have never heard of it?

i have gone by this for my guidance which mentions no need for confirmatory PCR. my day of release is friday:









						What to do if you have coronavirus (COVID-19) or symptoms of COVID-19
					

Advice on staying at home (self-isolation) and avoiding contact with others if you have tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) or have symptoms of COVID-19




					www.nhs.uk


----------



## killer b (Jan 5, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> confused by teh current news on bbc. ministers are thinking of changing the rules so you "don't need a PCR as confirmatory" to end the isolation period.
> 
> well it was my understanding that the 10 days start on symptoms start, and if you start testing negative on LFTs on day 6 and 7 you can end the isolation period. no pcr required.
> 
> ...


The change is for people who've tested positive with no symptoms - previously the isolation period starts with the confirmatory PCR


----------



## BigMoaner (Jan 5, 2022)

killer b said:


> The change is for people who've tested positive with no symptoms - previously the isolation period starts with the confirmatory PCR


ah, thanks.


----------



## Cloo (Jan 5, 2022)

I think a lot of harm was done by early reports of LFTs as being really inaccurate that seem to have been repudiated now, but people still don't really trust them and think they might get false positives. I've heard more than one account of people with positive LFTs going out and about while waiting for their PCR to come back as presumably they don't really believe the LFT.


----------



## Ax^ (Jan 5, 2022)

was the whole point of a lateral flow test not to show when you are current got a high load of the virus and are infectious



nah screw it after 10 days you are fine even if still showing a positive result

have I missed some thing


----------



## BigMoaner (Jan 5, 2022)

Ax^ said:


> was the whole point of a lateral flow test not to show when you are current got a high load of the virus and are infectious
> 
> 
> 
> ...


people can show positives way way after the ten days, in some cases months. i was speaking on the phone to the test and trace folks and they were saying that the main thing on day ten is a normal temperature. i explicitly asked them that if i was still testing positive to carry on isolating, and they said no as i was confused too.


----------



## l'Otters (Jan 5, 2022)

Cloo said:


> I think a lot of harm was done by early reports of LFTs as being really inaccurate that seem to have been repudiated now, but people still don't really trust them and think they might get false positives. I've heard more than one account of people with positive LFTs going out and about while waiting for their PCR to come back as presumably they don't really believe the LFT.


They are inaccurate. The false negative rate is high. But the false positive rate is very low, so taking a positive result as “definitely got it” does make sense. Treating a negative result as “definitely don’t have it” is not such a good idea.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 5, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> people can show positives way way after the ten days, in some cases months. i was speaking on the phone to the test and trace folks and they were saying that the main thing on day ten is a normal temperature. i explicitly asked them that if i was still testing positive to carry on isolating, and they said no as i was confused too.


So this is likely going to be me, post-Covid, completed 10 days of isolation, but still getting positive LFTs. How do you prove your safety to places that ask for a negative test - does your Covid pass automatically take into account your recent positive experience?


----------



## Cloo (Jan 5, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> They are inaccurate. The false negative rate is high. But the false positive rate is very low, so taking a positive result as “definitely got it” does make sense. Treating a negative result as “definitely don’t have it” is not such a good idea.


I'm not saying they're super accurate, but I think they are more accurate than was initially highly publicised to the point where people don't take them seriously enough when they do get a positive.


----------



## Cerv (Jan 5, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> They are inaccurate. The false negative rate is high. But the false positive rate is very low, so taking a positive result as “definitely got it” does make sense. Treating a negative result as “definitely don’t have it” is not such a good idea.


public understanding probably not helped by the large numbers of people who were (incorrectly) getting negative PCR results after a positive LFD result a few months ago.

question - if people are to be told to no longer get a PCR test, won't that affect detection of new variants? I thought that a random selection of PCRs were sampled for variants monitoring.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 5, 2022)

Cerv said:


> question - if people are to be told to no longer get a PCR test, won't that affect detection of new variants? I thought that a random selection of PCRs were sampled for variants monitoring.



There will still be plenty of positive PCR results for sampling.


----------



## gentlegreen (Jan 5, 2022)

I wonder if they'll fall back on waste water sampling ...


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 5, 2022)

Anyone been able to get an LFT pack in recent times? Every pharmacy around me is out and has been for a while. I need to get some as I have cold-type symptoms but nothing that qualifies for a PCR but need to travel and care for old people. Can't see much value in people diligently self-isolating if those of us unable to test are just wandering the streets infecting everyone around.


----------



## elbows (Jan 5, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> I wonder if they'll fall back on waste water sampling ...


Thats one of the ongoing ways they will continue to do overall infection rate surveillance even when the testing system becomes too stretched to give the same clarity of picture as it once could.

But obviously its not a direct replacement for some of the things they are using mass testing for, such as getting people to self-isolate.


----------



## elbows (Jan 5, 2022)

Cerv said:


> question - if people are to be told to no longer get a PCR test, won't that affect detection of new variants? I thought that a random selection of PCRs were sampled for variants monitoring.


Yes, you are correct.

However since there is only so much capacity to do genomic tests on PCR swabs in the first place, the proportion of positive tests that are evaluated in this way already drops to a much lower fraction at times when the number of people testing positive becomes very large.

The other way they have been able to monitor for a particular new variant becoming dominant is to check PCR samples for S gene dropout, but since we'e already reached the point where Omicron is shown to be totally dominant using this method, such results are less important right now.

So you are correct to mention this issue, but the implications are of more concern if we are talking about the longer term, eg if they permanently change the PCR testing regime at some future point beyond the current Omicron wave.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 5, 2022)

killer b said:


> The change is for people who've tested positive with no symptoms - previously the isolation period starts with the confirmatory PCR


Weird, test and trace gave 10 days fro symptoms appearance to my ex (her PCR was 5 days after the onset)


Carvaged said:


> Anyone been able to get an LFT pack in recent times? Every pharmacy around me is out and has been for a while. I need to get some as I have cold-type symptoms but nothing that qualifies for a PCR but need to travel and care for old people. Can't see much value in people diligently self-isolating if those of us unable to test are just wandering the streets infecting everyone around.


I managed to order some online Monday morning, still waiting on delivery though.


----------



## killer b (Jan 5, 2022)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> Weird, test and trace gave 10 days fro symptoms appearance to my ex (her PCR was 5 days after the onset)


that's because she had symptoms. the rule was for people with no symptoms but positive tests


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jan 5, 2022)

killer b said:


> that's because she had symptoms. the rule was for people with no symptoms but positive tests


ah OK  ta


----------



## elbows (Jan 5, 2022)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> Weird, test and trace gave 10 days fro symptoms appearance to my ex (her PCR was 5 days after the onset)


Yeah I think the existing guidance is slightly more complicated than I previously tended to think. I believe that if you initially test positive but dont have any symptoms, but then later symptoms begin, then they tend to start the 10 days from the symptom onset date. Thats just one example of nuance in the guidance, but it probably isnt evenly applied and there are different combinations of this stuff and the tests people end up taking.

I'll probably just wait till this latest change becomes official and then read the wording in official docs, and the final press reporting of this change.


----------



## Cloo (Jan 5, 2022)

Carvaged said:


> Anyone been able to get an LFT pack in recent times? Every pharmacy around me is out and has been for a while. I need to get some as I have cold-type symptoms but nothing that qualifies for a PCR but need to travel and care for old people. Can't see much value in people diligently self-isolating if those of us unable to test are just wandering the streets infecting everyone around.


They seem to be improving - I last got some on NYD, but I've been seeing messages on kids' school whatsapp in the last few days saying when they're available and the gaps in supply seem to be getting shorter, like maybe half a day rather than vanishing for days on end.

I've decided I'm not going to have more than 2 ordered kits in the house at a time, otherwise it feels too hoardy considering we're a WFH household and no one is high risk or in regular contact with anyone at risk. Oldest gets one from school as well which I don't count in that, but obviously as a family of 4, and with youngest having to test twice a week (and not getting any from school) 2 kits don't last that long.


----------



## elbows (Jan 5, 2022)

Sounds like the change to the testing regime isnt happening in England till January 11th, at leasts thats whats started to be reported.


----------



## zahir (Jan 5, 2022)

Carvaged said:


> Anyone been able to get an LFT pack in recent times? Every pharmacy around me is out and has been for a while. I need to get some as I have cold-type symptoms but nothing that qualifies for a PCR but need to travel and care for old people. Can't see much value in people diligently self-isolating if those of us unable to test are just wandering the streets infecting everyone around.



Maybe you should just get a PCR test if you can. I've seen the suggestion, I don't know how accurate, that right now the majority of people with cold symptoms will actually have covid.


----------



## elbows (Jan 5, 2022)




----------



## Carvaged (Jan 5, 2022)

zahir said:


> Maybe you should just get a PCR test if you can. I've seen the suggestion, I don't know how accurate, that right now the majority of people with cold symptoms will actually have covid.



Yeah eventually I thought fuck it, I'll say I'm suffering one of the three symptoms that qualify for a PCR as this is ridiculous. However:



Which is rather like trying to order some LFTs:



So nothing. Nowhere. What a useless bunch of idiots these Tories are


----------



## 20Bees (Jan 5, 2022)

I managed to order a pack of LFTs late on Monday afternoon for home delivery, and received them today. I still have a QR code from before Christmas to collect a pack locally but there are stlll none in the pharmacies here.


----------



## _Russ_ (Jan 5, 2022)

I dunno Carvaged, they're not all useless idiots, a fair few are clever psychopaths


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## Buddy Bradley (Jan 5, 2022)

Carvaged said:


> Anyone been able to get an LFT pack in recent times?


We were able to order some online a few days ago - the online system seems to get replenished at random intervals, so it's just a question of retrying several times throughout the day/night and hope you get lucky.


----------



## Sue (Jan 5, 2022)

Carvaged said:


> Yeah eventually I thought fuck it, I'll say I'm suffering one of the three symptoms that qualify for a PCR as this is ridiculous. However:
> 
> View attachment 304645
> 
> ...


Are there no walk-in test places near you, Carvaged?


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 5, 2022)

Sue said:


> Are there no walk-in test places near you, Carvaged?





I wouldn't call it local no. I'd wouldn't object to walking normally, but it's rather cold and I am feeling a bit lousy.


----------



## Mation (Jan 5, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> They are inaccurate. The false negative rate is high. But the false positive rate is very low, so taking a positive result as “definitely got it” does make sense. Treating a negative result as “definitely don’t have it” is not such a good idea.


I think thinking of them as inaccurate is unhelpful.

They pick up ~70% of asymptomatic positive cases, but are not sensitive enough to pick up more than that. Therefore, they shouldn't be used to give anyone the all clear, but should be used as an all stop/don't go out, if you get a positive. (I think you're coming from the same angle on that.)

In my mind, they'd be inaccurate if they routinely gave false positives, rather than not giving positives that they aren't sensitive enough to detect. In other words, they don't malfunction (more than any other test), but our/the generally communicated expectations of them are wrong.


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 5, 2022)

The blighters tricked me a minute ago by suddenly enabling the Home Testing option again. What luck I thought! So I went ahead and filled in all the extra details I hadn't reached last time, but then was met, right at the final step, with the coup de grace:


----------



## l'Otters (Jan 5, 2022)

Mation said:


> I think thinking of them as inaccurate is unhelpful.
> 
> They pick up ~70% of asymptomatic positive cases, but are not sensitive enough to pick up more than that. Therefore, they shouldn't be used to give anyone the all clear, but should be used as an all stop/don't go out, if you get a positive. (I think you're coming from the same angle on that.)
> 
> In my mind, they'd be inaccurate if they routinely gave false positives, rather than not giving positives that they aren't sensitive enough to detect. In other words, they don't malfunction (more than any other test), but our/the generally communicated expectations of them are wrong.


I think the issue has been in communicating something which is not simple black and white. The false negative and false positive rates are very different. There is a problem when people think a negative test means they definitely don’t have covid and use that info as a basis for doing a higher risk activity, eg visiting someone in the CEV bracket. 
But it seems like it was too difficult to get across that they’re accurate in one direction and inaccurate in the other. 

I think we’re saying the same thing tho 🙃😆


----------



## Badgers (Jan 5, 2022)

> “The vagueness of this announcement is staggering. Once again the government is guilty of issuing confusing advice which creates worry and distress for potentially affected workers,” she said. “It rapidly needs to be made entirely clear which workers will or won’t be labelled as critical.”








						Subscribe to read | Financial Times
					

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication




					www.ft.com


----------



## komodo (Jan 5, 2022)

Yes everyone I know who has had a +ve lateral flow and then has gone for a PCR then gets +ve on that. So proposed change makes sense to me.
A lot of swapping around of LFT kits here if people desperately need them and can’t get any more - through friends, street WhatsApp etc


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## Orang Utan (Jan 6, 2022)

Why do people ‘desperately’ need them? Can’t they just eke out what they already have (if they have any) more and reduce the frequency they take tests? 
I’d be happy to go back to once a week from five a week or before getting on a long train journey.


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## Badgers (Jan 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Why do people ‘desperately’ need them? Can’t they just eke out what they already have (if they have any) more and reduce the frequency they take tests?
> I’d be happy to go back to once a week from five a week or before getting on a long train journey.


People who have doctor, dentist or hospital appointments. Emergency services and key workers who have to test for work. Carers, teachers and NHS staff. Retail workers and taxi drivers. School and college kids of course. 

Plus people (a lot at the moment) who have tested positive so are testing.


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## quimcunx (Jan 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Why do people ‘desperately’ need them? Can’t they just eke out what they already have (if they have any) more and reduce the frequency they take tests?
> I’d be happy to go back to once a week from five a week or before getting on a long train journey.



We need to do one before visiting mum. On the day.


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## Orang Utan (Jan 6, 2022)

quimcunx said:


> We need to do one before visiting mum. On the day.


Exactly, save them for occasions like that I reckon, just going to do one on Monday mornings for work and before any journey or  non-family social occasion


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## cupid_stunt (Jan 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Exactly, save them for occasions like that I reckon, just going to do one on Monday mornings for work and before any journey or  non-family social occasion



Just doing one on a Monday for work is pointless, you could catch it on Tuesday, and start spreading it about a day or two later, not knowing it until the following Monday.


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## Orang Utan (Jan 6, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Just doing one on a Monday for work is pointless, you could catch it on Tuesday, and start spreading it about a day or two later, not knowing it until the following Monday.


Aye, but at least you won’t be bringing it in from wherever you’ve been at the weekend. I will have 14 left now as I’m giving the the rest to customers who were either seniors/vulnerable or doing stuff like shopping for isolated family.


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## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Jan 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Exactly, save them for occasions like that I reckon, just going to do one on Monday mornings for work and before any journey or  non-family social occasion



Maybe people don't have them to save?


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## nagapie (Jan 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Exactly, save them for occasions like that I reckon, just going to do one on Monday mornings for work and before any journey or  non-family social occasion


Some households have multiple family members going out to lots of different places regularly. 
I'd have to test many days per week if I'm testing whenever I go somewhere and I'm just a single adult family and my kids aren't teens.
A lot of people are also very anxious and want to test often.


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## Orang Utan (Jan 6, 2022)

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:


> Maybe people don't have them to save?


Indeed, which is why I’m rationing my own and saving them for those who don’t have any. People are really desperate - they were calling all day yesterday and pleading. We can issue one box a customer and no more


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## Doctor Carrot (Jan 6, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Just doing one on a Monday for work is pointless, you could catch it on Tuesday, and start spreading it about a day or two later, not knowing it until the following Monday.


Did a lateral flow on Monday. Then I caught the Rona on Tuesday. Asymptomatic on Wednesday and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday PCR Sunday.


----------



## Numbers (Jan 6, 2022)

Doctor Carrot said:


> Did a lateral flow on Monday. Then I caught the Rona on Tuesday. Asymptomatic on Wednesday and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday PCR Sunday.


Craig Covid


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 6, 2022)

Still no tests of any kind anywhere.


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## Carvaged (Jan 6, 2022)

Just managed to bag myself both a box of LFTs and a PCR. It really does seem to require a lot of page refreshing but if you're determined enough a slot will miraculously appear for a second or two from time to time!


----------



## Ĝasper (Jan 6, 2022)

Badgers said:


>



I'd wager there was more traffic in the opposite direction.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 7, 2022)

__





						England Covid testing changes could hit low-paid workers, leaked memo warns | Health policy | The Guardian
					






					amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org
				




#worldbeating


----------



## _Russ_ (Jan 7, 2022)

> "In 2010 Djokovic met with a nutritionist who asked him to hold a piece of bread while he pressed down on his arm. Djokovic claims he was much weaker while holding the bread, and cited this as evidence of gluten intolerance."



I thought he was just an arrogant twunt but apparently he may well be a bona-fide Loon


----------



## elbows (Jan 7, 2022)

Other evidence included not being able to play tennis as well when substituting the ball for a jam doughnut.


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

There are people at work and friends who seem to have Covid for the second time within about a month. Does this mean they had Delta before and Omicrom second? One friend thinks she's got Delta the second time. All London based so seems Delta is unlikely but can you get Omricrom twice and quite close together?
I realise this comes without some scientific back up about what tests they've had because I don't have all that information. But that's why I posted it in this thread.


----------



## Sue (Jan 7, 2022)

My sister's just tested positive. She's been wfh (as has everyone else in her house)  and hasn't been inside anywhere recently apart from the supermarket once. 🤷‍♀️ 

She's boostered and all that so just feeling a bit rough. The weather's rubbish where she is so guess that makes staying at home a bit less rubbish. She is reconsidering the whole dry January thing though.


----------



## Ms Ordinary (Jan 7, 2022)

nagapie said:


> There are people at work and friends who seem to have Covid for the second time within about a month. Does this mean they had Delta before and Omicrom second? One friend thinks she's got Delta the second time. All London based so seems Delta is unlikely but can you get Omricrom twice and quite close together?
> I realise this comes without some scientific back up about what tests they've had because I don't have all that information. But that's why I posted it in this thread.



I think you can get what seems to be a recurrence of symptoms after a few clear weeks, without necessarily being re-infected.

A few of us at work (we all had it early December) were discussing that today - just comparing symptoms like fatigue & breathlessness / light-headedness.
Must admit it hadn't occurred to me to re-test as I just didn't think you could get it again that quick.

I've also developed Covid fingers which seems to be a thing that kicks in a month or so after the original infection, so it makes sense to me that if I can get that - after a few weeks of feeling more or less ok  - then it's somehow just having another wash around my system...


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

Ms Ordinary said:


> I think you can get what seems to be a recurrence of symptoms after a few clear weeks, without necessarily being re-infected.
> 
> A few of us at work (we all had it early December) were discussing that today - just comparing symptoms like fatigue & breathlessness / light-headedness.
> Must admit it hadn't occurred to me to re-test as I just didn't think you could get it again that quick.
> ...


That sounds more like long covid than actually having it again.
At least one of the people I'm thinking about has tested positive in December and now in January, unless one was a false positive.


----------



## Poot (Jan 7, 2022)

I have Covid, which I think is Omicron, and one of the first symptoms was that my voice became a bark, which was vaguely funny for about ten minutes until the other symptoms struck. Not so funny now, though.


----------



## Thora (Jan 7, 2022)

nagapie said:


> That sounds more like long covid than actually having it again.
> At least one of the people I'm thinking about has tested positive in December and now in January, unless one was a false positive.


You can test positive for 90 days after your initial infection.  With it being so close together I'd assume probably still testing positive from the first bout.


----------



## elbows (Jan 7, 2022)

Omicrons immune escape properties probably require some recalibration of opinion about reinfection timing possibilities, so I exclude such possibilities less than I would have done before the Delta->Omicron period. But yeah, I'd still say its less likely the closer together the two incidents of infection are perceived to be.


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

Thora said:


> You can test positive for 90 days after your initial infection.  With it being so close together I'd assume probably still testing positive from the first bout.


Possibly. However one is sick again. Just wondering if you can get Omicron twice or Delta and Omicron straight after each other.


----------



## elbows (Jan 7, 2022)

Delta then Omicron is more likely due to the ability of Omicron to escape immunity that resulted from infections with previous strains.

However when considering very short time periods between the two, in theory we might expect certain antibody levels to still be rather high some weeks after the first infection. But its not foolproof stuff.


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

elbows said:


> Delta then Omicron is more likely due to the ability of Omicron to escape immunity that resulted from infections with previous strains.
> 
> However when considering very short time periods between the two, in theory we might expect certain antibody levels to still be rather high some weeks after the first infection. But its not foolproof stuff.


But would be people have been getting Delta in London in December, wasn't it all Omicron?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2022)

nagapie said:


> But would be people have been getting Delta in London in December, wasn't it all Omicron?


does it matter? they're the same disease


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> does it matter? they're the same disease


I'm just wondering about the immunity that Delta gives to Omicron and if you can get Omicron twice.
It 'matters' because I thought those of us who had it in December, including my family and I, would have immunity for a few months. I also thought my badly hit team at work might get a break.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2022)

Sorry, haven’t been paying attention to variants - thought you could only get it once like other viruses


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> Sorry, haven’t been paying attention to variants - thought you could only get it once like other viruses


So did I. That's why I'm wondering why friends and colleagues who had it in December, have it again now.
You know I'm not up on the science, I' m asking because of the implications for real life this term.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2022)

nagapie said:


> So did I. That's why I'm wondering why friends and colleagues who had it in December, have it again now.
> You know I'm not up on the science, fair m asking because of the implications for real life this term.


I'm not up on it either- it seems way more rife in London than up here - still don't really know anyone who's had it or is even worried about it, though we're all taking the right precautions


----------



## strung out (Jan 7, 2022)

Is it possible that this second bout of illness isn't actually Covid, and is actually a cold? They might still be testing positive from the first bout, while suffering from a second, non-Covid virus.


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> I'm not up on it either- it seems way more rife in London than up here - still don't really know anyone who's had it or is even worried about it, though we're all taking the right precautions


I'm sure it'll come. This variant is so contagious.
I'm not scared of catching it because I've been in school and on public transport throughout.
This was the first time I've tested positive and I felt a bit ill for 3 days so didn't suffer.
But the boys did get sick, life was massively disrupted for a while and their dad got quite sick again although he tested negative.
So yeah, I liked the surety of being protected by immunity, which doesn't necessarily seem assured any more.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2022)

strung out said:


> Is it possible that this second bout of illness isn't actually Covid, and is actually a cold? They might still be testing positive from the first bout, while suffering from a second, non-Covid virus.


That’s quite likely isn’t? Remember we all used to get weird mystery viruses all the time before


----------



## nagapie (Jan 7, 2022)

strung out said:


> Is it possible that this second bout of illness isn't actually Covid, and is actually a cold? They might still be testing positive from the first bout, while suffering from a second, non-Covid virus.


It's possible but it's just weird it's happening to quite a few people I know.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 7, 2022)

Starmer's got it again after only having had it in October









						COVID-19: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tests positive for coronavirus for a second time
					

It is the second time the Labour leader has had COVID-19 - he tested positive on the day of the budget in October - and it will be his sixth period in isolation since the pandemic began.




					news.sky.com


----------



## zahir (Jan 7, 2022)

nagapie said:


> But would be people have been getting Delta in London in December, wasn't it all Omicron?



See the graphs in this tweet for the proportions of omicron and delta in December. It's still possible to catch delta, though getting rapidly less likely.


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 7, 2022)

zahir said:


> See the graphs in this tweet for the proportions of omicron and delta in December. It's still possible to catch delta, though getting rapidly less likely.




It amazes me the speed at which they become totally dominant over an earlier variant


----------



## Sunray (Jan 8, 2022)

strung out said:


> Is it possible that this second bout of illness isn't actually Covid, and is actually a cold? They might still be testing positive from the first bout, while suffering from a second, non-Covid virus.


Not really, the tests are very specific.   A week ago, 75% of colds were covid, symptoms are the same. 
Everyone I know got it and is pretty much  recovered now.

No getting away from this virus this time, so highly infectious impossible to avoid now unless you don't leave the house.
Even thats not a guarantee as one person I knew did that, and still got it. 🤷‍♂️


----------



## BigMoaner (Jan 8, 2022)

elbows or anyone else.

do pandemics work where there issay an "end day". like a turning point where hte scientists start saying, "yes, it's over". like something the data releals that means the virus from that point is suddenly then fully and irreversibly on the back foot? or does the tpossibility of new variants squash the idea of such a day/period?

not a loaded question, just a layman quetion arising in my layman's mind.


----------



## Ming (Jan 8, 2022)

Got two cases on my home ward this week. Doing basic ADL stuff in full PPE is more difficult. Staff with kids are starting to call in sick. Management are giving out mixed messages with regards to visits for the patients and provincial best practice guidelines. It’s a bit of a shit show to be honest. The clinical side are basically ignoring ‘leadership‘ and prioritising safety. I also think this ‘Omicron is mild’ stuff should be taken under advisement until it’s proven.


----------



## prunus (Jan 8, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> elbows or anyone else.
> 
> do pandemics work where there issay an "end day". like a turning point where hte scientists start saying, "yes, it's over". like something the data releals that means the virus from that point is suddenly then fully and irreversibly on the back foot? or does the tpossibility of new variants squash the idea of such a day/period?
> 
> not a loaded question, just a layman quetion arising in my layman's mind.



Short answer: no. 

Slightly longer answer: sort of yes, but it won’t really be possible to identify the point of the ‘end’ until probably 12-24 months after it happens.


----------



## strung out (Jan 8, 2022)

Sunray said:


> Not really, the tests are very specific.   A week ago, 75% of colds were covid, symptoms are the same.
> Everyone I know got it and is pretty much  recovered now.
> 
> No getting away from this virus this time, so highly infectious impossible to avoid now unless you don't leave the house.
> Even thats not a guarantee as one person I knew did that, and still got it. 🤷‍♂️


You obviously didn't read/understand my post, as per.


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 8, 2022)

Looks like I really do just have a normal cold, according to the LFT which arrived through the postbox this morning. I'm still waiting on my PCR result.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jan 8, 2022)

From the No Safety No Work campaign :









						“Living with the pandemic” demands occupational sick pay for all - Anarchist Communist Group
					

Article from the comrades at No Safety No Work    A constant refrain coming from the bosses staunchest supporters in Parliament is that we must “learn to live with” or “live alongside” the Pandemic. That 99 Tory MPs voted against more restrictions to combat the spread of the Omicron variant is a...




					www.anarchistcommunism.org


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jan 8, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> elbows or anyone else.
> 
> do pandemics work where there issay an "end day". like a turning point where hte scientists start saying, "yes, it's over". like something the data releals that means the virus from that point is suddenly then fully and irreversibly on the back foot? or does the tpossibility of new variants squash the idea of such a day/period?
> 
> not a loaded question, just a layman quetion arising in my layman's mind.


I think there's probably some formal definition of what counts as a pandemic and what doesn't, and at some point Covid will cross some threshold of cases or transmission rates or whatever the metric is and the WHO will declare it is over.


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## elbows (Jan 8, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> elbows or anyone else.
> 
> do pandemics work where there issay an "end day". like a turning point where hte scientists start saying, "yes, it's over". like something the data releals that means the virus from that point is suddenly then fully and irreversibly on the back foot? or does the tpossibility of new variants squash the idea of such a day/period?
> 
> not a loaded question, just a layman quetion arising in my layman's mind.


The scientific and expert communities incorporate a range of different attitudes and complete consensus can be elusive. For example we already saw a bunch of experts in the UK trying to spend a big chunk of 2021 creating the impression that we were moving to a new phase, with talk of it becoming endemic, of not worrying too much about variants, and of the prospect of no more giant waves in 2021. Obviously that narrative went pear shaped, but it will be back again in the wake of the Omicron wave. Many other experts had no intention of jumping the gun in that way in 2021, but if things go ok then we will see their attitudes evolve plenty in 2022.

Future perceptions of the public will likely vary by country, especially when some governments conclude that the acute phase is ending for their own nation. A formal declaration of the end of the pandemic by the WHO will come later, likely once certain global vaccination targets have been met, or when the situation calms down in a whole bunch of countries for a more prolonged period than has been the case so far.

For the UK the really simple version of 'its all over' is not really anticipated, barring an unexpected turn of events in regards the presence of the virus. But other versions of 'its all over', in terms of the acute pandemic phase, are anticipated and there is much impatience to reach that point this year. This is why things like 'endemic equilibrium' get floated instead, and the idea we have to learn to live with the virus long term, which is not the same as living in a state of pandemic long term. There are a series of things that will probably end up being major milestones that cause big shifts in the publics perception that the pandemic is over here. These include:

Being able to go at least 6-9 months without a major new variant threat and a large wave.
Experiencing a large wave without experiencing a very large uptick in the number of deaths (current Omicron wave has that potential so far).
The authorities being confident enough to remove much of the mass testing and self-isolation system (likely on the agenda in the UK this year, but unclear how quickly or how far they will push that initially).
Things settling down into a traditional seasonal pattern where concerns about pressure on health services end up focussed on winter, with a yearly vaccination programme.


----------



## elbows (Jan 8, 2022)

nagapie said:


> But would be people have been getting Delta in London in December, wasn't it all Omicron?


Even during the period when Omicron was rising to dominate there were still plenty of Delta cases around, and its only far more recently that I would stop making claims about there still being plenty of Delta about.


From this document that includes proper info about what that and other graphs show: https://assets.publishing.service.g...044522/20211231_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf


----------



## elbows (Jan 8, 2022)

In regards my response to the 'end day' question, here is a glimpse of the new evolution of comments about the future that we'll get as a result of Omicron:









						Omicron could be ‘first ray of light’ towards living with Covid
					

UK government scientist predicts possibility of less severe variant but warns ‘we’re not there yet’




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (Jan 8, 2022)

elbows said:


> In regards my response to the 'end day' question, here is a glimpse of the new evolution of comments about the future that we'll get as a result of Omicron:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


This is top sciences.



> But as Covid cases continued to rise in the UK and hospitalisations at their highest in almost a year, he said “we’re not quite there yet”.


----------



## elbows (Jan 8, 2022)

Yeah, and variants of concern that have sufficient immune escape demnstrated in 2021 the ability to piss on some experts chips.

For example professor Paul Hunter was all over the media in the 2nd half of 2021, talking about a looming future where the virus reaches a state of 'endemic equilibrium'. He wasnt all bad, and for example he readily acknowledged that the first versions of 'herd immunity' that we were sold as being the end game are in some ways now a dead concept. But a version of that stuff still exists in terms of severe disease and death, and those things and endemic equilibrium will surely come back into the narrative again once the sharp part of the current wave subsides.

Variants of concern have clearly proven to have been a stumbling block when it comes to these tidy narratives and declarations that the end is in sight. Far less experts will probably be willing to make loud noises about how confident they are that there will be no more variants with big implications in future. But there will be modified versions of such thoughts available, and they might even come true. Here is a recent example. I prefer to remain more cautious about such matters, and will do so for quite some time. I'll only be confident with hindsight and the increasing passage of time, but I'm certainly not ruling out the possibilities mentioned.









						Omicron may not be the final variant, but it may be the final variant of concern
					

SARS-CoV-2 cannot improve indefinitely.




					theconversation.com


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 8, 2022)

Is anyone else finding that general mask-wearing in shops has, if anything, gone _down_ since before xmas (when it wasn't required at all)? The last few times I've been to supermarkets it's been maybe 50% tops.

I'm aware that epidemiologically speaking this is a fairly minor vector compared to schools, workplaces, hospitals, etc but it's the one I encounter regularly so it makes me anxious.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 8, 2022)

Was a bit of a dispiriting week for the Covid Testing folk. 

Last two deliveries of LFT Self Test Kits have both been 50% lower than required. We have had to restrict supplies to key workers (including NHS staff and schools who are also getting little or none) let alone the general public. All of whom are being told by our disgraced #ToryScum government to test more. Not to bother with a PCR test but do daily LFT tests instead. 

The last delivery consisted of boxes of 20 rather than 7 home LFTs. So I had staff unpacking them and making up bags of 5 or 10 so we could at least give some to people in need. Deconstructing hundreds of boxes then repacking them on bags is a seriously long and boring gig 🙄 

Had a woman last week kick off because she paid tax and wanted a sealed box. I 'politely' told her that it was that or nothing. Her response was to hang around for 20 mins saying nice things like '_why did that NHS bitch get a sealed box and I can't have the same? You didn't even ask if I was a nurse_.' 

(she was wearing a company name badge ffs 😁) 

Then accused me of racism and risking the lives of her family. 

(she was not even wearing a mask 🙄) 

Took a photo of me and told me she would let the public know what type of man I am. 

All good fun 🤔

To add to this fun our Tuesday delivery if stock was delayed till today and has not arrived. So will not be here till Monday at the earliest and likely not the quantity we needed a week ago. 

Not much fun telling care homes (and all key workers) there are no tests for them.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 8, 2022)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Is anyone else finding that general mask-wearing in shops has, if anything, gone _down_ since before xmas (when it wasn't required at all)? The last few times I've been to supermarkets it's been maybe 50% tops.
> 
> I'm aware that epidemiologically speaking this is a fairly minor vector compared to schools, workplaces, hospitals, etc but it's the one I encounter regularly so it makes me anxious.


I’m so used to working in an environment in which mask wearing has never been mandated, that I often don’t notice whether customers have masks on or not, even though I’m supposed to ask people to wear them


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 8, 2022)

Badgers said:


> Was a bit of a dispiriting week for the Covid Testing folk.
> 
> Last two deliveries of LFT Self Test Kits have both been 50% lower than required. We have had to restrict supplies to key workers (including NHS staff and schools who are also getting little or none) let alone the general public. All of whom are being told by our disgraced #ToryScum government to test more. Not to bother with a PCR test but do daily LFT tests instead.
> 
> ...


We got loads of 25 packs that were meant for nursing homes, which we’ve had to redirect. Omnishambles isn’t it?


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 8, 2022)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Is anyone else finding that general mask-wearing in shops has, if anything, gone _down_ since before xmas (when it wasn't required at all)? The last few times I've been to supermarkets it's been maybe 50% tops.
> 
> I'm aware that epidemiologically speaking this is a fairly minor vector compared to schools, workplaces, hospitals, etc but it's the one I encounter regularly so it makes me anxious.



Nope, not around Worthing, mask wearing in both supermarkets & local shops are at 95%+


----------



## Badgers (Jan 8, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> We got loads of 25 packs that were meant for nursing homes, which we’ve had to redirect. Omnishambles isn’t it?


Fucking farcical. Pretty consistent with general government performance throughout #ToryScum 

What is also fun is the DHSC state they base their orders on previous/current demand. Because we have not had any stock (due to their lack of supply) the number distributed is way way less than actual demand. So am pretty certain the shortages will go on for weeks at least.


----------



## 2hats (Jan 8, 2022)

elbows said:


> Variants of concern have clearly proven to have been a stumbling block when it comes to these tidy narratives and declarations that the end is in sight. Far less experts will probably be willing to make loud noises about how confident they are that there will be no more variants with big implications in future.


It is not yet clear whether the shift in tropism seen in omicron hasn't also been accompanied by a significant change in disease pathogenesis in another direction (as oppose to just a reduction in a previously dominant presentation). For example, that the typical severe disease pathway could shift from a shorter term respiratory focus to a longer term one of sequelae arising from the vasculopathy of resultant COVID-19 (it has been suggested that there are increased incidences of greatly elevated signals of microclotting in omicron patients). Other evolutionary paths may be available.


----------



## elbows (Jan 8, 2022)

Makes sense, and of course in terms of establishment attitudes and public pandemic perception, the longer term consequences are easier to brush under the carpet. At least when it comes to short-term demands to respond strongly to a large, rapidly growing threat that manifests itself quickly.


----------



## MrCurry (Jan 8, 2022)

Badgers said:


> Took a photo of me and told me she would let the public know what type of man I am.
> 
> All good fun 🤔


You mean somewhere on the internet there‘s a forum thread where Ms unsatisfied customer is ranting about you?  I was about to go to bed, but that’s ruined my plans.

Gotta hit up Mumsnet and start searching.  Or maybe I’ll cheat and use pimeyes


----------



## Badgers (Jan 9, 2022)




----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 9, 2022)

Badgers said:


> View attachment 305137



It's a non-story - SEE THIS POST and the one below it.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 9, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> It's a non-story - SEE THIS POST and the one below it.


It has been discussed a lot in meetings


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 9, 2022)

Badgers said:


> It has been discussed a lot in meetings



Well, it's bound to happen at some point, I remember this first coming up in a news report 2 or 3 months ago, but I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon, not with the current level of cases.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 9, 2022)

It was in the Guardian back in mid-November, it was based on a discussion document for a 'exit strategy' at some point. 









						UK officials have compiled ‘Covid exit strategy’ from April – report
					

No 10 sources say ministers had not seen leaked plan to wind down testing and self-isolation




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Badgers (Jan 9, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Well, it's bound to happen at some point, I remember this first coming up in a news report 2 or 3 months ago, but I doubt it's going to happen anytime soon, not with the current level of cases.


The smart money is on 31/03


----------



## cupid_stunt (Jan 9, 2022)

Badgers said:


> The smart money is on 31/03



That was the date suggested in the Guardian article, before omicron arrived, so I guess it'll depend on how things play out over the coming weeks.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 9, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> That was the date suggested in the Guardian article, before omicron arrived, so I guess it'll depend on how things play out over the coming weeks.


I guess it will depend on how the government fuck up over the coming weeks.


----------



## komodo (Jan 9, 2022)

very hard for them to stop the free LFTs without kicking off a load of panic ordering and hoarding by the great British Public


----------



## Carvaged (Jan 9, 2022)

PCR result also came back negative. So it seems I probably do just have a regular cold. First in over 2 years!


----------



## blameless77 (Jan 9, 2022)

elbows said:


> Yes, you are correct.
> 
> However since there is only so much capacity to do genomic tests on PCR swabs in the first place, the proportion of positive tests that are evaluated in this way already drops to a much lower fraction at times when the number of people testing positive becomes very large.
> 
> ...




PCR post-lfd was suspended last year when cases were very high, and then restarted once prevalence was lower.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jan 10, 2022)

This might have been posted already. Some were  saying this ever since Omicron reared its ugly head and the media became fixated on calling it mild despite there not being any evidence to back up their claim :









						Covid: Deadly Omicron should not be called mild, warns WHO
					

The WHO cautions that just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalising and killing people.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## danny la rouge (Jan 11, 2022)

I’m feeling very despondent about the pandemic at the moment. I can see me having to stop reading about it.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jan 11, 2022)

danny la rouge said:


> I’m feeling very despondent about the pandemic at the moment. I can see me having to stop reading about it.


Sorry Danny. On reflection maybe it was insensitive of me to post that, and not at all thoughtful.


----------



## MrCurry (Jan 11, 2022)

danny la rouge said:


> I’m feeling very despondent about the pandemic at the moment. I can see me having to stop reading about it.


That’s the approach I used during the second half of 2020. I stopped reading about it, checking stats, etc. Was just too depressing.  Take a break from it and I’m sure your resilience will return


----------



## zahir (Jan 13, 2022)

A study on the promotion of the idea of herd immunity









						Analyzing natural herd immunity media discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States
					

Natural herd immunity, where community-acquired infections in low-risk populations are used to protect high risk populations from infection–has seen high profile support in some quarters, including through the Great Barrington Declaration. However, this approach has been widely criticized as...




					journals.plos.org


----------



## NoXion (Jan 17, 2022)

You know when you hear idiots talking about how Covid has a 99% survival rate? Well...









						Some COVID Patients Need Amputations to Survive
					

Impaired blood flow leads to loss of limbs




					www.scientificamerican.com
				




I guess losing a limb or two counts as surviving.


----------



## Ming (Jan 18, 2022)

We’ve Covid on a majority of my units now. Code blue yesterday. Don’t underestimate Omicron. To paraphrase an expert ‘if your opponents‘ guns are 1/3 as lethal as they were but you’ve now got 4 times as many opponents more people are going to die’. Can’t remember who the expert was (Guardian?) but it makes a fair analogy.


----------



## Dogsauce (Jan 18, 2022)

Ming said:


> We’ve Covid on a majority of my units now. Code blue yesterday. Don’t underestimate Omicron. To paraphrase an expert ‘if your opponents‘ guns are 1/3 as lethal as they were but you’ve now got 4 times as many opponents more people are going to die’. Can’t remember who the expert was (Guardian?) but it makes a fair analogy.


I believe it’s still worse than the original version from early 2020, which bumped off a lot of vulnerable people. Only vaccines and improved hospital care have kept the numbers down, but for the unvaxxed it’s still a big risk.

I was reading some proper harrowing accounts from nurses working in maternity units in the US dealing with unvaxxed cases, mums being kept alive on ECMO machines long enough to deliver the baby, then bringing the babies in to take a picture of the nipper next to mum on the machine for the memory before they switch it off.  This shit isn’t nice.


----------



## Ming (Jan 18, 2022)

It's nowhere near over. This is an endemic. Unfortunately. Got my booster shot today. Probably have to get another one.


----------



## Mation (Jan 18, 2022)

Got yesterday's PCR test result (negative) back just now. First time it's been under 24 hours for several months. Some were around a week, and some never arrived.


----------



## Ming (Jan 18, 2022)

Dogsauce said:


> I believe it’s still worse than the original version from early 2020, which bumped off a lot of vulnerable people. Only vaccines and improved hospital care have kept the numbers down, but for the unvaxxed it’s still a big risk.
> 
> I was reading some proper harrowing accounts from nurses working in maternity units in the US dealing with unvaxxed cases, mums being kept alive on ECMO machines long enough to deliver the baby, then bringing the babies in to take a picture of the nipper next to mum on the machine for the memory before they switch it off.  This shit isn’t nice.


Yeah. People are comparing it to the Delta varient. Which has a higher fatality rate.


----------



## Aladdin (Jan 23, 2022)

Ireland has suddenly decided to drop a number of restrictions. 
1. Pubs clubs and restaurants can open as usual. No 8pm curfew anymore.
2. Covid passes .. gone.
3. Outdoor and indoor events now can have full capacity 

Masks still advised for indoor gatherings, public transportat and in schools. 

Close contact rules still apply but duration of isolation is less and antigen tests are key.

People are going round like the rug has been pulled. Many still wearing masks because the covid numbers are still high every day.
It's quite surreal.

Some drs saying its too soon to drop covid passes. And immunologists warning the elderly amd very vulnerable to be very cautious. 

It looks like the government wants to let omicron rip through the country quickly.


----------



## T & P (Jan 23, 2022)

Currently with Covid and have just failed my Day-5 lateral flow test, albeit only just as the dreaded second red line was much, much weaker than that in my first test.

Oh well, at least I won’t have to go into work tomorrow


----------



## Thaw (Jan 25, 2022)

Has anyone used a covid recovery certificate, for travel or anything else, instead of showing a negative PCR test? I have my positive Day 2 PCR certificate that I think has all the relevant details but I'm not sure if I need some sort of official 'Proof of Recovery' certificate instead. I see some companies offering them for about £99 online


----------



## Dogsauce (Jan 25, 2022)

Aren’t proof of recovery certs used instead of vaccine proof rather than PCR? Wouldn’t think it could supplant a test, especially now people are getting reinfected in as little as six weeks.


----------



## LDC (Jan 25, 2022)

Thaw said:


> Has anyone used a covid recovery certificate, for travel or anything else, instead of showing a negative PCR test? I have my positive Day 2 PCR certificate that I think has all the relevant details but I'm not sure if I need some sort of official 'Proof of Recovery' certificate instead. I see some companies offering them for about £99 online



What kind of travel and where to/from?


----------



## Thaw (Jan 25, 2022)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> What kind of travel and where to/from?


From UK to Canada.
The proof of recovery is used instead of a negative PCR test because PCR tests will likely continue to give positive results for ~90 days even after you have recovered.

"If you are now symptom-free, you *can provide proof* of a *positive* COVID-19 molecular test when crossing the border, instead of a negative one.
When you arrive at the border, you must present an accepted negative molecular test result (paper or electronic proof) or *proof of a previous positive molecular test result taken between 15 and 180 days (starting January 15, 2022, between 11 and 180 days ago) that includes:*

traveller name and date of birth
name and civic address of the laboratory/clinic/facility that administered the test
the date on which the test was taken
the type of test taken
the test result"


----------



## Badgers (Jan 28, 2022)

> Covid deaths in the UK are at their highest since February 2021 despite omicron being less severe than previous variants. Gareth Iacobucci investigates why
> 
> Confidence is growing among experts and ministers in the UK that omicron is milder than previous variants of SARS-CoV-2, and politicians and scientists alike are increasingly bullish that the worst of the covid-19 pandemic is behind us.12 At the same time, the number of people dying from covid in the UK is higher than it has been since February 2021











						Covid-19: unravelling the conundrum of omicron and deaths
					

Covid deaths in the UK are at their highest since February 2021 despite omicron being less severe than previous variants. Gareth Iacobucci investigates why  Confidence is growing among experts and ministers in the UK that omicron is milder than previous variants of SARS-CoV-2, and politicians...




					www.bmj.com


----------



## Badgers (Jan 29, 2022)

> As Tim predicted, overall cases of COVID have increased as a result of children being back at school. There are now more than 160,000 new cases daily, an increase of 11% from last week. Cases are also rising in the 35-55 age group which could suggest that children are bringing infections home and passing them onto parents







__





						COVID cases bounce back
					





					us13.campaign-archive.com


----------



## elbows (Jan 29, 2022)

Badgers said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That page says BA.2 is 'just as infectious' as the BA.1 strain of Omicron, but actually there are signs that it has a transmission advantage, so we should be prepared for the possibility that it will combine with the other causes of increasing case numbers and lead to a further surge.


----------



## Badgers (Jan 29, 2022)

elbows said:


> That page says BA.2 is 'just as infectious' as the BA.1 strain of Omicron, but actually there are signs that it has a transmission advantage, so we should be prepared for the possibility that it will combine with the other causes of increasing case numbers and lead to a further surge.


It is a 'concern' it seems.


----------



## LDC (Feb 2, 2022)

Had an unplanned walk past the National Covid Memorial wall in London today. Really quite moving, unsettling, and dystopian, well worth going if you have some time when you're in London.

One heart that stuck out in my memory was one filled in saying something like 'Mum and Dad. Died XXXX within 24 hours of each other. RIP. Love XXXXX.'

Another 500+ hearts could be added today. Grim.


----------



## Badgers (Feb 6, 2022)

MPs Raise Concerns as Government’s Reliance on Controversial Foreign COVID Testing Firm Continues – Byline Times
					

John Lubbock investigates why domestic lateral flow test manufacturers are still being left out in the cold by the Government




					bylinetimes.com


----------



## Yossarian (Mar 5, 2022)

In Ontario, the return to something like normality is gathering steam - the vaccine mandate for pubs, indoor dining etc. was lifted on Tuesday, though a lot of places are going to keep asking for proof of vaccination for now.  Summer festivals are back on and the assorted mask mandates will probably be lifted en masse in two or three weeks.

It's weird, I thought I would be a lot happier about this phase when it arrived, but I mostly just feel sad that the war is over and COVID won.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 6, 2022)

Anyone else finding you can sometimes barely get one drop out of a lateral flow test? Definitely not the 4 that some test manufacturers state. Seems like they're putting less of whatever fluid it is in the dropper thingies.


----------



## shifting gears (Mar 6, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Anyone else finding you can sometimes barely get one drop out of a lateral flow test? Definitely not the 4 that some test manufacturers state. Seems like they're putting less of whatever fluid it is in the dropper thingies.



The liquid in the small twist-off-top  holders that were in the original blue-white packs seem to evaporate. The newer boxes all seem to come with the liquid in a test tube with a peel-off foil seal that solves this problem…


----------



## Cloo (Mar 7, 2022)

One of the ladies in choir who stood behind me in our concert on Saturday has tested positive. I guess we'll see how much protection triple vax and having had covid 8 weeks ago is now! It also meant I finally got pinged by the app, but of course I don't have to isolate under new rules. 

Nonetheless will test tonight, as supposed to be in office tomorrow, and tomorrow night before rehearsal to be sure.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 7, 2022)

shifting gears said:


> The liquid in the small twist-off-top  holders that were in the original blue-white packs seem to evaporate. The newer boxes all seem to come with the liquid in a test tube with a peel-off foil seal that solves this problem…


It's gone back to the original kits when I ordered some for me and a friend last week, which is annoying as they take longer and I dislike the tonsil scraping part of it.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 7, 2022)

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!  Daughter has just tested positive for Covid, which has screwed up plans for 1 concert, 1 party, 1 university interview, 1 kitchen installation, 2 days freelance work, and 5 days in France. Hope her night out was worth it.


----------



## BigMoaner (Mar 11, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!  Daughter has just tested positive for Covid, which has screwed up plans for 1 concert, 1 party, 1 university interview, 1 kitchen installation, 2 days freelance work, and 5 days in France. Hope her night out was worth it.


that was definitely the worst part of having covid for me. teh disruption and being house bound for 10 days. renewed empathy for prisoners.


----------



## not a trot (Mar 11, 2022)

Local surgeries have been sending text messages  today, warning that Frimley park and Wexham Park hospitals are expecting high demand for services over the weekend. Never happened before.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 11, 2022)

Yep looks like it's spreading again and I have no idea why


----------



## MrCurry (Mar 12, 2022)

two sheds said:


> View attachment 314001
> Yep looks like it's spreading again and I have no idea why



Waning immunity from booster doses which are now 3 months past and lack of caution from people who’ve picked up on the prevailing mood of “pandemic is over”?


----------



## two sheds (Mar 12, 2022)

Yeh you tell that to Johnson he'll just ignore you.

Mind you, they'll likely stop testing altogether soon so the new cases will drop to zero


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 12, 2022)

two sheds said:


> Yeh you tell that to Johnson he'll just ignore you.
> 
> Mind you, they'll likely stop testing altogether soon so the new cases will drop to zero


Fool's day is the end of free testing.


----------



## existentialist (Mar 12, 2022)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> Fool's day is the end of free testing.


How appropriate


----------



## _Russ_ (Mar 13, 2022)

I've continued to watch John Campbell's videos, He's fallen right down that anti-vax hole now.
All his videos now are full of shitty  commentary and heavily biased conclusions given to the data he presents in order to advance his herd immunity via infection mantra.
 Its easy to see through but is willingly swallowed by thousands of followers who hang on his every word...depressing

Honestly cant fathom how Tim Spector referred to him once as the esteemed Dr John Campbell
​


----------



## teuchter (Mar 13, 2022)

_Russ_ said:


> anti-vax
> ​


Is he actually advocating against vaccination or is this something you've just made up?


----------



## Griff (Mar 13, 2022)

Never watched him before, but his last two videos he''s just talking about Pfizer's own data that's just been released.


----------



## elbows (Mar 13, 2022)

teuchter said:


> Is he actually advocating against vaccination or is this something you've just made up?



He is misusing information to peddle a thinly disguised agenda.

Im trying never to watch his videos again as I had seen quite enough with which to reach a conclusion in the past, but on this occasion I have forced myself to watch his latest video "Long list of side effects to look out for".

In the video he is forced to retract stuff he said in a previous video, because the fucking idiot previously mistook a long list that was part of released Pfizer documents for something that the list is most certainly not. I have not read the pfizer documents myself or put myself through the torture of watching his previous video on this subject. I understand the documents were released as part of a court case they lost, and I will try to read some of them for myself in case there is additional context in regards the list.

Anyway the list is a very long one of medical issues that should be monitored for and reported if they show up post-vaccination. But he mistook it for a list of side-effects that had been seen and reported after being vaccinated. A disgraceful error to make if ever there was one.

And I cannot help but note that while issuing this retraction, he still takes the opportunity to spread fear using a number of techniques including dwelling on obscure, scary-sounding conditions that are on the list. And implying that health professionals have forgotten about many of these conditions and were not aware that they should be reported if they happen post-vaccine. And he makes vague reference to some heart issues that it sounds like he has previous gone on about. He also quotes the blog of a doctor who deems it appropriate to put the word vaccines in speech marks. I have not looked into that doctor yet, but signs of a typical dodgy vaccine FUD agenda appear to be present.

Red flags galore, as if I needed any more from this dangerous idiot. If I came out with the sort of things he has come out with in recent months then I'd expect to be torn a new one on here, and I say that as someone who was not afraid to take early signs of clotting issues seriously and mention them here.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Mar 13, 2022)

Griff said:


> Never watched him before, but his last two videos he''s just talking about Pfizer's own data that's just been released.



And, as elbows has just posted, he's misunderstood a lot of what he was reading, and mispresented the information, feeding the anti-vaxxer loons.  

The article linked below goes into some detail about what a fuckwit he is.









						Pfizer’s confidential document shows adverse events reported following vaccination; it doesn’t demonstrate that the vaccine caused the events or is unsafe
					

Pfizer's document released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration contains information about adverse events that occurred following vaccination. Adverse events are health problems that occur after vaccination but aren’t necessarily caused by the vaccine. Therefore, these reports don’t...




					healthfeedback.org


----------



## elbows (Mar 13, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> And, as elbows has just posted, he's misunderstood a lot of what he was reading, and mispresented the information, feeding the anti-vaxxer loons.
> 
> The article linked below goes into some detail about what a fuckwit he is.
> 
> ...



Now I'll have to study the list myself because his retraction and new explanation for what the list actually is doesnt match what that article says the list is. That article suggests that the list was of things that happened to be seen after vaccination (very much including incidental stuff that wasnt actually caused by the vaccine, but we lack the means to make this distinction), but his retraction said it was only a list of things to monitor for in general after vaccination, rather than things which had actually been seen.


----------



## elbows (Mar 13, 2022)

Exhibit B:



I cant bring myself to watch it. Is anybody else up for the task and willing to report back?

To be honest judging by the titles of numerous other videos of his, there is plenty else we could pick on. But I'm far from convinced its worth bothering with, especially as the insidious aspects often require some unpicking that can then result in quibbling here that I cant be arsed with too often.

I've said before that the simplest explanation for the direction Campbell has gone in is that he developed a rather large, profitable audience and learnt what sort of things that audience were interested in believing, and decided to play up to that shit. Other, even worse possibilities also exist but since I cant prove any of them I have not pursued them.


----------



## cupid_stunt (Mar 13, 2022)

elbows said:


> I cant bring myself to watch it. Is anybody else up for the task and willing to report back?



Not a chance, I've seen enough of the fool, and I certainly don't want to suffer Brand as well.



> To be honest judging by the titles of numerous other videos of his, there is plenty else we could pick on. But I'm far from convinced its worth bothering with, especially as the insidious aspects often require some unpicking that can then result in quibbling here that I cant be arsed with too often.



Yeah, not worth wasting time on, he's been discredited enough already.


----------



## elbows (Mar 13, 2022)

cupid_stunt said:


> Yeah, not worth wasting time on, he's been discredited enough already.



I really should ban myself from the subject, I find it too easy to get dragged into it because there are a couple of people here that like to quibble as to whether he is really as dodgy as we like to suggest.


----------



## _Russ_ (Mar 13, 2022)

teuchter said:


> Is he actually advocating against vaccination or is this something you've just made up?


I'm not making stuff up, I simply  recognise his thinly veiled agenda which is mostly trying to save face over shit hes got wrong in the past combined with his herd immunity plan via mass infection which is as shit when he states it as it was when it was the governments plan, but is now introducing the Vax = dodgy scheme
 Elbows puts more effort into his explanation than I do.

The only reason I consider the twats opinion is because reading the comments it worries me that so many are taken in.

If you want to question my view of his motives, how about giving yours as a counter?, or did yo just want to get one in?


----------



## teuchter (Mar 13, 2022)

_Russ_ said:


> I'm not making stuff up, I simply  recognise his thinly veiled agenda which is mostly trying to save face over shit hes got wrong in the past combined with his herd immunity plan via mass infection which is as shit when he states it as it was when it was the governments plan, but is now introducing the Vax = dodgy scheme
> Elbows puts more effort into his explanation than I do.
> 
> The only reason I consider the twats opinion is because reading the comments it worries me that so many are taken in.
> ...


You said he'd gone "anti-vax" - which has a fairly specific meaning.

I asked if he was actually advocating against vaccines, and haven't got a straight answer to that, but it sounds like he isn't. Misinterpreting some "adverse effects" reports is not necessarily the same as going "anti-vax" especially if he then corrected himself. I may have a look at the videos myself.


----------



## krink (Mar 15, 2022)

Does anyone know why you can never get free kits off the gov website? There's never any available!


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 15, 2022)

krink said:


> Does anyone know why you can never get free kits off the gov website? There's never any available!


Just ordered some for me and a friend today no problem, only a couple of hours before your post.


----------



## Miss-Shelf (Mar 15, 2022)

i've just  ordered some now


----------



## krink (Mar 15, 2022)

I'll keep trying. Cheers!


----------



## l'Otters (Mar 15, 2022)

The last few times I've done a lateral flow test I had a bit of blood from swabbing my nose. 
The results have been red line on the C and nothing on the T, so negative, not void. 
So I've still got a clear result, but is the blood going to be interfering with the test? 

(I'm not that worried about the blood, it's only a tiny bit)


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 16, 2022)

krink said:


> Does anyone know why you can never get free kits off the gov website? There's never any available!


Best get them from your local authority through pharmacies, hubs, libraries etc
Hurry up though, you’ve only got a couple of weeks before you’ll have to buy them


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 16, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> The last few times I've done a lateral flow test I had a bit of blood from swabbing my nose.
> The results have been red line on the C and nothing on the T, so negative, not void.
> So I've still got a clear result, but is the blood going to be interfering with the test?
> 
> (I'm not that worried about the blood, it's only a tiny bit)


IIRC it says not to use if there is blood as could create a potential false negative.

Noticed last month that you can only order a pack every 3 days now whereas they were giving them in pair of packs at pharmacies a few month back.
Hoping that they have some nose only quick turnaround in stock again, but not holding my breath.


----------



## l'Otters (Mar 16, 2022)

Damn. Better redo it.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 16, 2022)

I know you're only supposed to use LFTs if you have no symptoms but I presume they will work if you have symptoms, too? So they've been using PCRs to test the actual virus genetic material because if you've got symptoms it's more likely you've got it?


----------



## prunus (Mar 16, 2022)

two sheds said:


> I know you're only supposed to use LFTs if you have no symptoms but I presume they will work if you have symptoms, too? So they've been using PCRs to test the actual virus genetic material because if you've got symptoms it's more likely you've got it?



Yes absolutely.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 16, 2022)

ta


----------



## elbows (Mar 16, 2022)

Yeah the rules about which test to use were mostly to do with supply & demand and not overloading capacity, combined with some issues to do with accuracy of test/chance of false negatives.

The failure of UK authorities to expand the list of official Covid symptoms was also about testing capacity, workforce availability, probability of actually having covid vs another disease (eg using educated guesses to somewhat make up for lack of capacity).


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Mar 16, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> Damn. Better redo it.


tbf I did a few with nose blood on and never got a false positive, so only redo if you get a positive when blood was there.


----------



## l'Otters (Mar 16, 2022)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> tbf I did a few with nose blood on and never got a false positive, so only redo if you get a positive when blood was there.



With the last 3 LFT’s it was negative result & there was blood on the swab.

Not had a positive result yet. Or a void. 

I’ll try again tomorrow morning, may as well. 

( I don’t actually know if I can get a swab from my nose without blood on it at the mo…)


----------



## rubbershoes (Mar 18, 2022)

As far as I could see, I was the only person in Aldi last night wearing a mask


----------



## Numbers (Mar 18, 2022)

rubbershoes said:


> As far as I could see, I was the only person in Aldi last night wearing a mask


Same for me in Morrison's y/day and it was very busy.
Also had to get a bus home and not one person was wearing a mask.


----------



## _Russ_ (Mar 20, 2022)

China reporting first deaths in a year or so, made me wonder if their reports of amazingly low numbers of infections throughout that have been widely taken as hard to believe or downright ridiculous despite the severe lockdowns might actually be true or near true figures.

I mean 2 years in and with social meeja an all, if the figures really were such a load of bollox then it would have been exposed by now


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Mar 23, 2022)

I'm back in the office for only the second time since March 2020. Felt a little less anxious about the train ride, now that mixing with strangers has become more normalised, and the office is virtually empty (5 people in a room with 30 desks). It's nice to be in a different environment for a change, and socialise a little bit (we're going out for some lunch together) but overall most people are feeling that it's really rather pointless to come in unless there's a specific reason to.

I miss being able to listen to my music on speakers though.


----------



## LDC (Mar 23, 2022)

Got the train to Paris and then the south of France last week for first holiday overseas since this started, and have got a few local trains while here. 

Everyone here wears a mask, and it's enforced with no visible complaints or kickback. In shops it's slightly lower, but not by much and I'd say about 90% of people wear one. Really stark difference with England.


----------



## Numbers (Mar 23, 2022)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Got the train to Paris and then the south of France last week for first holiday overseas since this started, and have got a few local trains while here.
> 
> Everyone here wears a mask, and it's enforced with no visible complaints or kickback. In shops it's slightly lower, but not by much and I'd say about 90% of people wear one. Really stark difference with England.


I found the same when in Ireland recently.  I was taken aback compared to East London.


----------



## weepiper (Mar 23, 2022)

LynnDoyleCooper said:


> Got the train to Paris and then the south of France last week for first holiday overseas since this started, and have got a few local trains while here.
> 
> Everyone here wears a mask, and it's enforced with no visible complaints or kickback. In shops it's slightly lower, but not by much and I'd say about 90% of people wear one. Really stark difference with England.


It's still pretty much like that in Edinburgh.


----------



## Numbers (Mar 23, 2022)

Went to Morrison's today, 1 person + I wearing a mask, and it was busy.


----------



## teuchter (Mar 23, 2022)

The difference between Germany and France is as stark as the difference between France and the UK. Germany, absolutely everyone wearing FFP2 masks. Properly. France - plenty of UK style chin-masks, noses out, scraggy old cloth and paper masks.


----------



## two sheds (Mar 24, 2022)

Interesting short piece on the science around covid, and some scientists' entrenched positions. At the end I was thinking 'yes but what's your view?' but she does say in the last paragraph and it looks sensible.









						Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid? | Devi Sridhar
					

Our understanding of the virus has changed so much. Yet some doggedly cling to theories they proposed two years ago, says public health expert Devi Sridhar




					www.theguardian.com
				




This bit is revealing: 



> But instead of evolving their position based on new data, some, instead, keep trying to show how they were still right in early 2020, digging themselves an even deeper hole. A case in point is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, who, in March 2020, argued that governments were overreacting to the threat of Covid. He mocked those who worried that the “68 deaths from Covid-19 in the US as of 16 March will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000”. He estimated that the US might suffer only 10,000 deaths. He also was cynical that vaccines or treatments could be developed in any timeframe that would affect the trajectory of the pandemic.
> 
> Two years later, the current US death toll stands at 969,000, with almost 250,000 of those being people under 65. These numbers would have once been seen as outlandish. In addition, in less than a year we had developed safe and effective vaccines – and a year after that, safe and effective antivirals. One would expect these facts to prompt an academic to reconsider their initial assumptions – but instead, Ioannidis has continued to publish articles solidifying his starting position.



I also liked the 'test to treat' approach in America - you go to a pharmacy to get tested and if positive get free antivirals (although from the name I'd initially assumed you'd get tea and a cake ).


----------



## elbows (Mar 24, 2022)

Also see









						The claim that the NHS 'coped' with Covid is not true - it's drowning and damaged | Rachel Clarke
					

Two years on, so much rewriting of history has happened, it is easy to forget just how anarchic and desperate conditions were, says palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke




					www.theguardian.com
				




and









						False narratives about Covid left us with millions of deaths – will we challenge them now? | Debora MacKenzie
					

To stop another, more severe, pandemic, those misleading stories like thinking the virus would burn itself out can’t be forgotten, says science journalist Debora MacKenzie




					www.theguardian.com


----------



## Mation (Mar 26, 2022)

So my Day 5 lft is still positive. Am I meant to report the test result or would it look like a new infection?


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Mar 26, 2022)

Mation said:


> So my Day 5 lft is still positive. Am I meant to report the test result or would it look like a new infection?


I didn’t, I only reported my first positive LFT on the government site.

 I reported some of the follow ups on my work system but that’s evidently just turned out to be pointless bureaucracy, given how nothing was triggered automatically by my first LFT.


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Mar 26, 2022)

two sheds said:


> Interesting short piece on the science around covid, and some scientists' entrenched positions. At the end I was thinking 'yes but what's your view?' but she does say in the last paragraph and it looks sensible.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Scientists are people and as subject to cognitive dissonance as anyone else I guess. 

If anyone disagrees I shall argue the point for the next 146 pages


----------



## two sheds (Mar 26, 2022)

Agent Sparrow said:


> Scientists are people and as subject to cognitive dissonance as anyone else I guess.
> 
> If anyone disagrees I shall argue the point for the next 146 pages


But you'd hope that following scientific method would be some sort of inoculation against that. 

Around 145.03 pages to go


----------



## prunus (Mar 26, 2022)

Mation said:


> So my Day 5 lft is still positive. Am I meant to report the test result or would it look like a new infection?



I think you are supposed to report every result.  I don’t think most people do though.


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Mar 26, 2022)

two sheds said:


> But you'd hope that following scientific method would be some sort of inoculation against that.
> 
> Around 145.03 pages to go


 I think in most cases it does, but perhaps less in the case of some very prominent leads whose research is their  baby and/or have put their reputation on the line. There’s examples of this all over academia, for example climate change, Holocaust denial etc. Tbf there’s always an element of being selective about the research you cite in supporting your stance/why you did a certain study and I guess there’s always some potential evidence out there to support even the more opposed stances.

Also in less significant cases, have you seen that Reddit/Twitter thread about scientists sharing what niche arguments absolutely rage in their discipline? It’s hilarious!


----------



## two sheds (Mar 26, 2022)

Agent Sparrow said:


> Also in less significant cases, have you seen that Reddit/Twitter thread about scientists sharing what niche arguments absolutely rage in their discipline? It’s hilarious!


Would love to see it - can't see on search of "Reddit scientists niche arguments rage in their discipline"

145.94 (got it wrong last time  )


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Mar 26, 2022)

I’ve also been searching for the summary article since writing the above post and still not found it 

I think it might possibly be based on picking the more humorous ones out of this thread, but unfortunately there’s a huge bit at the beginning debating the reliability of Chinese research, which might be valid, might be racist, or might be both


----------



## Mation (Mar 26, 2022)

Good news for red wine drinkers and champagne anarchists! 🍷🥂









						COVID-19 Risk Appears to Vary Across Different Alcoholic Beverages
					

Objectives: To evaluate the associations of status, amount, and frequency of alcohol consumption across different alcoholic beverages with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) risk and associated mortality.Methods: This study included 473,957 subjects, 16,559 of whom tested positive for COVID-19...




					www.frontiersin.org
				





> Conclusions: The COVID-19 risk appears to vary across different alcoholic beverage subtypes, frequency, and amount. *Red wine, white wine, and champagne have chances to reduce the risk of COVID-19*. Consumption of beer and cider and spirits and heavy drinking are not recommended during the epidemics. Public health guidance should focus on reducing the risk of COVID-19 by advocating healthy lifestyle habits and preferential policies among consumers of beer and cider and spirits.


(My bold.)

Could it be that the reason I avoided testing positive for so long, despite working in a high-risk environment, was not in fact my superior moral fortitude  but because I like my red wine?

(I currently have covid.)

Post not prompted by or meant to relate to Agent Sparrow's Reddit discussion post above, which I've only just spotted as I came to post this.


----------



## crossthebreeze (Apr 7, 2022)

I thought this was all very interesting. Some symptoms are immune based while some are due to the virus causing damage. Explains why some people are now getting (immune based) symptoms without testing positive.


----------



## Agent Sparrow (Apr 7, 2022)

crossthebreeze said:


> I thought this was all very interesting. Some symptoms are immune based while some are due to the virus causing damage. Explains why some people are now getting (immune based) symptoms without testing positive.



This was all really interesting - thanks for posting it.

I wonder if this might explain the difference in my definitely COVID  experience recently, and my probably COVID experience at the beginning of everything? And whether constant headache counts as an immunity symptom or damage symptom?


----------



## Sue (Apr 7, 2022)

Mation said:


> Good news for red wine drinkers and champagne anarchists! 🍷🥂
> 
> 
> 
> ...


So being pissed for most of lockdown was actually a good thing..?


----------



## Mation (Apr 7, 2022)

Sue said:


> So being pissed for most of lockdown was actually a good thing..?


That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it


----------



## weepiper (Apr 11, 2022)

It's all over and everything is fine now though


----------



## l'Otters (Apr 16, 2022)

On a busy cross country train yesterday. Most people didn’t have masks on. 

For a while I was sat opposite a woman who’d had some accessibility support to get her onto the train. She had a cloth mask on. (I moved across the aislewhen the space opposite her came empty because I was sat 4 to a table seat, opposite someone with long legs and an inability to notice where my feet were - kept knocking my toes )

At some point she asked me about my mask - I had a reusable ffp3 on. I explained a bit about the type of mask, the electrostatic charge for the pm2.5 particles, the need for filtering aerosols vs droplets etc as best I could off the top of my head. Showed her an eBay listing for the kind of mask I had using my phone. She said she was assuming I must be clinically vulnerable like her, I said I’m not I just don’t want to get covid or give it to anyone especially not my mum who I was travelling to go visit. I felt so bad for this woman. She said she’d not been out much for 2 years cos of covid and being ECV. Was going to visit her mum for her mums 96th birthday, first time seeing her in years because of covid… her mum has Alzheimer’s and thus is also clinically vulnerable. 

If I’d had any unopened spare masks with me I’d have given one to her. But I’ve got a box at my mums and a box at home now and hadn’t had any reason to pack any spares. Maybe I should start carrying an unopened spare one from now on. 

She was sat opposite a guy with no mask on for the first half hour of joining the train. Her mask was a cloth one the kind with no wire at the top so tend leak around the top edge. 

Fucking hate this country so much.


----------



## BigMoaner (Apr 18, 2022)

Covid: Thousands of vaccinators get permanent NHS roles
					

The 11,483 people who have taken permanent NHS England jobs include former gym managers and air crew.



					www.bbc.co.uk


----------



## two sheds (May 4, 2022)

Interesting research on people with asthma getting some protection against coronavirus.









						Here’s why people with allergic asthma are at lower COVID-19 risk
					

A protein called IL-13 mounts defenses that include virus-trapping mucus and armor that shields airway cells from infection.




					www.sciencenews.org
				




Gives a suggested mechanism, but does end with a warning:



> Unfortunately, the extra protection doesn’t mean that people with allergic asthma don’t have to be concerned about getting COVID-19, Dickey says. “People with asthma have had very bad outcomes. This is not a virus you want to take chances with,” he says. But it’s OK to bask on the bright side a little. “It’s not fun to have asthma, so you have to be grateful for every rare occasion where it does something useful.”



Alongside some steroid inhalers helping to stop people getting covid symptoms, eg brown inhaler: Beclometasone inhaler: steroid medicine used for asthma and COPD, Asthma drug may reduce risk of severe Covid if taken early – study

plus montelukast Montelukast in hospitalized patients diagnosed with COVID-19 - PubMed


----------



## Buddy Bradley (May 4, 2022)

Hospitals are still struggling - my Dad had to wait over 7 hours in an ambulance last night, and is still just parked in a bed in a corridor waiting for them to decide what to do with him. Fucking ridiculous waste of resources.


----------



## miss direct (May 8, 2022)

I have been feeling utterly awful for the last two days. Runny nose, sneezing, cough, achy, sore throat. This came on on the last day of a trip away (and in particular, during a really cold long bus journey with the air con cranked up.) I've taken three lateral flow tests and all negative so far. Really struggling to work. I have to wear a mask to teach anyway, but it's horrid with a runny nose and having to sneeze. Not sure what to do


----------



## LDC (May 8, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> Hospitals are still struggling - my Dad had to wait over 7 hours in an ambulance last night, and is still just parked in a bed in a corridor waiting for them to decide what to do with him. Fucking ridiculous waste of resources.



Acute medicine is fucked. Totally fucked. Actually primary care is as well tbh.


----------



## zahir (May 12, 2022)

Thread arguing that the hepatitis cases in children are probably due to covid.


----------



## 2hats (May 19, 2022)

(Imperial/Cedars-Sinai) A hypothesis that cases of acute hepatitis in children may be arising from SARS-CoV-2 viral persistence in the gastrointestinal tract leading to repeated release of viral proteins across the intestinal epithelium. In particular, superantigenic protein fragments of spike*, resembling staphylococcal enterotoxin B, may give rise to broad and non-specific T-cell activation with adenovirus perhaps sensitising the host to those superantigens.
DOI: 10.1016/S2468-1253(22)00166-2.

There is an energy allocation trade-off argument that young children can be more susceptible to this scenario; essentially because their body tends to tolerate disease and prioritises growth over immune defence, unless the pathogen represents a serious threat to survival and fitness.

Brief overview thread from one of the authors.


* See, eg, TWiV #815 for a background discussion regarding superantigenic properties of fragments of SARS-CoV-2 spike.


----------



## elbows (May 30, 2022)

They had a national Covid art work monument thing in Bedworth that was ceremonially burnt at the weekend.


----------



## Cloo (Jun 6, 2022)

Crap, my mum's finally got it.  And just before going to Glyndebourne & then Slovakia too  

I asked gsv to check himself as he's had a nasty cold for a few days and we'd seen my parents at the weekend,  but he's clear - I thought it prob wasn't covid as very sinusy.

Mum is vulnerable but but not 'OMG she'll be a goner if she gets it' vulnerable,  so hope she will be OK. It'll mostly suck because of her ME, which means viruses always knock her out.


----------



## mx wcfc (Jun 7, 2022)

After swerving it for two and a half years, I've finally got it.  Just back from a festival, and there are others on the FB group saying the same thing.

I'm fine atm.  Just the irritating cough.  It's my M-i-L that's the worry.  She's 90 and lives here.  I've given her food today.  B@gger.  

I'm just frantically contacting everyone now - I've posted it on FB (as have others) , so hopefully people will be aware.  Emailed a mate who doesn't do FB etc.  

On the bright side, it means I don't have to go into the office on Thursday, or to a work function that evening, which means my mohawk doesn't have to go yet!


----------



## existentialist (Jun 18, 2022)

Jesus, this is as bad as it's ever been, in terms of people unexpectedly being exposed.


----------



## l'Otters (Jun 19, 2022)

Yeah quite a few people I know got it in the last week


----------



## Cloo (Jul 10, 2022)

gsv has it now - I thought he might have it much worse than me, but he's had a bit of a rest he's feeling OK and thinks maybe just bike riding in the heat really brought the feeling shonky on. Rest of us are clear for now, but I'm not suprised he's Patient Zero as he had a week of heavy socialising and office working with colleagues over from abroad (not that their being from abroad is the issue - the heavy working and socialising I mean!)


----------



## ska invita (Jul 11, 2022)

Is this Indie hyperbole? i cant open their articles








						‘Stealthy’ new Covid variant can reinfect you every month
					

‘Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections,’ said Prof Danny Altmann




					www.independent.co.uk


----------



## 2hats (Jul 11, 2022)

ska invita said:


> Is this Indie hyperbole? i cant open their articles
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It's referring to the study highlighted here. Read the linked overview for a summary.


----------



## prunus (Jul 11, 2022)

ska invita said:


> Is this Indie hyperbole? i cant open their articles
> 
> 
> 
> ...



No way to know really.  We'll find out...

You can use 'reader view' or similar to read Indie articles btw


----------



## elbows (Jul 11, 2022)

ska invita said:


> Is this Indie hyperbole? i cant open their articles
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Its got plenty of links to the actual science in it.

Its compatible with what was already being learnt about Omicron in general, not just the latest version of it. 

A picture is indeed emerging on Omicron infections not being a good booster of immunity against future infection against Omicron.

The headline is the most hyperbolic thing about it, continuing a trend of referring to Omicron as stealthy or sneaky, although the evidence suggests that some of this terminology may actually be well deserved. However since various forms of population protection and disease surveillance have been dropped during the same period that featured the arrival of Omicron, when it comes to the application of that terminology to aspects that are not directly related to peoples immune systems, the picture is less to do with the virus being 'sneaky and stealthy' and more to do with people and regimes turning a blind eye to its presence and implications.
.
As for why this new information is considered alarming, its because it rather pisses on previous expectations and policies that used concepts like herd immunity, and then later 'endemic equilibrium' & settling down to seasonal patters etc as a justification for policies that let it rip. It upsets establishment expecations as to the frequency and scale of disruption that the virus is still capable of causing.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 17, 2022)

119 is a bit useless now. I've got a medical procedure on Wednesday and was told I had to take an LFT and report the results to 119 - after listening to endless automated options I finally reached the option to talk to someone and was told "sorry, we're too busy, try calling again later" before it hung up on me.  

I don't even know whether they're going to accept a reported result from a non-NHS (i.e. paid) LFT as it doesn't have a tracking code on it.


----------



## wemakeyousoundb (Jul 17, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> 119 is a bit useless now. I've got a medical procedure on Wednesday and was told I had to take an LFT and report the results to 119 - after listening to endless automated options I finally reached the option to talk to someone and was told "sorry, we're too busy, try calling again later" before it hung up on me.
> 
> I don't even know whether they're going to accept a reported result from a non-NHS (i.e. paid) LFT as it doesn't have a tracking code on it.


If you have a medical procedure in hospital you can order tests from NHS test and trace.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Jul 17, 2022)

wemakeyousoundb said:


> If you have a medical procedure in hospital you can order tests from NHS test and trace.


Yeah, that's only if you're being admitted though - I just have a gastroscopy appointment at a clinic.


----------



## Cloo (Jul 23, 2022)

I tested + on Monday, having a mild bout. To my pleasant surprise, much line paler test today, which is day 5, although possibly it's 6, as I didn't test the day before my +, so may be freeeee on Monday. Son has his second jab today and luckily he remains negative, which I'm very relieved about as I have a slight paranoia that holiday destinations might start insisting on '2 vaccinations' proof for everyone again and we this weekend is pretty much our last chance to get that done in time for our break in a month's time, so really didn't want him to miss it. Also makes it less likely he'll catch it in the meantime of course.


----------



## LDC (Jul 24, 2022)

Just heading home from a week seeing friends in Berlin. The difference between there and the UK is shocking.

Everyone wears FFP2 or 3 masks on public transport. People are reminded politely with announcements and by staff and I never saw any moaning, refusals or 'exemptions'. Some friends went out to a nightclub and they said loads of bars etc. have installed (with State grants) really good ventilation systems, to the point where they could be inside with loads of people smoking (as plenty still smoke there) and they could hardly notice it. And you can check if the place you're going has got one, so it's been a way of encouraging people to come to your venue rather than a poorly ventilated one.

Oh, and the German State is doing €9 tickets that give you unlimited use of the metro, local trains, buses and trams. For 3 fucking months. Shit sometimes it is hard not to be depressed about the state of the UK!


----------



## BigMoaner (Jul 24, 2022)

LDC said:


> Oh, and the German State is doing €9 tickets that give you unlimited use of the metro, local trains, buses and trams. For 3 fucking months. Shit sometimes it is hard not to be depressed about the state of the UK!


that's wild. paying 200 a month a the moment. 

what does a 3 courrse meal cost out there? just trying to put that ticket price in context


----------



## LDC (Jul 24, 2022)

BigMoaner said:


> that's wild. paying 200 a month a the moment.
> 
> what does a 3 courrse meal cost out there? just trying to put that ticket price in context



Other costs seems about the same as any big city tbh, and housing is expensive of course. It's cheap though that €9 ticket, everyone I talked to thinks it's a brilliant deal.


----------



## BigMoaner (Jul 24, 2022)

LDC said:


> Other costs seems about the same as any big city tbh, and housing is expensive of course. It's cheap though that €9 ticket, everyone I talked to thinks it's a brilliant deal.


yes incredible.


----------



## ska invita (Jul 24, 2022)

LDC said:


> Other costs seems about the same as any big city tbh, and housing is expensive of course. .


Heard they have rent caps tho


----------



## furluxor (Jul 31, 2022)

So an (extended) family member got sick with Covid whilst abroad, flew home sick so as not to lose plane tickets, then once home travelled about by public transport for leisure purposes. FML.

Also, I'm at a mask crossroads. I see pretty much no one masked around, ever, so it feels superfluous, although I still carry them so I can put them on out of solidarity if a masked person is around. If I'm to go back to wearing them regularly, I need to buy more. Those of you in the UK, where are you at with masks? Do you wear them? Do people around you wear them? If you wear them, do you wear simple fabric ones or FFFFFFP2/N95? If the latter, are they at all reusable and where do you source them? Thanks


----------



## Cloo (Jul 31, 2022)

I'm hearing about a lot of people flying with COVID, especially return journeys. Gsv and I have only just had it, but when we go away at the end of Aug I'm thinking we should still wear masks on both flights as immunity isn't lasting all that long and I have to assume there will be people travelling unknowingly or otherwise with COVID on both flights.

furluxor - I wear N95 ones one tube, I've been taking the opportunity to travel without as I recover from current bout, but given what I'm hearing about reinfection I'm going to start wearing them again. I'd say there's usually 1-2 people per carriage wearing them these days.


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## existentialist (Jul 31, 2022)

furluxor said:


> So an (extended) family member got sick with Covid whilst abroad, flew home sick so as not to lose plane tickets, then once home travelled about by public transport for leisure purposes. FML.
> 
> Also, I'm at a mask crossroads. I see pretty much no one masked around, ever, so it feels superfluous, although I still carry them so I can put them on out of solidarity if a masked person is around. If I'm to go back to wearing them regularly, I need to buy more. Those of you in the UK, where are you at with masks? Do you wear them? Do people around you wear them? If you wear them, do you wear simple fabric ones or FFFFFFP2/N95? If the latter, are they at all reusable and where do you source them? Thanks


I'm using "HARD" (brand name! ) FFP2 masks that I get from (spit) Amazon, and work hard at the "fuck it, I WILL wear a mask attitude". But maybe that's easier for someone who's prepared to wear a funky suit and a purple hat out in public


----------



## prunus (Jul 31, 2022)

existentialist said:


> I'm using "HARD" (brand name! ) FFP2 masks that I get from (spit) Amazon, and work hard at the "fuck it, I WILL wear a mask attitude". But maybe that's easier for someone who's prepared to wear a funky suit and a purple hat out in public



Pics please


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## existentialist (Jul 31, 2022)

prunus said:


> Pics please


Over on the Ugly Mug thread.

ETA: https://www.urban75.net/forums/thre...ur-delectation.274873/page-1145#post-17781720


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## gentlegreen (Jul 31, 2022)

In Aldi I'm often the only one I see wearing one - except for one young staff member supervising the scab tills who is clearly of Asian ethnicity.
People leave me alone - 6 foot 2, built like a shed - buzz-cut hair, giant headphones leaking jazz, grubby from gardening, knackered muddy trainers, but often with two bottles of decent French wine along with a two-Ikea-tote shop of cans of beans and veggies.

Last week I was at my sister's - where my niece and her 8 year old had recently recovered from a bout - and only on the basis of meeting them in the back garden via the back gate - I didn't even use their loo.

I've spent 40 years in the main having a very good core diet, moderate in my habits and until recently taking more than adequate exercise and with plans to up my game in the near future.
I was lucky enough to retire early, so I have no intention of taking risks for fear of feeling embarrassed for twenty minutes in the supermarket.


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## furluxor (Jul 31, 2022)

existentialist gentlegreen Thank you for your input, I also don't have a problem with standing out, my wavering is more along the lines of 'is it still worth it?'. Granted, it's easy to act blase when I'm (relatively) young and healthy. I've seen people here mention that those basic cotton masks don't do much but I'm reluctant to buy FFP2s if I don't need them because it's just more stuff that ends in a landfill. So still very undecided! Wish things were more clear-cut.

As a side note, I really enjoyed descriptions of your appearance -- very cool.


----------



## existentialist (Jul 31, 2022)

furluxor said:


> existentialist gentlegreen Thank you for your input, I also don't have a problem with standing out, my wavering is more along the lines of 'is it still worth it?'. Granted, it's easy to act blase when I'm (relatively) young and healthy. I've seen people here mention that those basic cotton masks don't do much but I'm reluctant to buy FFP2s if I don't need them because it's just more stuff that ends in a landfill. So still very undecided! Wish things were more clear-cut.
> 
> As a side note, I really enjoyed descriptions of your appearance -- very cool.


What I tell myself is..."what price am I paying to put this mask on?". Apart from the 50p or so the mask costs. The answer, at least for me, is "precious little". The minor discomfort of wearing one is perfectly tolerable, and if I'm honest, I am more (albeit briefly) exercised at walking into a building and noticing that I'm one of a tiny minority wearing one. But I've only had one instance where someone was a bit arsey about that, and that was at the height of the pandemic, when they were required, anyway.


----------



## teuchter (Jul 31, 2022)

furluxor said:


> existentialist gentlegreen Thank you for your input, I also don't have a problem with standing out, my wavering is more along the lines of 'is it still worth it?'. Granted, it's easy to act blase when I'm (relatively) young and healthy. I've seen people here mention that those basic cotton masks don't do much but I'm reluctant to buy FFP2s if I don't need them because it's just more stuff that ends in a landfill. So still very undecided! Wish things were more clear-cut.
> 
> As a side note, I really enjoyed descriptions of your appearance -- very cool.


My impression is that if you want to wear a mask that has a realistic chance of protecting yourself, use one of the FFP2 ones. Cloth ones have gaps everywhere and may be something approaching useless.


----------



## 8ball (Jul 31, 2022)

NBC suit and full respirator for me.

Esp. now that monkeypox is also on the rampage.


----------



## Mr Retro (Jul 31, 2022)

I have a look at U-75 every so often to see how the extremely paranoid Covid’s are thinking. So when this time last year when you were all swearing to the effectiveness of masks and how you’d all keep wearing them, what has changed that you don’t wear masks any more?


----------



## Sue (Jul 31, 2022)

Mr Retro said:


> I have a look at U-75 every so often to see how the extremely paranoid Covid’s are thinking. So when this time last year when you were all swearing to the effectiveness of masks and how you’d all keep wearing them, *what has changed that you don’t wear masks any more*?


Still do. HTH.


----------



## l'Otters (Aug 1, 2022)

I got some reuseable ffp3 masks that work out at about 75p each. I use those for longer train journeys.

For shorter journeys & for shopping I have some non reuseable ffp2 and ffp3’s that are more like 30p-50p each. I reuse these too, by hanging them up to air out for at least 3 days before wearing again. 

I still wear the cloth masks I’ve made for some situations where I care a bit more what I look like. I layered them so they’re not too far off ffp2 level filtration and I made them to fit well. 

My reasoning is while a well sealing ffp3 isn’t going to be completely proof against longer exposure to infection it’s still going to reduce the viral load. And of course it’ll still do some source containment in case I was asymptotic and infectious. 

I think I’ve noticed more people seeming to do a slight double take which I can only guess is in reaction to seeing a mask/respirator. Bit hard to tell because no one has given me any hassle since this one occasion in summer 2021. Similarly I could be attributing it wrongly but I think some people in ticket offices, shops, etc, might be making more positive reactions in response to the masks. I dunno. I’m mostly wearing them for me at this point. Don’t really have head space to worry about the wider picture on this day to day level.


----------



## PR1Berske (Aug 1, 2022)

Mr Retro said:


> I have a look at U-75 every so often to see how the extremely paranoid Covid’s are thinking. So when this time last year when you were all swearing to the effectiveness of masks and how you’d all keep wearing them, what has changed that you don’t wear masks any more?


I still wear masks in certain circumstances. If a shop or bus is packed, I wear a mask. I'm an admin worker in the NHS so we've hardly stopped needing masks or testing so it's not hard for me to keep wearing them.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 1, 2022)

Mr Retro said:


> I have a look at U-75 every so often to see how the extremely paranoid Covid’s are thinking. So when this time last year when you were all swearing to the effectiveness of masks and how you’d all keep wearing them, what has changed that you don’t wear masks any more?


Definitely one reason for wearing a mask is to get up the noses of people who come out with stuff like this.


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 1, 2022)

I don't usually go in for selfies, but up yours Mr Tard.



I still consider the booster programme a bit decadent and "first world" - certainly for people like me who have far more to do with plants than people - but I won't turn them down ... and for those less fortunate than me, hopefully even imperfect masking will mean they get a very light dose and quasi-boosting that way.


----------



## xenon (Aug 1, 2022)

Have not wore a mask of any kind for months. People giving grief to those who do, are obviously twats.


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## xenon (Aug 1, 2022)

Oh and to answer REtro. What has changed.
Most people who want one have had a vaccine now.
Omnicron is for most people, a less severe illness, largely dependant on the vaccines.
I never liked wearing a mask and once it wasn't mandatory and the above applied was glad to stop.


----------



## ska invita (Aug 1, 2022)

xenon said:


> Oh and to answer REtro. What has changed.
> Most people who want one have had a vaccine now.
> Omnicron is for most people, a less severe illness, largely dependant on the vaccines.
> I never liked wearing a mask and once it wasn't mandatory and the above applied was glad to stop.


also this has changed


----------



## LDC (Aug 1, 2022)

Mr Retro? Hmmm I can't recall why I have them on ignore. <Takes them off ignore.> Oh yes I remember now. <Back on ignore.>


----------



## teuchter (Aug 1, 2022)

The main reasons I don't* wear a mask any more, whereas I did a year back:
1. Vaccines and their proven effectiveness
2. Virtually no-one else does, so whether anyone likes it or not, the concept of certain places being relatively "safe" for those at higher risk has been abandoned and I don't see much point in me being the only one in (eg) the supermarket wearing a mask to protect others. Those at high risk now have to take proactively defensive measures and can't rely on other people reducing the risk for them.
3. From the point of view of protecting myself, firstly I've now had covid. Secondly, compared to a year ago I am pretty much back to "normal" actvities which means that I am regularly in crowded places doing social stuff that you can't do with a mask on. So, the situations where I can wear a mask with little impact on what I'm doing constitute a much smaller proportion of stuff I'm doing. In other words, I've given up trying to protect myself, because I feel that if I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it. In fact when I did eventually get covid I'm fairly sure it was after meeting someone for a drink and sitting outside for 99% of that time, rather than from all the times I've sat on trains or buses unmasked.
4. Whatever anyone says, wearing a mask is unpleasant especially in hot weather and for extended periods, say on an 8 hour train journey. Especially if you go for a proper FFP one. It also makes it difficult to communicate with people properly. The balance of benefits vs unpleasantness, due to reasons 1-3 swung to a point where my personal threshold was crossed.

*I do/have done in certain situations still, for example if I go into a small shop and the staff are wearing masks I'll put mine on if I have it with me. If I suspected at all that I might have covid or a cold I'd wear one. And I have worn one a couple of times in the lead-up to visiting someone potentially vulnerable.


----------



## iona (Aug 1, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> Mr Tard.


Really?


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 1, 2022)

iona said:


> Really?


OK, maybe I should qualify it with wilfully-

I think intelligence works on many levels and how you use what you have. I spent my working life around people much more intelligent than me.

Plus I'm 62 and on the spectrum and I've come to realise recently I have no tolerance for "stupidity" - call it my last vestige of intolerance.
The key advantage with doing most of one's social interaction online is there's an iggy button.

In terms of interacting with random humanity, I would need to be amazingly in tune with someone to risk monkeypox or similar and covid has made me realise I am no longer prepared to risk *any *viruses if I can possibly avoid it. The stench of bathroom products invading my space is bad enough.


----------



## iona (Aug 1, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> OK, maybe I should qualify it with wilfully-
> 
> I think intelligence works on many levels and how you use what you have. I spent my working life around people much more intelligent than me.
> 
> ...


Oh well that's fine then, crack on calling people retards if they're being _willfully_ stupid


----------



## Thesaint (Aug 1, 2022)

For those still wearing masks of any sort, what would be the thing or event that would make you not wear it anymore? Is it time based, while they can still be bought, caught covid anyway, or some kind of data based decision? Just curious and not judging.


----------



## existentialist (Aug 1, 2022)

Thesaint said:


> For those still wearing masks of any sort, what would be the thing or event that would make you not wear it anymore? Is it time based, while they can still be bought, caught covid anyway, or some kind of data based decision? Just curious and not judging.


A substantial reduction in the risk of infection. Not entirely surprisingly.


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 1, 2022)

iona said:


> Oh well that's fine then, crack on calling people retards if they're being _willfully_ stupid


I think "retard" long ago lost its literal meaning - see also "moron" and "cretin".
And yes I think I noticed a recent thread but tl:dr.
I've become used to it via "creatard" "religitard", "trumptard" and "covitard"...
I suppose there might be people with a congenital brain issue who are also covitards, but "retard" is surely only a medical condition / possible bigotry *in the USA* ?


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## gentlegreen (Aug 1, 2022)

Thesaint said:


> For those still wearing masks of any sort, what would be the thing or event that would make you not wear it anymore? Is it time based, while they can still be bought, caught covid anyway, or some kind of data based decision? Just curious and not judging.


I'm struggling to imagine a time now. I won't even use the bathroom at my sister's house and only meet them in the garden.
Covid taught me that catching flu pretty well every year at work had not been a good thing - in my last two years there I got it full-on to the extent that I was off work for weeks ...
I suppose vaccine tech would have to be even more amazing than the covid ones - and super-responsive to all similar new viruses ...


----------



## manji (Aug 2, 2022)

Just received these text is it genuine ? NHS-UK: You've been exposed to someone with Omicron variant BA.5. PIease order a PCR test via: uk-health-department.com can’t see how it’s possible unless I can catch it off Dexter


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## xenon (Aug 2, 2022)

manji said:


> .Just received these text is it genuine ? NHS-UK: You've been exposed to someone with Omicron variant BA.5. PIease order a PCR test via: uk-health-department.com can’t see how it’s possible unless I can catch it off Dexter



It's a scam. Do not follow the link. Lots of people have been stung this way.



I don't think NHS are sending any texts like this out any more. Certainly when I called track and tracing as I needed help reading the LFT indicator, they were not interested in knowing my contacts and *I wouldnt' have given them anyway.

* I told people myself


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## manji (Aug 2, 2022)

Thanks suspected as much 👍🏻


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## 8ball (Aug 2, 2022)

I think the last 10 times I’ve worn a mask have all been in hospitals / pharmacies / robberies.


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## wemakeyousoundb (Aug 2, 2022)

8ball said:


> I think the last 10 times I’ve worn a mask have all been in hospitals / pharmacies / robberies.


you've been robbing hospital pharmacies?


----------



## Aladdin (Aug 3, 2022)

90 mins in a glasshouse with 2 windows open and a door.

Person A is there a day before their covid symptoms kick in and they are also unvaccinated. 

The other person, person B, is fully vaxxed.

What is the likelihood of person B getting covid and how long before symptoms will show?


----------



## 8ball (Aug 3, 2022)

Aladdin said:


> 90 mins in a glasshouse with 2 windows open and a door.
> 
> Person A is there a day before their covid symptoms kick in and they are also unvaccinated.
> 
> ...



‘Lean-to’ or ‘even span’ glasshouse?


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## Aladdin (Aug 3, 2022)

8ball said:


> ‘Lean-to’ or ‘even span’ glasshouse?




More a mini conservatory? Attached to the house...about 8ft square


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## 8ball (Aug 3, 2022)

Aladdin said:


> More a mini conservatory? Attached to the house...about 8ft square



3.7%


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## Aladdin (Aug 3, 2022)

8ball said:


> 3.7%



3.7% chance of catching covid? 
Or just random guess...

Kind of worried about my dad. Last thing he needs would be covid now...not after everything he has gone through the past few weeks.


----------



## Puddy_Tat (Aug 4, 2022)

manji said:


> can’t see how it’s possible unless I can catch it off Dexter



i think they did think it's possible for covid to be transmitted between cats and humans, but i'd say it's pretty damn unlikely that a cat would have given your details to the 'track and trace' people.

hope that helps



😷


----------



## 8ball (Aug 4, 2022)

Aladdin said:


> 3.7% chance of catching covid?
> Or just random guess...
> 
> Kind of worried about my dad. Last thing he needs would be covid now...not after everything he has gone through the past few weeks.



Has he got some tests?


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## l'Otters (Aug 4, 2022)

existentialist said:


> A substantial reduction in the risk of infection. Not entirely surprisingly.


This.
There are a few other scenarios where I’d ditch masks; eg if we had sterilising vaccines and I was offered it.

I didn’t imagine I’d be wearing them this long and this consistently. Somehow although on one level I knew the pandemic might rage on for a number of years that didn’t map across to the types of mitigations / protections I’d need to continue with.

 I don’t think I’ll change my approach for public transport, shops, libraries, health care etc. until background infection levels are right down, but for some stuff eg training courses I think it the ventilation was good, the air quality was monitored and displayed, everyone attending was doing regular rapid antigen tests, everyone present who could have one had taken vaccines for covid….that’s a fair old list of provisos but if they were met I might be up for sitting in a room bare faced.


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## Aladdin (Aug 4, 2022)

8ball said:


> Has he got some tests?


Will test him this am. 
Tested negative yesterday...and hoping it stayd that way


This was why I was asking how many days after ose contact can a person turn out to be positive.


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## 8ball (Aug 4, 2022)

Aladdin said:


> This was why I was asking how many days after ose contact can a person turn out to be positive.



I was under the impression it was around 5 to about 13 days with it usually being pretty certain after about 8 days, but that may well have changed with the new variant.
Someone here will know.


----------



## 2hats (Aug 4, 2022)

For omicron lineage 1-15 days though mean incubation period is around 4-5 days (see post #47034 from the UK thread).


----------



## Mation (Aug 4, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> I think "retard" long ago lost its literal meaning - see also "moron" and "cretin".
> And yes I think I noticed a recent thread but tl:dr.
> I've become used to it via "creatard" "religitard", "trumptard" and "covitard"...
> I suppose there might be people with a congenital brain issue who are also covitards, but "retard" is surely only a medical condition / possible bigotry *in the USA* ?


Wow. I'd thought better of you.


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 4, 2022)

Mation said:


> Wow. I'd thought better of you.


Well now you know I'm clearly a fascist bigot.


----------



## klang (Aug 4, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> Well now you know I'm clearly a fascist bigot.


fantastically helpful.


----------



## gentlegreen (Aug 4, 2022)

klang said:


> fantastically helpful.


I aim to please.


----------



## 8ball (Aug 4, 2022)

Please hold the line, your call is important to us.


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## IC3D (Aug 4, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> Well now you know I'm clearly a fascist bigot.


Naive.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 30, 2022)

People I know personally in Edinburgh who have tested positive since the 21st of August:

My two sons
Their dad
Their grandpa
My eldest brother's girlfriend 
A friend of said brother and girlfriend's 
A long-term good customer at my work
His daughter 

Combination of the schools being back (they went back on the 17th) and the Festival being on properly for the first time since 2019.


----------



## l'Otters (Aug 30, 2022)

Apparently my brother didn’t take any of the vaccines he was offered for covid. Found out via my mum, I’m not in touch with him. She didn’t want to go there to even find out what his logic was, I think she feels she’s treading on eggshells with him a bit anyway so wants to preserve things being amicable and semi functional at the moment. 

All we got to go on was he said it was a choice and he made one, and he’d done his own research about it. Apparently. That’s all my mum knew. 
Fuck knows which variety of rabbit hole he went down. 

Meh.


----------



## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Aug 31, 2022)

l'Otters said:


> Apparently my brother didn’t take any of the vaccines he was offered for covid. Found out via my mum, I’m not in touch with him. She didn’t want to go there to even find out what his logic was, I think she feels she’s treading on eggshells with him a bit anyway so wants to preserve things being amicable and semi functional at the moment.
> 
> All we got to go on was he said it was a choice and he made one, and he’d done his own research about it. Apparently. That’s all my mum knew.
> Fuck knows which variety of rabbit hole he went down.
> ...



Oh god my brother is the same. Except I've unfortunately heard about his rabbit hole in great detail.


----------



## David Clapson (Aug 31, 2022)

Very grim news from FT archive.ph


----------



## Aladdin (Sep 12, 2022)

My cousin got covid in early August.
Got double pneumonia and was hospitalized. Now covid has fucked up his liver and he is having to have fluid drawn from his abdomen.

The really sad thing is he didnt get vaccinated because his missus is a pharmacist who is antivaxx. She got covid at the same time and got over it in a week. He on the other hand is likely to be in hospital for another month at least and is waiting to be transferred to another hospital that has a liver specialist onsite. 

The vaxx works.
My 82 yr old dad got covid while in hospital fir heart problems...and he was just at the best stage of vaxx.. just 2 months after his jab. He had a high temperature for 2 days and some sniffles. He is still showing +ve on swab tests but feels fine.


As for mask wearing? 
Its no skin off my nose to wear a mask. I wear them everywhere except my own home. Mostly because covid is on the up again since schools reopened and people are not being as careful as they were.


----------



## Numbers (Sep 16, 2022)

I can’t remember the last time I wore a mask.  Even on packed tubes it’s rare to see anyone wearing one.


----------



## strung out (Sep 16, 2022)

Yeah, me either. Wore one in Malaysia back in June, but don't think I've worn one in the UK since April or May.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Sep 16, 2022)

I've worn one when going into medical facilities because they still have the signs up, but then I feel a bit silly because literally nobody else in the entire building is wearing one, including the staff.


----------



## 8ball (Sep 16, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> I've worn one when going into medical facilities because they still have the signs up, but then I feel a bit silly because literally nobody else in the entire building is wearing one, including the staff.



Snap.


----------



## two sheds (Sep 16, 2022)

Been in a couple of places - dentist and for eye test - staff were wearing them so I did.


----------



## weepiper (Sep 16, 2022)

Been in an orthodontist office recently and everyone was wearing one. Also in a hospital for a day procedure and everyone was wearing one there too except one particular cantankerous old patient. I wore one when I flew to Dublin a month ago, on the plane and in the airport waiting. Not many other people were wearing masks there. Otherwise I've not been wearing one for a while now.


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## existentialist (Sep 25, 2022)

Buddy Bradley said:


> I've worn one when going into medical facilities because they still have the signs up, but then I feel a bit silly because literally nobody else in the entire building is wearing one, including the staff.


I work in a medical facility, and we have those signs. I, too, am often the only one wearing a mask, AND I DON'T GIVE A SHIT 

Oddly, nobody ever says anything.


----------



## 8ball (Sep 26, 2022)

existentialist said:


> I work in a medical facility, and we have those signs. I, too, am often the only one wearing a mask, AND I DON'T GIVE A SHIT
> 
> Oddly, nobody ever says anything.



How much for a small bag of ket?


----------



## existentialist (Sep 27, 2022)

8ball said:


> How much for a small bag of ket?


My career, probably. Too much


----------



## Storm Fox (Sep 28, 2022)

The Storm Vixen has finally tested negative on a LFT 13 days after her first positive. She is getting out of breath very quickly and is exhausted. Not fun.


----------



## Aladdin (Oct 13, 2022)

Got a text today from the HSE (Ireland..and its a legitimate contact numher) 
It said I was a close contact to someone who has covid 19.
Thing is....I've met nobody.  I'm with my parents and sister cocooned.


----------



## starfish (Oct 19, 2022)

ms starfish has finally caught it. Very, very achey & a hideous headache. She tested positive yesterday so back to mask wearing in house & sleeping in separate bedrooms, which we did when i had it in June. A bloke in her work went home with it on Monday but decided to come into work yesterday as it was 'a faint line', the prick.


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## 8ball (Oct 19, 2022)

I have an unpleasant lurgee, but tests are negative so far.


----------



## MrCurry (Nov 15, 2022)

I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?  

Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?


----------



## elbows (Nov 15, 2022)

MrCurry said:


> I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?
> 
> Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?



It depends what sort of protection you mean. Protection against infection is rather fleeting in many cases, protection against mild disease gets a nice boost but wanes eventually. Protection against hospitalisation and death also wanes but the true extent of that waning has much to do with the state of an individuals immune system and their other risk factors such as health conditions and age. For example one possible version of the truth is that t-cell based protection is long lasting after the initial 2-3 doses of vaccine, but older people that are more reliant on the antibody level of defence due to their t-cell based immune system not working so well in older age are far more in need of the boosters to bump up their antibody protection.

And in terms of truly getting to the bottom of these things and building a better picture over time, real world data always takes ages to accumulate, we only learn the truth about a particular booster vaccines impact on the particular strains of covid in current circulation once huge numbers of people have been placed in harms way during a wave. And although various bits of knowledge imporve as the years go by, the analysis also gets more ocomplicated because we've not got an increasingly complex set of immune histories out there. ie people have increasingly complex histories of being infected with particular covid strains in the past, increasingly complicated vaccination histories involvig different types of vaccines and different timing between doses and between vaccination and infection.

So take for example the impact that the new dual vaccines have against current strains compared to the original vaccines. You wont get a tidy straight answer about that, and there will be some contradictions between different evidence and analysis. For example some early evidence suggested the updated vaccine might not make much difference compared to the original vaccine, but this evidence was not really based on a sufficiently large number of people. But Moderna and Pfizer have an interest in proving that the updated vaccines offer a useful boost in effectiveness, and are keen to use any data they can muster that points in that direction to make impressive claims. And the extent to which we will actually get to the bottom of this in the fullness of time is unclear. Too many variables change over time to draw the simplest conclusions, and in a country like the UK where the aim is for the vast majority of autumn 2022 booster vaccine doses given to be the updated vaccine, we wont have a large enough pool of data about people who were given the older vaccine with which to compare and contrast how they fared against upcoming waves compared to those who got the new vaccine. Might be able to work around that by comparing studies from different countries, but different countries also have different histories of past vaccine timing and which past covid strains their populations were most exposed to.


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## elbows (Nov 15, 2022)

For example, JCVI said the following about the updated vaccines based on the evidence they had at the time, some months ago. They werent clear that there would be a notable advantage to the updated vaccines at the time, but they still thought it was worth trying to use those ones anyway. The extent to which evidence has improved massively since then is not hugely clear to me at this particular moment, I think its still a mixed picture with much uncertainty. And we never know what strains will come along in future to test the vaccines in a big new way.



> JCVI has reviewed data from studies undertaken by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna on bivalent Original ‘wild-type’/Omicron BA.1 mRNA vaccines, and from the COV-BOOST clinical trial. These studies indicate that neutralising antibody levels against Omicron after vaccination with a bivalent or monovalent-Omicron vaccine are marginally higher than after vaccination with a monovalent wild-type vaccine (references 2, 3 and 4). Reactogenic events were similar to those observed in clinical studies of antecedent wild-type mRNA vaccines. There is no data on the clinical efficacy of these variant vaccines against currently circulating strains, or on their durability of protection.
> 
> The committee considers that the likely clinical benefits arising from only small differences in neutralising antibody levels between bivalent and wild-type vaccines are highly uncertain, with no clear advantage against other non-Omicron variants either. These uncertainties are increased when set in the context of on-going evolution of the SARS-CoV2 virus and the possibility of the emergence of future new variants of concern over winter 2022 to 2023 (reference 5).
> 
> ...



From JCVI statement on the COVID-19 booster vaccination programme for autumn 2022: update 3 September 2022


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## elbows (Nov 15, 2022)

And here for example is recent news about Modernas updated claims of effectiveness, with this particular article being sure to point out some of the caveats with the data they've used:



			https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/modernas-omicron-busting-covid-19-booster-holds-its-own-against-latest-variant-bq11
		


That sort of article is also quite clear about how a lot of this stuff is seen as a business story, a story of Modernas sales forecasts etc. And I already see other articles about Modernas stock price surging on that news. For that and other reasons its generally better to wait for other sources of data about vaccine effectiveness to emerge other than those the companies use in their sales pitches. Such other studies also benefit from much larger amounts of data, but as I pointed out in a previous post, as the immune history of people and populations grows more complicated as the years go by, the number of caveats to studies conclusions can also be expected to grow.


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## elbows (Nov 15, 2022)

In terms of broader UK studies of vaccine effectiveness, the vaccine surveillance reports attempt to keep an eye on this sort of thing:






						COVID-19 vaccine monthly surveillance reports (weeks 39 to 48, 2021 to 2022)
					

Data on the real-world effectiveness and impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.




					www.gov.uk
				




But it takes time to accumulate data. When a new booster campaign starts, and new strains become dominant, it can take quite some time before any of their analysis and the studies they link to to start to be able to come up with even low-confidence estimates. For example these days there is some BA.4 and BA.5 specific stuff covered, as well as the impact of previous boosters, but evidence about the latest booster campaign and the updated vaccines isnt going to show up much there yet.And due to large reductions in mass testing for covid in the UK, it will probably be much harder to come up with decent estimates about reductions in symptomatic infection using mass UK data in future. They will still be able to do estimates in other ways (eg measuring antibody levels in individuals) and they will still be able to come up with estimates of protection against hospitalisation and death.


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## 2hats (Nov 15, 2022)

MrCurry said:


> I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?
> 
> Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?


Degrees of protection against severe disease, from a wide range of variants, in under-65 immunocompetents with hybrid immunity or completion of primary series plus booster likely can be measured in years (more so for the former cohort). For others (older/immunosenescent/immunodysfunctional), [widely] varyingly less so.

Don't confuse that with efficacy to [any] infection which unsurprisingly wanes sooner (timescale of months), particularly for those with infection-only or vaccine-only mediated immunity; less so for those with hybrid immunity. Note that individual antigenic exposure histories and HLA genetics will modify this picture.


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## elbows (Nov 15, 2022)

elbows said:


> COVID-19 vaccine monthly surveillance reports (weeks 39 to 48, 2021 to 2022)
> 
> 
> Data on the real-world effectiveness and impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.
> ...



Also note some of the effects of study/data limitations that show up when they try to analyse severe hospital cases, eg:



> There are likely still some incidental admissions in our data, in particular among younger adults, which may explain the higher vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation in 65+ year olds compared to 18 to 64 year olds



All the same, the following is an example of the sort of picture they have come up with via the past Omicron waves. I havent seen equivalent conclusions based specifically on the updated vaccines that include Omicron yet:



> Vaccine effectiveness against a range of hospitalisation outcomes with the Omicron variant has been estimated using a test-negative case control study design (Table 1, Error! Reference source not found.). Among 18 to 64 year olds, VE after a booster peaked at 83.9% before dropping to 45.5% by 25 to 39 weeks after booster vaccination. VE against the most severe outcome measured (those on oxygen/ventilated/on intensive care) ranged from 92.4% down to 53.7% following a booster vaccine. Among those aged 65 years and older, VE against hospitalisation peaked at 89.5% before waning to 60.7% at 40 weeks or more after receiving a booster vaccine. Protection against hospitalisation requiring oxygen/ventilated/on intensive care ranged from 92.4% down to 66.8% for older adults (Table 1).


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## gentlegreen (Nov 17, 2022)




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## Aladdin (Nov 27, 2022)

I've had 6 vaccines now.
And EVERY time my lfts go further off. I get lfts every 3 months so tracking it became easy. 
Last vacc was 6 days before a blood test. The results were not ok.
I've had autoimmune hepatitis for 22 years. By 2020 I had just about developed Fibrosis...20 years on.
Roll on 2 years and suddenly I'm at stage 3 Fibrosis. I am dreading having another vacc in 6 months.


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## Serge Forward (Nov 30, 2022)

Fucking conspiraloons in New Zealand:
Parents refuse use of vaccinated blood in life-saving surgery on baby


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## 8ball (Nov 30, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


>




Do you have any info on this person's scientific credentials?


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## gentlegreen (Nov 30, 2022)

8ball said:


> Do you have any info on this person's scientific credentials?


She always attaches links to any papers she cites and apologises if she gets it wrong.
I subscribe to Rebecca Watson largely because she ISN'T Richard Dawkins...


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## 8ball (Nov 30, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> She always attaches links to any papers she cites.



It’s not the papers that are the problem in this case.  More that, while she points out that individual immunity debt (framed as immune system damage) as per anti-vaxxers is not a real thing, she is happy to leave the viewer with an “immunity debt isn’t real” impression.

She also doesn’t understand the origin of the term, or it’s non-garbled meaning, which I’m going to put down to politically-motivated blinkers.

I’ll have a dig in that paper about there needing to be more to what is being seen than infection lag, because she glosses over that pretty quickly.

Edit:  actually there’s no citation there at all.  She just says “experts say..” in the video and that’s it.
I don’t doubt an expert has said that at some point, but a quick Google shows up nothing.


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## gentlegreen (Nov 30, 2022)

To be honest I have  short attention span and posted it pretty much for comment by people who know about this stuff...


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## 8ball (Nov 30, 2022)

gentlegreen said:


> To be honest I have  short attention span and posted it pretty much for comment by people who know about this stuff...



I can’t see that she has said anything scientifically wrong (though I can’t find evidence for one claim), and I agree with her about the currently misused term.

She’s just not clear that the term has a legitimate use (I don’t know whether this is deliberate or not).  Though granted it was in v limited usage til recently.

The fifth reference from the below article interests me, but I don’t have access right now - might give sci-hub whirl later in case it’s there…









						Quantifying the RSV immunity debt following COVID-19: a public health matter
					

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common cause of lower respiratory tract infection in children younger than 5 years. In 2019, a meta-analysis estimated that RSV was associated with 33 million acute lower respiratory infection episodes and 3·6 million hospitalisations for acute lower...



					www.thelancet.com


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## MrCurry (Dec 11, 2022)

How reliable are LFTs for omicron infections?  My wife has had fever (38.5C), sore throat, runny/blocked nose, faintness, etc since Friday, but an LFT test yesterday showed no line. Just wondering if that can be considered definitive or if it’s still possibly omicron, as she hasn’t had a covid vaccine shot in about a year?


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## prunus (Dec 11, 2022)

MrCurry said:


> How reliable are LFTs for omicron infections?  My wife has had fever (38.5C), sore throat, runny/blocked nose, faintness, etc since Friday, but an LFT test yesterday showed no line. Just wondering if that can be considered definitive or if it’s still possibly omicron, as she hasn’t had a covid vaccine shot in about a year?



Pretty much as reliable as they are for detecting other variants, ie not bad, but not perfect.  I’d certainly try a couple more tests before relying on a negative result. 

That said, there are plenty of other viruses out there that can give those symptoms, especially at the moment, and ime if one has strong symptoms (of covid) (and so likely plenty of virus) one can get a positive result on lfts by just spitting on them, so the chances are the circumstances you describe are something else.


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## MrCurry (Dec 11, 2022)

prunus said:


> Pretty much as reliable as they are for detecting other variants, ie not bad, but not perfect.  I’d certainly try a couple more tests before relying on a negative result.
> 
> That said, there are plenty of other viruses out there that can give those symptoms, especially at the moment, and ime if one has strong symptoms (of covid) (and so likely plenty of virus) one can get a positive result on lfts by just spitting on them, so the chances are the circumstances you describe are something else.


Thanks. I didn’t realise it at the time of posting the above, but she’s been doing another one this morning and that’s come back positive, which renders my question irrelevant.


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## Aladdin (Jan 3, 2023)

One of the big hospitals here put out an sos to drs & nurses & hospital staff to turn into work and cut short breaks / holidays due to a major internal incident.

Basically huge numbers in the A&E dept. They're rerouting non critical patients by ambulances to smaller hospitals and asking that people not attend A&E unless they are heart patients or stroke or critically ill.

They've moved patients out of beds to minor hospitals if they are non critical care but have no place to go.

Huge increase in covid plus flu and rsv cases ending up in A&E.

Scary.


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## Aladdin (Jan 3, 2023)

Aladdin said:


> One of the big hospitals here put out an sos to drs & nurses & hospital staff to turn into work and cut short breaks / holidays due to a major internal incident.
> 
> Basically huge numbers in the A&E dept. They're rerouting non critical patients by ambulances to smaller hospitals and asking that people not attend A&E unless they are heart patients or stroke or critically ill.
> 
> ...




The hospital literally sent out an SOS text to all staff to turn in to work to assist with extremely high numbers in A&E and moving patients already in hospital to other hospitals or home or nursing homes if well enough to move.
All outpatients appointments are cancelled.
It's crazy.


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## moochedit (Wednesday at 11:37 AM)

BBC News - Tory MP suspended over Covid vaccine comments









						Tory MP suspended over Covid vaccine comments
					

MP Andrew Bridgen suspended by Conservative party for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccine, chief whip says



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## Karl Masks (Wednesday at 12:36 PM)

Wasn't expecting Bridgen to go down that rabbit hole so far so fast.

Still, one less (sort of) Tory. For now. 

Weird


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## elbows (Wednesday at 12:40 PM)

Well the 2022 deaths picture got rather grim, so anyone who started down the anti-vax rabbit hole and ended up in an echo chamber would have been tempted to accelerate quickly to ever increasing levels of absurdity recently.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why the overall deaths in 2022 got bad, not least various effects of the virus itself. And so those whose dislike of various policies etc led them to consistently downplay the impact of the virus were always likely to blow a gasket at this point and seek to sloppily place the blame elsewhere. Some try to blame the lockdowns rather than the virus, but its harder to get emotive momentum going with that angle these days due to the lack of ongoing restrictions, so they are tempted to make it all about the vaccines instead.


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## moochedit (Wednesday at 12:55 PM)

Karl Masks said:


> Wasn't expecting Bridgen to go down that rabbit hole so far so fast.
> 
> Still, one less (sort of) Tory. For now.
> 
> Weird


A career on gb news awaits


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## toblerone3 (Wednesday at 9:15 PM)

Is this the study which he was touting in his comments?


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