Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
- Start date
elbows
Well-Known Member
This was predicted/expected but its no less horrible to hear about:
Coronavirus: 'Local shortages' of intensive care drugs
Some painkillers and sedative drugs used in intensive care are "a bit stretched", the BBC learns.
www.bbc.co.uk
Cid
Proper break this time
This was predicted/expected but its no less horrible to hear about:
Coronavirus: 'Local shortages' of intensive care drugs
Some painkillers and sedative drugs used in intensive care are "a bit stretched", the BBC learns.www.bbc.co.uk
Fuck that's grim.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
TBF the £60 fines (£30 if paid in 30 days) are tiny compared to many other countries.
People need to understand the stages:
1 - You get asked to move on, if you get mouthy & refuse -
2 - You will be asked for your details, so an on spot the fine can be issued, if you continue to be mouthy & refuse -
3 - You will be arrested, until your details can be confirmed, most likely charged & summoned to court, where the maximum fine is £1000 + court costs & victims surcharge.
Those 2 twats having a BBQ on Brighton beach last weekend managed to get themselves charged & are off to court.
mauvais
on reddit or something
This might have worked at about the point at which those people came back from China on the Horseman coaches, if it had been coupled with other restrictions like full lockdown and proper isolation.
The fundamentals are that there are four ways to do location on modern mobile phones:
- Actual GPS
- Wi-Fi network identification (you know or can crowdsource where a Wi-Fi router is)
- Bluetooth, a bit like Wi-Fi
- Cell tower triangulation
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are potentially promising. However even the very best scenario is weak compared to supposed social distancing guidelines. Wi-Fi location only has high accuracy in carefully designed physical environments (supporting using Google Maps in a shopping centre full of access points), and Bluetooth might tell you more about personal contact but its range is too high.
So you will go to Tesco and you'll be ID'd as having contacts with pretty much everyone in there. Then, a week or two later, when you've got symptoms and self-report, it will alert everyone you were ID'd with in Tesco and everywhere else since, and this will cascade out, and oh look the whole country will be in lockdown.
There are myriad other boring technical barriers to this going well but it's fundamentally difficult to see how it can work from a technical perspective.
ska invita
back on the other side
Im in that category tbh. But I doubt my work would be happy about it if everyone else was happy to go back to work with their apps
eta: as with so many proposals floating around, it only works financially if everyone is back in circulation - half the work force and half the customers etc doesnt add up in practical terms, for my business at least. Would rather be closed and take basic income
Last edited:
2hats
Dust.
Have just noticed (Worldometers) that there is no country with as high a death rate per million population as the UK (145) that is testing so little per million (4934). And we already know the UK is undercounting deaths (the ONS won't backfill the numbers for days, weeks).
ska invita
back on the other side
Well that's also my pessimistic reaction...yet apps have been used in east asia, so.... ?? I dont know. I guess its a long time to go till then anyway, maybe not worth getting too far into hypotheticals
mauvais
on reddit or something
Most of these have very few cases and strict control measures. It's too late for Western countries unless they manage to magic up universal daily testing.
Cid
Proper break this time
What choice do we actually have though? It's either a very long lockdown until a viable vaccine or phased back to work with test and trace (and probably some level of lockdown).
ska invita
back on the other side
mauvais
on reddit or something
It's not clear that anyone in this photo is breaching distancing guidelines. Whether those guidelines are sufficient is another matter.
Cid
Proper break this time
There are ways of spinning out relatively sparse material into more useful data though... I remember batch testing being talked about earlier, though no idea on the specifics of that. Combine testing with extensive symptom tracking, looking for clusters of symptoms associated with covid to get an idea of where outbreaks are taking place. That kind of thing.
I'm not optimistic mind you. I just think a move away from lockdown may technically be possible. But I'm not even sure whether our current form of lockdown is sufficient to set the groundwork for that...
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
How so? Can you point to groups of people from different households interacting in ways that could spread infection? I can't.
andysays
Love and solidarity
Yeah, just in case people are in any doubt about my position, I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, I'm saying the whole testing, tracing, tracing, testing cycle should have been started weeks ago.
That the government is only now thinking about/preparing to implement this means that far, far more people will have it, and the job of tracing and testing everyone who has been in contact with someone who tests for it, then tracing and testing everyone who has been in contact with them, etc, becomes hugely more difficult than it might have been.
mauvais
on reddit or something
I'd look at it in a slightly different way: that the government is still seriously entertaining ideas like this as our apparent future means it neither has a coherent idea of what to do nor is talking to anyone who does.
look at the crowds behind the tree's on the left.
andysays
Love and solidarity
I suggest you report them all.
How dare they be outside, the London dwelling bastards
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
I was thinking more "thin end of the wedge", but yes - I cannot see how this government, with its reputation for tearing up conventions, would ever let go of these wonderful powers, having got them. "Mission creep" is a given with them, and would be the case with this. In spades.
Cid
Proper break this time
Hmm... It's certainly not a proper lockdown. But every time I go out the difference between things as they are and as they were is striking. I do think there's wide adherence to the rules. As we all keep saying though, whether those rules are sufficient is another matter. Thing is, I suspect it has had a genuine and profound effect on transmission. The effects of closing pubs, leisure stuff, public meeting, many jobs etc will be far greater than many of the more stringent measures. But all that depends on where you want the restrictions to take you, and we have fuck all idea what the government has planned in that regard.
Just wondering, are you in the shielding or at risk group?
btw, there was a gathering next to me as i posted on that thread, didn't report it, but boy am i going ot vent when i get a chance.
mauvais
on reddit or something
All I see is a perspective-compressed photo taken with a telephoto lens, making it very difficult to judge separation. If you want to figure it out for yourself you can find the Street View location in Vicky Park and judge how far apart the trees really are.
If you go out in any park and are careful to maintain your distance, you can still end up in one of these shots, which amongst other reasons is why it irritates me.
Cid
Proper break this time
Yeah, I was about to post about that again. The people taking these pictures are fucking reprehensible.
andysays
Love and solidarity
I'd agree with you on that.
This idea seems to be viewed as a magic bullet, but the practicalities of it don't suggest it will be of much help, now that so many people are likely to be infected.
The way these things work, to the extent they do work, is that once someone has tested positive, they go into isolation, then the job is to trace everyone who they've been in contact with for the past how ever many days (at least 7, maybe more).
Then all of those people have to be tested, those who test positive go into isolation and everyone each of them has been in contact with for the past 7 days has to be traced and tested.
And then all of those people have to be tested, those who test positive go into isolation and everyone each of them has been in contact with for the past 7 days has to be traced and tested.
The job would be made theoretically easier if a magic app could identify everyone a given carrier had been within a set distance of in the last week, but the job would still be to actually test all those people.
The most recent figures I can immediately find suggest that over 60,000 people had tested positive on April 9th. Finding and testing even the direct contacts, far less contacts of contacts etc, is a task way beyond not only current testing capability, but our likely capability for the foreseeable future.
ska invita
back on the other side
Reminds me of this
The Rice and Chessboard Legend
An ancient legend about some rice and a chessboard goes as follows: “A wise old ruler wanted to reward his servant for an act of extraordinary bravery. The servant said:...
www.mathscareers.org.uk
andysays
Love and solidarity
No, I'm a keyworker, so I'm going out every day, funnily enough maintaining public green spaces so that people can get out of their homes and use them to exercise.
And although I've seen a few people doing things which suggest they might not be following the letter of the guidelines, I've got more important things to do and more important things to think about than looking at photos of people in a park hundreds of miles from where I live and playing "guess the infractor".
Similar threads
