Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[Mation]

TBF, the Union Jack Club is basically a youth hostel for serving or ex-servicemen.

What's your point, caller?

 

[William of Walworth]

I hate to refer to a S*n story , but their front page scream-headline today was 'Pubs could stay closed until Xmas!'
A somewhat more measured version of this appears in today's Metro -- their version of the story also gives the source for the shitrag's headline :

Pubs and restaurants will be ‘among the last’ to see lockdown restrictions lifted – and may not be running as normal until Christmas.
Cabinet secretary Michael Gove this weekend said the hospitality industry will be subject to social distancing measures for a longer period than others in a bid to prevent a second wave of the virus hitting Britons later this year.
Frank Maguire, from Truman’s brewery in London, told The Sun he thinks it is ‘unlikely’ that pubs will be able to open again as normal before Christmas.

He later clarified to Metro.co.uk : ‘I expect pubs won’t reopen before July – and only once scientists advise the Government it is safe to do so. I don’t envisage normal levels of trade returning until the end of the year. We (pubs and breweries) were the first to be hit by the lockdown and we’ll be the last to reopen, which is completely understandable.’

So unsurprisingly, it seems that The S*n were sensationalising/exaggerating it.

 

[2hats]

So what? The whole population eventually gets exposed. A lower R number means it takes longer, but it still happens.

No.

If you keep the effective reproduction number below one then the outbreak will fizzle out.

Furthermore, by taking longer it buys more time for development of pharmaceutical interventions, vaccines, therapeutics, better ICU techniques, improved and more effective mitigations (eg careful redesign of the urban environment).

That's what.

 

[William of Walworth]

I hate to refer to a S*n story , but their front page scream-headline today was 'Pubs could stay closed until Xmas!'

And today's story on the British Beer and Pub Association website does not mention when they think pubs will re-open
(July, as the Metro//Truman Brewery guy suggested, seems possible -- or maybe August).

British Beer & Pub Association says urgent support targeted at pubs is needed to ensure they can survive extended COVID-19 lockdown
The British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) is pressing the Government to announce extra support just for pubs, to ensure they can survive an extended COVID-19 lockdown.
The trade body’s plea comes after cabinet minister Michael Gove warned that the nations pubs would be ‘among the last’ to see restrictions placed upon them relaxed.

 

[Petcha]

This may just be me, but...

When I went for my state-permitted walk yesterday, I looked up at the trees and houses and noticed that it was as if I was seeing them in high definition. I mentioned this to my OH and he said he'd noticed the same thing.

For context, we're in an inner London borough but not central London. Makes me wonder what sort of fug we are used to wandering around in without noticing.

Oh I notice it.

Maybe this is mother nature's way of sayin fuck you. Remember who's in charge.

Himalayas come into view as lockdown leads to drop in air pollution

Follow our live coronavirus updates HERE Coronavirus: The symptoms

www.standard.co.uk

 

[Azrael]

No.

If you keep the effective reproduction number below zero then the outbreak will fizzle out.

Furthermore, by taking longer it buys more time for development of pharmaceutical interventions, vaccines, therapeutics, better ICU techniques, improved and more effective mitigations (eg careful redesign of the urban environment).

That's what.

Well said.

We must reach a consensus going forward. Embrace the old school public health approach of suppressing any outbreak of a novel communicable disease by using border quarantine to keep the virus out, and if it gets in, deploy the most rigorous contact tracing/isolation to break chains on transmission to eliminate the virus among the general population.

It's the sheerest arrogance that this was ever departed from.

 

[weltweit]

Plasma treatment to be trialled

The UK is gearing up to use the blood of coronavirus survivors to treat hospital patients ill with the disease.

NHS Blood and Transplant is asking some people who recovered from Covid-19 to donate blood so they can potentially assess the therapy in trials.

The hope is that the antibodies they have built up will help to clear the virus in others.

The US has already started a major project to study this, involving more than 1,500 hospitals.
..
"If fully approved, the trials will investigate whether convalescent plasma transfusions could improve a Covid-19 patient's speed of recovery and chances of survival.

from 20/04/2020 Coronavirus blood treatment to be tried

 

[Azrael]

I've signed up for this.

Given the grave prognosis for hospitalised Covid cases, if they intend to deny 50% of patients the treatment for a double blind trial, it's the duty of hospitals to rebel (as one London NHS Trust has already done by approving therapies for immediate use), and offer it to all.

 

[weltweit]

I am hearing that the government has appointed someone to focus on getting PPE made in the UK. Does anyone know about this? and who this person is?

 

[Orang Utan]

All staff at my school have been offered testing if we or a family member has symptoms. Email came this evening. What's going on, is mass testing finally getting off the ground?!

colleagues who have been working with the public have been offered the test too, but only if you have a car ffs as it's a drive through service - i wonder if they let you cycle through!

 

[Orang Utan]

I am hearing that the government has appointed someone to focus on getting PPE made in the UK. Does anyone know about this? and who this person is?

it's you. get on with it, will you

 

[cupid_stunt]

I am hearing that the government has appointed someone to focus on getting PPE made in the UK. Does anyone know about this? and who this person is?

The guy that headed-up organising the London Olympics, and pulled it off, despite so many thinking it would be a total cock-up.

 

[nagapie]

colleagues who have been working with the public have been offered the test too, but only if you have a car ffs as it's a drive through service - i wonder if they let you cycle through!

I don't have a car either

 

[Azrael]

With a substantial part of their capacity unused, they've belatedly realized that they must expand the testing criteria to have a hope of meeting their 100,000 tests a day target.

Teachers and other frontline workers is good. Crucial is linking this to contact tracing, which Hancock already said he wants to do. With even Whitty making positive noises about Germany's successes (and Vallance having apparently abandoned the field to focus on the much safer vaccine policy), the roadblock's likely to be the deputy-CMO, whose antipathy to testing and tracing is as undimmed as it is inexplicable.

Most helpful would be her colleagues in the scientific and medical communities speaking to her in private, drilling down to the root of her opposition, and doing all they can to change her mind.

 

[David Clapson]

No.

If you keep the effective reproduction number below zero then the outbreak will fizzle out.

Furthermore, by taking longer it buys more time for development of pharmaceutical interventions, vaccines, therapeutics, better ICU techniques, improved and more effective mitigations (eg careful redesign of the urban environment).

That's what.

Wrong again. You just keep proving my original point.

 

[two sheds]

Wrong again. You just keep proving my original point.

How is he doing that?

 

[Azrael]

Eh? Is someone actually disputing the fact that, if you break the chains of transmission of a communicable disease in a country with no known natural reservoir, it's starved of hosts and dies out? This is epidemiology 101.

 

[Orang Utan]

I don't have a car either

I know - fucked innit

 

[2hats]

Wrong again. You just keep proving my original point.

Fuck me. You certainly chose the right tagline.

 

[Lurdan]

If I make an effort to mentally subtract out the way he says things, what's wrong with the content of what he said? (Christ, these are weird times!)

Isn't he saying that supposed racial biology can't be the answer, but that some cultural practices might account for some communities being less hit than others? And therefore that social distancing/isolation/hygiene is effective where it's possible for people to do that (i.e. those not on the front line)?

Before I start, apologies if what follows is a bit grumpy. It's not aimed at you but is because this is Trevor Phillips talking crap about where I live.

Setting aside 'the way' he says things is IMO a bit of a big ask. The bullshit use of 'culture' as an alternative to 'race' as an 'explanation' for why some group 'is different'/'should be treated differently' is long established. He knows this perfectly well.

He uses the work of an acadamarketing expert, his partner in a "specialist research and insight consultancy", to identify 'hotspots' linked to boroughs. He specifically cites the Borough I live in Tower Hamlets

One puzzling finding in our report concerns not who is being infected, but is who is not. Were poverty the key determinant, we would expect the virus to be running rampant among Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities. Yet they are conspicuous by their absence in the list of hotspots — no Blackburn or Bradford, no Rotherham, Rochdale or Luton. The London borough of Tower Hamlets is more than a third Muslim — the highest density of any in England — and is sandwiched between two Covid-19 hotspots, Newham and Southwark, both home to substantial non-Muslim minority communities. Yet Tower Hamlets lies in the bottom third of the capital’s infection list: 22nd out of the 32 boroughs.

Boroughs all contain populations which are diverse in many ways including ethnicity and wealth. Tower Hamlets contains extremes of poverty and wealth. Places at the other end of that extreme, including the finance hub at Canary Wharf, the wealthier parts of the population, and the facilities and transport hubs in the borough which service them, will be used by people whose 'cultural practices' will be different to those found in many other Boroughs which don't contain their equivalent, and will presumably help 'balance out' the effects of 'hand washing' among the Borough's Muslim. I don't believe you could meaningfully quantify that effect either.

The very notion that 'hotspots' can be reliably plotted by Borough boundaries - even assuming that his acadamerchandising chum had meaningful and accurate Borough statistics to work with - is utter jibber jabber in itself. But then there is what he draws from this.

Tower Hamlets has a large Muslim community as he points out. The problems begin right there with that statement. The largest component of that is within the Bengali community. But there are a number of other ethnic groups within it as well. The notion that a religion implies that the 'cultural practices' of those who profess it are homogenous is nonsense.

There is also a sizeable portion of the population (30% in the 2011 census) which describes itself as christian. But the 'cultural practises' in the Roman Catholic part of that are somewhat different to those in the C of E, or Methodist, or Orthodox elements of that group. No-one who wasn't a fucking idiot would suggest that common Christian 'cultural practises' accounted for anything significant in terms of viral spread. There's church going of course. Which <sarcasm> is entirely different </sarcasm> to people going to the pub weekly. Of course perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way round. Perhaps <sarcasm>the 'well known' cultural practice of 'luvable cockernees' to wet their whistle multiple times a day is another part of the 'geodemographic' explanation of why Tower Hamlets is 'different'. </sarcasm>

Even more important is the question of what actually it means to be Muslim (or indeed to profess adherence to any kind of religion).

Maybe there is a revelation to be had here; if one key to stopping transmission of the virus is hand washing, might a faith community many of whose members ritually wash before five-times-a-day prayers have something to teach the rest of us? And does an ethnic group where almost 40 per cent are economically inactive — and therefore not regularly using public transport, for example — merely underline the protective value of social isolation? Many believe that only faith will deliver us from this particular evilbut even they must know that only science will tell us how.

He singles out the practise of handwashing. The injunctions of Islam about this have been the subject of a good deal of 'commentary' since the pandemic started. (A simple search on google will throw up multiple articles addressing the question of whether 'some' 'Muslim' nurses are 'refusing' to obey hygiene rules or to use to alcohol based hand sanitizers. Of course <sarcasm> Muslims aren't a race so this isn't racism </sarcasm>). His musings on the subject imply that all Muslims have a common understanding of what 'being observant' means, actually practise that and indeed are in jobs where they can 'be observant' if they wanted to. News flash: Muslims aren't like the fucking Borg. I'm not Muslim but fwiw my observations among my Muslim neighbours and friends in Tower Hamlets over the last thirty years is that many of them take the same 'sophisticated' attitude to 'observance' that I have seen among my Roman Catholic friends and neighbours, even devout ones.

Not for the first time reading articles by Trevor Phillips I find myself wondering to what extent he is trolling wiberals and to what extent he simply has his head up his arse and imagines that the 'common sense' stereotypes he DARES TO ADDRESS, are different to the breezy bollocks said at any golf club bar, simply because he's 'TREVOR FUCKING PHILLIPS'. For what little it's worth I'd guess a bit of both but perhaps more out of column B.

Can 'cultural practices' explain differences in viral spread. I don't see why not. Will we ever be in a position to (a) have accurate enough statistics to work with and (b) be able to isolate them out as more than mere possibilities. I strongly doubt it myself.

(Incidentally I omitted to link to Phillips and Webber's 'report'. It's here PDF file. Myself I can't even be bothered.)

 

[agricola]

I am hearing that the government has appointed someone to focus on getting PPE made in the UK. Does anyone know about this? and who this person is?

Fantastic news this, it will give them plenty of time to get stocks in and ensure security of supply. Or it would have done in February.

 

[David Clapson]

How is he doing that?

Because he's very optimistically filtering the numbers he's reading in the press and concluding that the virus will go away before there's mass vaccination.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Wrong again. You just keep proving my original point.

Lots of us are learning new things here. Rnought is a new term I've learned. The beauty of it is that the maths is simple and it's really easy to understand. Basically get the R0 under 1 - ie on average each infected person infects less than one other person, say 0.9 - and the virus will eventually disappear. Anything above 1 and it spreads.

It is that simple.

What Is R0? Gauging Contagious Infections

 

[Mation]

Before I start, apologies if what follows is a bit grumpy. It's not aimed at you but is because this is Trevor Phillips talking crap about where I live.

Setting aside 'the way' he says things is IMO a bit of a big ask. The bullshit use of 'culture' as an alternative to 'race' as an 'explanation' for why some group 'is different'/'should be treated differently' is long established. He knows this perfectly well.

He uses the work of an acadamarketing expert, his partner in a "specialist research and insight consultancy", to identify 'hotspots' linked to boroughs. He specifically cites the Borough I live in Tower Hamlets


Boroughs all contain populations which are diverse in many ways including ethnicity and wealth. Tower Hamlets contains extremes of poverty and wealth. Places at the other end of that extreme, including the finance hub at Canary Wharf, the wealthier parts of the population, and the facilities and transport hubs in the borough which service them, will be used by people whose 'cultural practices' will be different to those found in many other Boroughs which don't contain their equivalent, and will presumably help 'balance out' the effects of 'hand washing' among the Borough's Muslim. I don't believe you could meaningfully quantify that effect either.

The very notion that 'hotspots' can be reliably plotted by Borough boundaries - even assuming that his acadamerchandising chum had meaningful and accurate Borough statistics to work with - is utter jibber jabber in itself. But then there is what he draws from this.

Tower Hamlets has a large Muslim community as he points out. The problems begin right there with that statement. The largest component of that is within the Bengali community. But there are a number of other ethnic groups within it as well. The notion that a religion implies that the 'cultural practices' of those who profess it are homogenous is nonsense.

There is also a sizeable portion of the population (30% in the 2011 census) which describes itself as christian. But the 'cultural practises' in the Roman Catholic part of that are somewhat different to those in the C of E, or Methodist, or Orthodox elements of that group. No-one who wasn't a fucking idiot would suggest that common Christian 'cultural practises' accounted for anything significant in terms of viral spread. There's church going of course. Which <sarcasm> is entirely different </sarcasm> to people going to the pub weekly. Of course perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way round. Perhaps <sarcasm>the 'well known' cultural practice of 'luvable cockernees' to wet their whistle multiple times a day is another part of the 'geodemographic' explanation of why Tower Hamlets is 'different'. </sarcasm>

Even more important is the question of what actually it means to be Muslim (or indeed to profess adherence to any kind of religion).


He singles out the practise of handwashing. The injunctions of Islam about this have been the subject of a good deal of 'commentary' since the pandemic started. (A simple search on google will throw up multiple articles addressing the question of whether 'some' 'Muslim' nurses are 'refusing' to obey hygiene rules or to use to alcohol based hand sanitizers. Of course <sarcasm> Muslims aren't a race so this isn't racism </sarcasm>). His musings on the subject imply that all Muslims have a common understanding of what 'being observant' means, actually practise that and indeed are in jobs where they can 'be observant' if they wanted to. News flash: Muslims aren't like the fucking Borg. I'm not Muslim but fwiw my observations among my Muslim neighbours and friends in Tower Hamlets over the last thirty years is that many of them take the same 'sophisticated' attitude to 'observance' that I have seen among my Roman Catholic friends and neighbours, even devout ones.

Not for the first time reading articles by Trevor Phillips I find myself wondering to what extent he is trolling wiberals and to what extent he simply has his head up his arse and imagines that the 'common sense' stereotypes he DARES TO ADDRESS, are different to the breezy bollocks said at any golf club bar, simply because he's 'TREVOR FUCKING PHILLIPS'. For what little it's worth I'd guess a bit of both but perhaps more out of column B.

Can 'cultural practices' explain differences in viral spread. I don't see why not. Will we ever be in a position to (a) have accurate enough statistics to work with and (b) be able to isolate them out as more than mere possibilities. I strongly doubt it myself.

(Incidentally I omitted to link to Phillips and Webber's 'report'. It's here PDF file. Myself I can't even be bothered.)

Ok. For clarity, are you reading him as saying religion/cultural practices are responsible for more cases, or fewer? I read him as saying fewer.

 

[David Clapson]

Eh? Is someone actually disputing the fact that, if you break the chains of transmission of a communicable disease in a country with no known natural reservoir, it's starved of hosts and dies out? This is epidemiology 101.

Wishful thinking. You're overlooking the fact that we don't know who's carrying it. We don't know how many people are getting it or how many of those have no symptoms. Those are just a couple of the huge unknowns.

 

[Marty1]

This whole fucking thing must be doing wonders for the air quality in London. One silver lining.

Alpine quality?

 

[2hats]

Lots of us are learning new things here.

Sadly, some aren't.

 

[Lurdan]

Ok. For clarity, are you reading him as saying religion/cultural practices are responsible for more cases, or fewer? I read him as saying fewer.

Fewer. It's still IMO speculative nonsense based on objectionable stereotypes.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Wishful thinking. You're overlooking the fact that we don't know who's carrying it. We don't know how many people are getting it or how many of those have no symptoms. Those are just a couple of the huge unknowns.

That's exactly why we need test and trace. And why test-trace-isolate is such an effective way to drive down and keep down the infection rate. That isn't theoretical. Look at the examples of South Korea and now what's happening in Germany. Even without perfect understanding, indeed even without perfect tests or even perfect compliance with quarantine orders, you can get the R0 under 1 and know that it is down at that level from the lead indicators, primarily the number of people getting sick, which after all is the only thing that actually matters in the end.

 

[Mation]

Fewer. It's still IMO speculative nonsense based on objectionable stereotypes.

Ok. I'll read it again.