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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

LynnDoyleCooper said:
It wasn't just 'breathing' on a police officer. They did it while boasting that they were carrying a potentially deadly virus. So no, I'm very happy that if anyone says that and does that like that on anyone else to be charged and jailed. They're potentially opening up loads of other people to dying, fuck them.
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Completely agree with this. Fuck em.

But fuck me, Raab is a terrible public speaker. Sounds like a schoolboy being bollocked by the headmaster - and he's foreign sec. :(
 
emanymton said:
Well I'm assuming he was just being a gobby dick rather than thinking he actually has it.

And behaving like a cunt is not the same as assault.
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I lived with a twat who was diabetic. He used to go around stabbing people with his needles and telling them he was HIV+ and the needles were used.
They weren’t and he wasn’t but we still had the worry and the testing and the wait.
That officer had no way of knowing if this was just a gobby dick or someone who genuinely thought it was ok to do that when they have a potentially deadly virus.
 
SheilaNaGig said:
Here's a post to say a big fat Thank You to weltweit .

Thank you for trawling the world's media and posting links so I don't have to go and look for myself. Thank you for asking questions on threads so that elbows LynnDoyleCooper and others can answer , saving me from having to do that too. And thank you for engaging with these threads back when it all started, which kept the discussion bouncing across the top of the boards, which helped me to get ahead of the curve and be better informed than a lot of people around me IRL.
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Hi SheilaNaGig, thank you for that, I am just trying in my own way to keep up with events and learn what is going on. I won't ever have the medical or scientific knowledge of many on here but I am learning more than I expected to. As to doing things so that you don't have to, that certainly isn't my intention! :) believe me there is bucket loads of interesting questioning articles out there and your comments and commentary are always knowledgeable interesting and very welcome. Also it is fascinating which media are producing good content, who would have thought I might actually have considered paying to read the Financial Times .. :hmm:
 
Looby said:
I lived with a twat who was diabetic. He used to go around stabbing people with his needles and telling them he was HIV+ and the needles were used.
They weren’t and he wasn’t but we still had the worry and the testing and the wait.
That officer had no way of knowing if this was just a gobby dick or someone who genuinely thought it was ok to do that when they have a potentially deadly virus.
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Seriously? I think Stabbing someone is a bit different to breathing.
 
If the UK had a professional far-sighted government, would we have been able to use contact tracing to minimise the lockdown and avoid crippling our economy? This is what I want to know. Other, more sophisticated countries seem to be succeeding at this.

The follow on question is, should we have a national contact tracing system and a more ordered society with constrained civil liberties so we can avoid crippling the economy when future coronaviruses arrive?
 
If there is a lesson to learn, this might be it. There is nothing to say that Covid-19 is the only epidemic this nation will suffer. The growth in international air traffic and the mobility of the world's population (to say nothing of its growth), might make pandemics a routine event.
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For my part, I'm beginning to get to grips with this issue. I would not say I'm there yet as the last time I looked at the epidemiological system for dealing with a communicable disease – for my PhD thesis – it took me five years. However, I am tending to the view that the first mistake in a fatal cascade started with the promulgation by the World Health Organisation of the 2005 International Health Regulations. It was these which, for the first time, specifically listed pandemic influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) as potential "events of international public health concern". This formal status required member nations to "develop, strengthen and maintain… the capacity to detect, assess, notify and report" these diseases, and then to the develop "the capacity to respond promptly and effectively to [the] public health risks".
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This led to the rash of the preparedness plans produced by members, including the UK, then under the Blair government, supposedly based on WHO guidelines. Where it all went wrong, in my view, is that members were allowed to produce influenza plans and use them as the template for dealing with SARS which, as it now transpires, demands a very different approach.

To that extent, we might have the right plan – for influenza – but it is being used to fight the wrong disease. Covid-19 is not influenza - it is a SARS. And as we record 47,806 cases and 4,934 dead, that represents the true failure, and why we are now having to embark on costly lockdowns.
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EU Referendum

eureferendum.com eureferendum.com
 
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David Clapson said:
If the UK had a professional far-sighted government, would we have been able to use contact tracing to minimise the lockdown and avoid crippling our economy? This is what I want to know. Other, more sophisticated countries seem to be succeeding at this.
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Maybe more to the point is that other less sophisticated countries have succeeded at this. If the Faroe Islands can do it you have to ask why all the years of planning here led to such a botched response.
 
David Clapson said:
If the UK had a professional far-sighted government, would we have been able to use contact tracing to minimise the lockdown and avoid crippling our economy? This is what I want to know. Other, more sophisticated countries seem to be succeeding at this.

The follow on question is, should we have a national contact tracing system and a more ordered society with constrained civil liberties so we can avoid crippling the economy when future coronaviruses arrive?
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It is questionable whether those countries can maintain their current approach. This is a constant theme of mine and there are usually multiple opportunities every week to demonstrate it. Singapore and Japan are recent examples of countries having to introduce more aspects of lockdown. And, even before things approaching fuller lockdowns have happened in these countries, their economies have still take a big hit.

Having said that, the steps they took early can still have made a rather large difference to the scale and timing of their epidemics. Its too early to know quite how much, but it would be very disappointing if they ended up exactly the same as everywhere else that didnt do these things.

My stance is also flawed if I dont point out that some of the problems these countries have now, stem from the fact many other countries didnt do those things, and have ended up causing cases that then travel back to these other countries. Perhaps if everyone had done the best test & trace thing in the first place, the picture would be a fair bit different. Perhaps not though, it might be that all these measures could ever have hoped to achieve at that stage was to buy time and change the scale of their epidemics, but not completely suppress the virus without at least some periods of lockdown. I say that because its easy for there to be too much focus on all the successes - ie all the cases they did manage to find via lots of testing & tracing, at the expense of properly considering how many cases these countries were still likely failing to spot.

Anyway, even if that stuff done at earlier stages wasnt enough on its own, I think you are correct to consider that such things are likely to come back onto the agenda again, because they could be a very important part of some later stages too. Countries will be watching other countries that are starting to get past their peaks closely to see what 'exit strategies' are being proposed and implemented, and then what actually happens in different places with different approaches.

The UK government should plan for a good number of different things now, but are trying to resist publicly getting into the possibilities or which ones they will actually go for at this stage. But the press keep asking questions about this already. Which is understandable, but a bit too early in my book, if I were the government I'd still be trying to hedge my bets rather than committing to a particular approach publicly.
 
zahir said:
Maybe more to the point is that other less sophisticated countries have succeeded at this. If the Faroe Islands can do it you have to ask why all the years of planning here led to such a botched response.
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you can hardly compare the Faroe Islands with the UK in terms of population density, interconnectedness or industry.
 
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care in hospital after his coronavirus symptoms worsened, Downing Street has said.

Mr Johnson has asked Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to deputise for him, a spokesman added.
 
emanymton said:
Well I'm assuming he was just being a gobby dick rather than thinking he actually has it.

And behaving like a cunt is not the same as assault.
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If he gave the copper any reason to believe that his threat was credible, then it was assault.

Same as if you wander up to one and say "I've got a knife", they're not likely to say "get away with you, of course you haven't". They're going to treat you as if you've got a knife until they can definitively prove otherwise.

I LIKE the idea that someone threatening someone else with infecting them with a potentially fatal disease gets busted for it. Whether or not it's a copper they're threatening. It's a cunt's trick, but it is also totally out of order...and if the hook it's hung on is "assault", well, that's just fine by me.
 
zahir said:

EU Referendum

eureferendum.com eureferendum.com
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Its true that pandemic influenza planning is able to rest on a couple of things that allow them to cut corners and avoid thinking the unthinkable on certain fronts.

For example, they have a reasonable idea of timescales for infleunza vaccines, and there are other antivirals for influenza that they can chuck around in the meantime.

However I would suggest that in the event of a bad influenza pandemic, the results could easily have been comparable to what we are seeing with this coronavirus pandemic. So I dont think it was simply a case of a reasonable influenza plan being attached to the wrong disease.

For example, the 2009 pandemic, even without the subsequent austerity and its effects on the NHS and other parts of the system, could still have massively overloaded hospitals in the same way this pandemic is, if the influenza in question had been much nastier and if far less people had any natural immunity to it. But the 2009 influenza turned out to be somewhat similar to a strain older people had seen before, so it ended up largely as a disease of the young, and that made a really huge difference to the picture, including the hospital situation.
 
existentialist said:
If he gave the copper any reason to believe that his threat was credible, then it was assault.

Same as if you wander up to one and say "I've got a knife", they're not likely to say "get away with you, of course you haven't". They're going to treat you as if you've got a knife until they can definitively prove otherwise.

I LIKE the idea that someone threatening someone else with infecting them with a potentially fatal disease gets busted for it. Whether or not it's a copper they're threatening. It's a cunt's trick, but it is also totally out of order...and if the hook it's hung on is "assault", well, that's just fine by me.
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Yep, sure someone robbed a bank years ago with a banana in a carrier bag. Got done for armed robbery.
 
elbows said:
Its true that pandemic influenza planning is able to rest on a couple of things that allow them to cut corners and avoid thinking the unthinkable on certain fronts.

For example, they have a reasonable idea of timescales for infleunza vaccines, and there are other antivirals for influenza that they can chuck around in the meantime.

However I would suggest that in the event of a bad influenza pandemic, the results could easily have been comparable to what we are seeing with this coronavirus pandemic. So I dont think it was simply a case of a reasonable influenza plan being attached to the wrong disease.
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So the UK pandemic planning wasn’t really adequate for a serious flu pandemic then?
 
zahir said:
So the UK pandemic planning wasn’t really adequate for a serious flu pandemic then?
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That is my opinion, yes. Obviously it comes down to where the threshold is set for serious, but yes, its perfectly possible to imagine influenza pandemics that are well within the bounds of possibility, that the plans would not have coped with. Many of the issues would have been the same - number of intensive care beds, ventilators, availability and distribution of PPE in a timely fashion, limited testing capacity, no real genuine attempt to contain the spread (only to delay).

The big difference would have been, in theory, the timescale. There would have been more confidence about the exit strategy, a vaccine-based one. But that fact alone wouldnt have prevented at least one horrendous wave of overwhelmed hospitals and death. There are reasons people always go on about the 1918 pandemic and the fact we hadnt had one of that severity since was mostly considered to be luck.

In my opinion the main flaw with modern influenza pandemic planning was the built in limits due to an inability to 'think the unthinkable', with the thinkable consisting of both establishment and medical dogma, but also various rather large limits imposed by neoliberalism and other related aspects of the modern world. For example much earlier in this pandemic I knew people would be surprised when I told them in advance that the WHO's response would include lots of language about how nations should not impose travel restrictions and close borders. And that did turn out to be their original stance, and it was easy for me to predict it because I knew what their priorities were. Later they were still making announcements about the work they were doing with the World Tourism Organisation. Its all UN stuff setup for a world we know only too well. A world that considered itself incompatible with many of the draconian measures on a scale that would be needed to tackle a pandemic in a highly pro-active, virus-suppressing manner. Well now this virus took a giant shit in their comfort zone and now the unthinkable is the new normal.
 
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