It really depends if they applied those measures fully or not. Were they close to each other at the table ? Those distanciation measures are a luxury in all honesty in the sense that not everyone can distance themselves from others in the same house/apartmentOne of my Facebook friends has posted about how she had her parents round yesterday for her birthday but practiced ‘social distancing’ by not sitting close etc.
There’s pictures of them sat at a table eating together.
why are some people so ignorant?
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Not sure how it all works, but wont the fact those 9mil people will have 80 percent of their usual salary not help?
As in when this is all over they will still have money to spend which will flood back into the economy whereas before, people were actually broke and there was no money to spend?
They don't live with her, so they shouldn't have gone to her house at all.
They still closed schools, large gatherings and parks etc, you'd think life was carrying on as normal the way some discuss South Korea.
They also have a very intrusive system where citizens records are inspected to track where they've been and this is alerted to other locals through an appbso they can see cases. Personally it's not something I'd mind but there's no way that will fly here.
Not sure why you have CC’d me in particularly, but it is a great read. Thanks.
I completely agree with you but what you are essentially arguing is that socialism is more beneficial to capitalism than conservatism which is fairly difficult to imagine the Conservative party agreeing with. It's basically been Corbyn's argument for the last 5 years. Invest an absolute tonne of money in the country's infrastructure and education and the economy will boom with trickle up economics.
It will 100% be austerity under this government. Major cuts to public spending "because there is no money" while simultaneously cutting taxes "to tell corporations we are open for business".
I remembered us both speculating wildly about what was going on behind the scenes in the UK govt last month. Figured you’d be interested in some proper insight.
They’re already working on a similar app to be rolled out across the EU. GDPR will be a pain in the arse to get round but exceptional times call for exceptional measures.
Not really. If it is over it is because most of the population have already caught the virus.
To me in Italy especially at least 1/3 of the population is/was infected but they didn't test them all.
I don't believe for a minute that China had only 80k that got infected. The numbers are way up.
We really don't know how much of the entire population is infected and for countries like UK and USA the peak isn't reached yet, IMO.
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks. I’ll read the latter half of the article after breakfast.
Not been posting as much here in the last week or so, as there seems little to debate. Shit got much worse as expected and we’re bracing ourselves for most of this year being written off as I strongly felt a month ago.
I don't know if it's too late now but something needs to change with the furlough scheme. It's well intentioned but i don't think they accounted for the sheer number of businesses that would take the piss and put people on it whether they needed to or not - Liverpool being the perfect example. There needs to be some sort of test, any business that posts a profit in 2020 can't claim back from it or something like that.
On the other hand the reason they are being so generous is because they can't have a country full of people worrying about their finances for the next year. As soon as restrictions are lifted they need people back in the shops with pockets full of money getting the economy going again. A nation sitting on it's arses counting pennies for the rest of 2020 will be far more costly than the furlough scheme.
Ah thanks, will have a look. I can't imagine it'll be as detailed because in SK it's led to some ending up on the news saying they aren't having affairs etc. They mark age and where abouts so people were figuring it out.
As far as i recall there's a lot of public health exclusions to GDPR. At least in the UK regs they made sure it had as little impact on the civil service as possible.
I imagine all those sunbathing in parks suddenly would find better things to do if an app told them someone with coronavirus had recently been there.
I'm curious why it wouldn't work here. People might not be comfortable with it but surely would understand the benefits of such an app for tracing the virus spread. If the information was deleted after this is over so it would be a temporary intrusion its something I'd be happy with.
Arent a lot of Europe in the process of doing this as well, it seems we need to be on the same track as this is a long term thing with possible 2nd waves and release and tighten of restrictions over time. If this limits the death toll until we get a vaccine then it's a no brainer really. Desperate times and all that.
I was worried about catching it early and getting caught up in the mass that would flood the hospitals if I got a bad case. We are certainly reading that hospitals are busy but they do seem to be coping. Now I'm thinking that when SD is relaxed there will be a flood of people who assume that the crisis is over and go about their business, ignoring the set protocols, and cause a huge transmission of the virus over a period of time that will really strain the hospitals.
I think the next wave will be far worse than whatever we are going to go through in this first one.
I think the next wave will be far worse than whatever we are going to go through in this first one.
Testing, screening and tracing is key for knowing where you are in case of pandemic situation. You have to isolate the risk groups, already ill, already healed, etc.
It's much much better than doing it blind and closing entire economies, which leads to catastrophic situations all over the world.
There are multiple problems though, unfortunately for a model like this.
1. You need enormous resources to pull it off. Poor countries or even those in tough economic situations can't really sustain it.
2. People need to be aware and keep their own social distancing from others and be self motivated and disciplined to do so.
3. Monitoring already ill patients is key - and as mentioned GDPR could be a big obstacle in developed countries as it goes against tracking individuals and data.
4. Healthcare system needs to be at very good level to sustain peaks of many ill patients at certain periods and not get overloaded.
But in any case this model is the best to cope with this crisis, because if you don't have enough data to know where you are every rigid actions are worthless as the virus will soon be back again in couple of months.
Just been reading on the EU one, it looks like it's based on bluetooth and is voluntary but also anonymised. It'll alert those found to have been close to someone else with the app who has been confirmed for covid.
South Korea are actually using CCTV, phone location data, transport cards and contactless payment records.
Personally I've always been in favour national id cards and centralised location data but that's not popular here in the west.
You are right if they relax things too much which unfortunately makes it more likely that things are not going to be relaxed much at all for a very long time.
Obviously far more people have been infected in Italy than the official numbers show but a third of the population?
The current mortality rate in South Korea is roughly 2% and it will exceed 2% in Germany.
If we apply that rate to Italy (which doesn't really make sense because the health care system got overwhelmed in Italy but not in Korea) we'd get 850k infected people only. Maybe double that amount because already infected will continue to die for another 2 weeks or so. But that's still only 1.7m while a third of Italy is 20m.
Now of course there are undetected cases in any country in the world so the mortality rate is most likely lower than 2% but by that much? I just find it very hard to believe that even South Korea only found 10% or so of the actually infected people. Would be great news and we should find out somewhat soon but I'm not too confident.
I hope you are wrong about the size of the second wave. I must agree to a certain degree that once restrictions are lifted there will be spikes in new cases as more people get infected. Its also worrying, if true that recovered people in other countries are becoming re infected.
One positive thing though, is that further waves will not catch us out, our icu capicity and ventilator numbers will be higher. From what news ive seen we have luckily not exceeded capacity in any hospital yet.
As reported on the news today, Wuhan has lifted the lockdown. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Also on the news, Paris has now tightened its lockdown further, no outside exercise allowed. I was hoping that france was over the worst but obviously they are concerned things are not improving quickly enough
Which is why they've got to keep the public engaged and take them along with this whole thing. Explain & stress the impact of the restrictions, then lift them one by one and explain how adhering to them is still keeping us on track. If people not adhering/you're seeing cases rise, delay the next set of relaxations with an explaination.
One of the biggest failures of our govt has been they've failed to stress the severity of this and tried to keep the public ignorant at the start of this pandemic - to try and reduce 'panic'. Now they need to do the opposite, stress what's at stake and keep people engaged.
I agree and I think the illness of Boris will actually help with that - wouldnt wish it on anybody including him but there is no doubt it has opened everybody's eyes to just how serious this can be. Sadly there are always going to be total muppets who will just do whatever they like and ruin it for the rest of us. I'd love nothing better than to be off over Easter, sit in my garden and have a beer or two with my wife but unfortunately as I'm an NHS worker my Easter bank holiday has now been cancelled and I honestly have no idea when I'll get the chance to take any annual leave at this stage - they are saying that legislation will be changed to let us carry leave over for the next 2 years. This is not going away anytime soon and people need to wise up to this and accept it.
Well, confirmed cases are 135k. However due to the overwhelmed health care system, a lot of others didn't get hospitalized and tested and probably died at their home as well.
Due to the asymptomatic types of the virus a huge number might have now known they got it and considering the reports and connections between China and Italy, I'd assume the virus was a lot earlier there - probably December. Bergamo is a huge international hub as well and compared to Germany for example is a lot easier to become an epicenter as it links lots of people from Asia with Europe. Most of Italy's population is also in the North where the epicenter broke.
I read reports that 1/10 is the approximate number of actually ill to confirmed cases, which makes sense considering how infectious the virus is, but again with Italy is very specific situation as they began mass testing a lot later compared to other countries. You also have to bear in mind that there was a flu epidemic there as well in December and large proportion might have been diagnosed with flu, whilst having coronavirus in the same time.
Italy now posts numbers like 3k confirmed on daily basis which in a week or so (when most of the people begin to show symptoms) the number would reach circa 150-160k of confirmed cases.
Italy's mortality rate is not as low as Germany and South Korea due to the state of the system, average age of population and also late diagnostics. With intensive screening and tests from the off South Korea and Germany can catch ill patients a lot early before they are of dire need of hospitalization.
The fact Valencia's players and staff all got tested without symptoms and 35% tested positive was quite telling.
I know they went to Italy a few weeks prior but that's still a high number and strongly suggests a ridiculous amount of people have had it without knowing.
Rubbish. The failure is with people who are too fecking thick to listen to what they are being told constantly in the media and on their social feeds.
Maybe the government failure is assuming that most people aren't as stupid as they really are.
£40 billion - thats about £588 per person... over a decade thats what lets say £60 a year or a fiver a month
I think income tax take was around 190bn last year so over a decade allowing for a bit of in inflation thats 2 trillion... a 2p in the £ rise would cover it just from income tax alone yet i expect that it will be recouped also from tax on self employed increasing, business tax increasing (can see Rishi saying we supported the self employed and business like never before and its now time for business and the self employed to repay that) ... perhaps 1p in income tax rise - some vat some business taxes and its paid for... which is probably better than 9 million people being unemployed today?
There will always be thick people in society - it's the case everywhere in the world. But if you want those thick people not doing stupid things, you need to be consistent with your message.
I'm not saying we should thank China - I'm countering the argument that we should blame one particular country where this thing originated with another silly point of view. This whole blame game is something that you see some leaders engaging in to cover their own inept handling of the disease outbreak.
Good leaders deal with the situation and plan to avoid it happening again. Bad leaders seek to direct blame elsewhere. Where does the blame stop? Do we trace it all back to the one individual who maybe caught and sold a wild animal because they were desperate or dirt poor? How would that benefit us?
Take action to close down wet markets- maybe that would be more productive. Have stockpiles of PPE to protect health and care workers - more productive. Gambling on stockpiling certain drugs / treatment aids - more of a gamble.
My point is that we should be listening to scientific experts, acknowledging that they may get things wrong on occasion but that their motives are generally clearer than those of politicians.
I think some might have been wrongly diagnosed in Italy which furthermore extends the damages:
https://www.garda.com/crisis24/news...n-affected-by-influenza-nationwide-january-15
There were numerous reports in spikes of influenza in early January.
There were millions of tourists coming from China using Bergamo as hub in December. Due to being a new virus Italy didn't begin testing for it till February when probably many have already healed.
When all is said and done a massive campaign (testing) has to be done for antibodies so that every country knows where we are..
Good read that.
Without over simplifying it, it sounds like Governments listen to experts (it's what they're there for... to give expert advice?) and based on their advice, some key decisions were likely (i) wrong and (ii) too slow? (Quote from article..... 'Editor of The Lancet said he would testify to parliament about a mismatch between “the urgent warning that was coming from the frontline in China” and the “somewhat pedestrian evaluation” of the threat from the scientific advice to the government').
Stupid? Naive? Too trusting?
Also, on 9th March (when virus well established around the world), article says 'the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE, had recommended that day, with no dissension recorded in its summary, that the UK reject a China-style lockdown'
Thereafter there seems to be a case of a delay in some decisions, mainly closures (though not attending the EU meetings sounds nobbish now?) until ICL report. Obviously, that's bad, but we're talking days and it sounds like that delay only meant the numbers (cases, deaths) would have been slightly lower... but the vast majority would have happened anyway due to earlier advice and earlier decisions?
Going forward, I don't think advisors will be slow to shout in future and I hope the Government (any Government) gives more challenge, says "explain it more, explain it again, give me all the options not just your conclusion". A tough lesson (hopefully) learned by the UK/most of the world.
You're right.
The seats in a stadium are very close. It will not observe the 2m rule. Imagine someone sat behind you coughing on you
I'd Taser the feckers.
I get "civil liberties" blah but this is too important. Do what you're told or else. Greater good and all that.
Mate called me last week to say he'd reported a neighbour for inviting people round to their house for a birthday party. He was worried he'd done the right thing... I said absolutely.
On the proviso the virus stays the same i don't think that will be true. When it first emerged we didn't know anything about it, how it spread or how it affected people. Countries had to go on total lockdown because they had no idea where it was or how to control it. We now have a much better understanding, particularly of how it spreads. Once restrictions are relaxed we will know exactly what behaviours need to be eliminated to stop it spreading if it flares up again, without needing to resort to the draconian measures we have seen this time around.
Not popular in the UK and the US. Most countries in Europe have no problem with ID cards and tracking where it's seen as necessary - I have an ID card and it's brilliant. I don't think a tracking app will be problematic for continental Europe. The UK has some weird obsession with ID cards and the US....well they do their own thing.
I agree with all of this. reports have come out that wet markets have been closed in various regions but then I see conflicting reports that they are still happening on the down low.
The problem is that everyone wants some of the Chinese market financially and don't want to rock the boat and have a bit of fear. Only Trump and the US dare to challenge them publicly (funny enough).
To be fair I don't remember much criticism or blame for African countries when Ebola broke out so maybe we as an international community, don't see any benefit in playing the blame came when it comes to outbreaks
Because they locked down of course. Without it, I’d imagine the figures are at very least doubled
Belgium: 4th day in a row there are barely any new ICU cases, and first time yesterday that there were more hospital dismissals than new hospitalizations (source). So the hospital occupation decreases for the first time, let's hope this is the start of a new trend. Looks like we're finally past the peak we've been waiting for.
I've started collating the data from NHS England, from https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ in the spreadsheet linked below. This gives the mortality figures assigned to the date recorded, so takes out some of the weird jumps caused by the late reporting of weekend deaths. I'll try and keep this up to date each day.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...oTTrQlzFadyDfSj-TS1YEV_r7om_SRCn5XZxm/pubhtml
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...oTTrQlzFadyDfSj-TS1YEV_r7om_SRCn5XZxm/pubhtml
The Government has just relaxed the social distancing laws for construction workers on sites in England. Currently Scottish workers have to maintain 2m on "essential sites".
https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2020/04/08/latest-government-advice-on-safe-site-working/
English workers are being advised to wash their hands a bit more and wipe certain surfaces down.
Isn't this a bit early?
https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2020/04/08/latest-government-advice-on-safe-site-working/
English workers are being advised to wash their hands a bit more and wipe certain surfaces down.
Isn't this a bit early?