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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

 
campanula said:
What is the fucking matter with these morons? MY D-i-L, one of the extremely vulnerable groups has been going for a sioitary walk with her partner throughout the entire crisis. After a very short foray along the road, they nip through a hedge into fields where they have 'befriended' a family of water voles. Does this govt seriously think anyone not bedridden has been literally under lock and key? I get that people live in different circumstances - D-i L lives in a busy uni town...but with enough wildness on the edges to swish through nettles and be entirely alone. And outside, safe. With her mental health intact.
But no, they make these ludicrous announcements which manage to be both eerily specific (such as precise number???) while still being vague and ambiguous.
I would surely expect that, like us, the majority of the UK take zero notice of crappy blitherings made by govt. stooges...and operate from a point of intelligent awareness, having been utterly unable to rely on a single govt initiative whatsoever. . There are only 2 things to bear in mind, surely - to protect yourself and everyone else by remaining separate...whether indoors, outdoors, in private spaces or public land. Everything else is...just a bit pointless. Especially since they need to eat and as a youngish and healthy looking couple, there are no eager mutual aid groups and because R has a partner, she has conscientiously refused to accept food parcels because people who live alone are a priority...so the weekly supermarket visit has been far more of a worry than staying indoors.
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Loads of people have been shut in for weeks. I talk to self-isolated people every day for my job and many are terrified of leaving the house. Many can’t go outside as they have no garden
 
Orang Utan said:
Loads of people have been shut in for weeks. I talk to self-isolated people every day for my job and many are terrified of leaving the house. Many can’t go outside as they have no garden
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know. Just doesn't make any sort of sense that suddenly, they can now step outside and be visited by someone from another household. I am not questioning people's choices and actions here...just the shallow 'advice' when, afaics, nothing much has changed...because we are still effectively blind. A month ago, we were told there would be anitbody tests available to every household...amongst other such promises...when there still isn't even enough PPE. The things we need in place...such as regional (accurate) testing, are still nowhere easily available ..so I dunno. I am having a hard time in understanding why people would literally put their lives in the hands of venal liars and corrupt flunkeys. If I was too scared to step outside before...why would it suddenly feel 'safe' right now. Crappy bit of rubbish advice is no substitute for effective controls.

We are still guessing who has already had the virus...with all sorts of assumptions of immunity. We just don't know anything which would encourage me at least, to materially alter my current precautions and behaviour. I know data and statistics are available to make policies on macro levels...but on an individual, everyday level, I am still flailing about in the dark.
 
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elbows said:
I see something on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph about how officials could 'only cope with 5 COVID-19 cases a week' which appears to relate to how much contract tracing the awful system could actually ahndle during the original 'contain' phase. I havent found the relevant SAGE stuff on this yet, but its not surprising, this sort of thing is why I have always said the contain phase was not a genuine attempt at containment, at best it was only a delay and learn phase.
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The EUReferendum blog has some comments on the Telegraph article:

EU Referendum

www.eureferendum.com www.eureferendum.com
 
zahir said:
The EUReferendum blog has some comments on the Telegraph article:

EU Referendum

www.eureferendum.com www.eureferendum.com
Click to expand...

Although I obviously agree with that article that large sections of the media dont really understand what they are reporting about that stuff, this article still makes the classic mistake of thinking that the shitty pandemic plans were only foiund wanting because this was a SARS virus rather than flu. But I've said before that I consider that our plan and resources would have been found to be just as inappropriate if we had a really bad influenza pandemic, especially if there was quite a long gap between epidemic outbreaks and vaccine availability.

Anyway I should quote a bit to backup my general position on this.

This is a chicken and egg situation. PHE didn't have the capacity to carry out extensive contact tracing and testing (for control purposes), because there was no intention to control the pandemic, when the infection arrived in the UK. Thus, testing and contact tracing wasn't stopped because of lack of capacity. There was a lack of capacity because it was always expected that testing and contact tracing would be stopped.
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As for the following bit, there are soon signs of this in the SAGE minutes, soon after the major u-turn they start going on and on about testing capacity, and in some quotes which I shall dig up shortly it is almost possible to detect the exasperation.

It is true though that, had the scientists and assembled "experts" at Sage realised the game was up, there was nothing immediately that could have been done, because of capacity issues. But, at least, they could have sounded the alarm, and got an expansion programme underway.
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March 16th: SAGE 16 minutes: Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, 16 March 2020

  1. SAGE advises that there is clear evidence to support additional social distancing measures be introduced as soon as possible.
  2. These additional measures will need to be accompanied by a significant increase in testing and the availability of near real-time data flows to understand their impacts.
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UK testing
  1. SAGE highlighted the critical importance of scaling up antibody serology and diagnostic testing to managing the epidemic. A solution is urgently required, with a plan for implementation.
  2. Antibody testing is particularly vital to address the central unknown question of the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic cases.
  3. PHE explained how testing is being scaled up over the coming weeks to 10,000 per day – focused on intensive care units, hospital admissions and key workers.
  4. PHE is urgently assessing commercial self-test options, with accuracy a key criterion.
ACTION: PHE to update SAGE on the efficacy and feasibility of rolling out a rapid home swab test for antigens, including the mechanism for collection (for next meeting).
ACTION: PHE to develop a proposal for ramping up antibody serology and diagnostic testing capacity, seeking input from DSTL and the National Laboratories Alliance
Click to expand...

  1. Close to real-time, high-quality data are important to the strategy the UK is pursuing. All options to get this data flow need to be considered. NHS and PHE are arranging a workshop ASAP to discuss and make this happen. Duplication of effort on this needs to be avoided.
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March 18th: SAGE 17 minutes: Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, 18 March 2020

  1. SAGE discussed the importance of good quality and timely data. CHESS data has improved but has not stabilised, so trend analysis is more challenging. The overall quality of data is improving, with short time lags to ensure data quality and consistency.
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17. NHS updated on a joint NHS-PHE plan for testing, including 25,000 PCR tests a day, an increase in viral antigen detection tests and increased serosurveillance, including a more widely available serological test.
SAGE discussed how to ensure that key workers, particularly NHS staff, get full access to comprehensive testing and agreed the importance of ramping up testing as soon as possible.
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March 23rd: SAGE 18 minutes: Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, 23 March 2020

9. Increased community testing and surveillance will be invaluable to measure the effects of the interventions taken
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30. NHS testing capacity in the UK is currently at around 5000 a day, to be increased to 15,000 a day by mid-April. A platform in partnership with the private sector has been established to aim to increase capacity to 110,000 a day by mid-April.
31. It is essential to have a clear rationale for prioritising testing for patients and health workers, and to coordinate testin supplies across the UK to ensure the most urgent needs are being met.
32. Healthcare workers must be screened repeatedly and should take priority.
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Frustration visible via reemphasis on March 26th: SAGE 19 minutes: Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, 26 March 2020

36. PHE described efforts to increase clinical testing, key worker testing and antibody testing. SAGE re-emphasised the importance of urgently ramping up testing with appropriate quality.
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CMO to communicate that prioritisation of testing - i.e. who gets tested first - sits with him.
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By the 2nd of April they are still largely going round in circles in regards various testing issues. Throughout March the subject of serology testing and spread in hospitals comes up nearly as often as I was bringing such things up in the early months. By the end of March they could tell nosocomial spread was an issue, and their comments on the subject become more desperate. Care homes didnt get much of a look in or prioritisation at the time.

By April 16th the limits of what PHE was going to deliver was on full display: SAGE 26 minutes: Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, 16 April 2020

9. PHE confirmed ot was unable to deliver a community testing programme. SAGE agreed that if PHE is unable to undertake the programme then this should be undertaken within a repeated ONS-led household survey programme.
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Formby beach Liverpool apparently ...
My local park is also attracting people who can't even be bothered to dump their crap within 2 metres of a bin when they have to walk past one to exit ...

formbybeach.png

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk

Beaches covered in glass, laughing gas canisters and litter

People were asked to be respectful as they flocked towards the coast this weekend - those pleas were ignored
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk www.liverpoolecho.co.uk
 
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averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

The Sick Man of Europe

It's hard to recall now, but there was a time the UK looked on top of Coronavirus. In the very early days as the outbreak was raging in Wu...
averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

It's hard to recall now, but there was a time the UK looked on top of Coronavirus. In the very early days as the outbreak was raging in Wuhan, Iran, and northern Italy, we were treated to a reassuring show of covid-19 victims getting tracked down and carted off to hospital. The people they had been in contact with were traced, tested, and told to stay put. For once, the Tories were on the edge of ... doing the right thing. As the rest of Italy succumbed and Spain fell under its pall, there was a smidgen of possibility the UK might weather the storm with fewer infections and fewer deaths than the countries across the Channel. Two months is a long time in epidemiology these days, and here we are at the end of May leading Europe with the highest incidence of disease and the greatest number of dead. And we take this grisly trophy for one reason. Despite their best efforts at trying to blame the public for not obeying lockdown rules, the Tories' tardiness at implementing the measures necessary to save tens of thousands of lives is responsible. This disaster is on them. There is no one else to carry the can.

Yet, as with all political things, fortune contrived to smile kindly on the Tories. With the initial shock of people being forced to stay home, combined with record job losses, significant cuts to the income of millions of others, and the fear covid-19 has struck into our collective hearts, this sheer incompetence wasn't much noticed. Labour's new leadership also fought shy of trying to highlight it fearful of Keir Starmer being seen playing politics with a life-or-death crisis. Therefore, many were prepared to forgive the government their innumerable sins because we needed them to get it right and, well, no one had been in this situation before. See, the Tories are lucky. The wrong choices could be put down to exceptionalism.

Nothing lasts forever, not even polling honeymoons facilitated by a deadly disease. In this last fortnight, the Tories have appeared determined to do everything to take their immense advantage and throw it around like non-functioning testing kits. We saw the imbecility of forcing open the schools while picking fights with teachers and their unions, retreats on ending furlough early and on NHS charges for foreign-born NHS workers, and a collapse in support thanks to the eternal Dominic Cummings crisis. And the government's response to this state of affairs couldn't be worse. Mindful of the u-turn-if-you-want-to nostalgia of the Tory imaginary, and the barrelling approach to Brexit, they've decided to hunker down and go through with school openings and further lockdown relaxations, with arbitrary dates set for the resumption of sports and opening of non-essential shops. This despite infections and death rates standing many times higher than the next worst afflicted European country. That's what they think of the science they're supposedly led by.

There are two intertwining aspects to understanding the Tories here. The first barely needs much rehearsing because it will be familiar with anyone reading anything to the left of the liberal press: class politics. The history of the Tory party is of its being the preferred, but not sole, arena for the political articulation of ruling class interests, for organising those interests, and representing these sectional interests as if they're identical with those of the country/people. The Tories' hesitation over implementing quarantine measures, their being forced by the measures already taken by the public was, transparently, about keeping the UK's stagnating economy from seizing up. How they've supported people through the crisis by tying subsistence to employers, keeping Universal Credit low, propping up landlords and issuing loans to businesses demonstrated their first concern was maintaining the disciplinary complex underpinning waged labour and market competition. No matter how many old people are shipped back into coronavirus-riddled care homes to die, no capitalist relations of production will be harmed by the pandemic. Even if some changes to the workplace are accelerating. Therefore the lifting of the lockdown is about putting profits before people, reasserting employer authority over employee, and starting the bounce back from the viral depression.

The second is about authoritarianism, which has been the ingrained common sense of British state craft since Thatcher. This is different to what we see in Russia, Hungary, the US, and elsewhere but is driven by the same sorts of processes. As Andrew Gamble observed in his 1988 book, The Free Economy and the Strong State, Thatcher's roll back of the post-war social order was not possible without the state tooling up. Famously it did so to see off the labour movement in the key disputes of the 1980s, but the authoritarianism ran deeper than handing the police more powers and carte blanche to do as they pleased. The Thatcher project was about positioning the government as the absolute authority within the state system. Her attacks on the civil service, the restructuring of education and health, the gutting of local government, and her overall disdain for expert knowledge (except when it was in accordance with her prejudices) reinforced Downing Street as the seat of command to which all other institutions cleaved. Tony Blair settled very well into this practice of government - the rows with the BBC, enforcing more marketisation on public services, and so on. Ditto for Dave's lash up with the LibDems and their programme of austerity in defiance of economic sense, and doubly so with Johnson first on Brexit and now with coronavirus. The parading of SAGE is just there for show - Johnson has no intention of abiding by their advice not because he thinks they're wrong and he's right, but because it goes against the entirety of his political socialisation. There cannot be room for alternative bases of authority in government if, crucially, the Thatcherite settlement within the state apparatus is to be maintained. I therefore fully expect the government to declare victory over the virus some point this summer while infections head toward a second peak and deaths accumulate at a greater rate than present.

I doubt Johnson consciously see things this way. His modus operandi is opportunism, not ideology or an appreciation of the interests of his class. As such, he's also well suited to the government machine bequeathed him by his predecessors. He doesn't have to be held to account, no one in the civil service is going to say no, experts and critics are rubbished as activists with political axes to grind, and they have zero authority in the state system anyway. Whether an active authoritarian like Thatcher or a couch potato authoritarian like Johnson, they want to maintain government privilege - hence also the outright refusal to sack Cummings, even at the risk of diving poll ratings.

In the 1970s, right wing columnists and rent-a-quote Tory MPs used to regularly describe Britain as the sick man of Europe because of rising inflation, sclerotic growth, strikes, inflation, and a generalised malaise. With an unenviable record and a rate of transmission higher now than when we entered quarantine, more people are going to be getting ill, getting incapacitated, and dying as other European countries start easing things and begin the slow journey back to something approximating the normal. Our continued morbidity contrasts unfavourably with their recovery. But our sickness is deeper - the illness of the social body is exacerbated by a disease of the mind, of a governing party and a Prime Minister prepared to sacrifice the many to conserve the profits and power of the few, and a practice of government that encourages him to do so.
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Pope cautions against rush to ease lockdowns

Pope Francis said on Sunday that healing people was "more important" than the economy, as countries around the world continue to ease lockdown restrictions. The Pope made his first address from his window overlooking St Peter's Square in three months. Many thronged to the Vatican City square, which was reopened to the public last Monday, to listen to him.
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"Healing people, not saving [money] to help the economy [is important] - healing people, who are more important than the economy," he said. Pope Francis said on Sunday that healing people was "more important" than the economy, as countries around the world continue to ease lockdown restrictions.
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The Pope made his first address from his window overlooking St Peter's Square in three months. Many thronged to the Vatican City square, which was reopened to the public last Monday, to listen to him. "Healing people, not saving [money] to help the economy [is important] - healing people, who are more important than the economy," he said. "We people are temples of the Holy Spirit, the economy is not."
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It’s weird walking through the INSANELY busy park here full of people having a lovely time 3 ice cream vans etc and just feeling impending doom looking at it all.
I’ve lived in this park for a year and never before seen people double parked all along the way. And it’s not even “happy Monday” yet.
Feels like (regardless of government uselessness) everyone just basically got bored of the whole virus thing, like you can’t maintain a state of acute fear long term and without that it just falls apart.
 
campanula said:
Yeah, I know. Just doesn't make any sort of sense that suddenly, they can now step outside and be visited by someone from another household. I am not questioning people's choices and actions here...just the shallow 'advice' when, afaics, nothing much has changed...because we are still effectively blind. A month ago, we were told there would be anitbody tests available to every household...amongst other such promises...when there still isn't even enough PPE. The things we need in place...such as regional (accurate) testing, are still nowhere easily available ..so I dunno. I am having a hard time in understanding why people would literally put their lives in the hands of venal liars and corrupt flunkeys. If I was too scared to step outside before...why would it suddenly feel 'safe' right now. Crappy bit of rubbish advice is no substitute for effective controls.

We are still guessing who has already had the virus...with all sorts of assumptions of immunity. We just don't know anything which would encourage me at least, to materially alter my current precautions and behaviour. I know data and statistics are available to make policies on macro levels...but on an individual, everyday level, I am still flailing about in the dark.
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It makes no sense.
Their chart thing said ‘vulnerable people can go out’ was for when the virus has gone away, threat level one in their little chart that was introduced with much seriousness by the pm. They’ve just basically said sod it and I can’t at all see why.


CB222408-6592-4C72-9D5A-837A0A8D977E.jpeg
 
A sheltered housing block opposite me has had people coming round to see one old guy who lives there for a good week or more. Sometimes ten cars turn up, multiple families, all generations, big party with a barbecue. I'm on the fourth floor and he's on the ground floor so I can see it all.

I guess he has a large family that sticks together and I'm actually a bit jealous about that but clearly none of them give a fuck about distancing or the regulations or any of that.

Nobody social distances on the high street here either, or anywhere else but the high street is busiest. It's like nothing ever happened.

I mean I'm no grass anyway and practically I think this has very little impact vs commuting and, omfg, schools re-opening which is going to be terrible. But I'm still cross. This is real, people, Christ.
 
My take on it is that they think the NHS can cope with whatever increase in cases that we might see, that we will put up with a steady trickle of deaths that doesn't seem too high, and (most significantly) that the only alternative is a longer lockdown that will be too economically damaging and they've been under pressure from a wing of the party and business to get things back to normal as fast as possible.

Anecdataly I think lots of people have had enough of the lockdown as well. It was crumbling around here before all the Cummings stuff anyway, and that was the final excuse some people needed.

It's all a fine balancing act and a massive gamble though, if it tips over into something else we'll be back to an exponential growth in cases again, but without the public backing and belief that it's serious.
 
Orang Utan said:
It’s prettying obvious why they’re doing it
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Why? I mean yes the economy but why tell the most vulnerable to go out when they so recently said that was for the final stage?
Has the science changed so that human interaction and not being stuck indoors is now a factor in their thinking when it wasn’t before?
 
bimble said:
Why? I mean yes the economy but why tell the most vulnerable to go out when they so recently said that was for the final stage?
Has the science changed so that human interaction and not being stuck indoors is now a factor in their thinking when it wasn’t before?
Click to expand...
they don't give a fuck, they're just making a political choice for economic reasons
 
bimble said:
Why? I mean yes the economy but why tell the most vulnerable to go out when they so recently said that was for the final stage?
Has the science changed so that human interaction and not being stuck indoors is now a factor in their thinking when it wasn’t before?
Click to expand...

It was covered a bit in today's briefing. Much less prevalence of the virus, less chance of meeting someone with it, better awareness of what symptoms are so people less likely to be out now, social distancing still very necessary, it limited contact, and it advisory.

I know a couple of people shielding, think they'll welcome this tbh. Maybe it's also balanced with the realism that they aren't actually going to stay inside until there's a vaccine?
 
Orang Utan said:
they don't give a fuck, they're just making a political choice for economic reasons
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Yeah in general of course just that one bit I don’t get, why tell the vulnerable to go out at the same time as all the rest of it.

Eta answered (mostly makes sense) by Lynn
 
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They're not 'telling the vulnerable to go out' really. They're giving some limited options for them to not just stay in a room for the forseeable future.

Is it a bit like teenagers drinking alcohol? Better to let them do it under some guidance and rules, rather than ban it outright and have them do it in secret?

Sorry, shit analogy, but you hopefully get what I mean?!
 
bimble said:
Why? I mean yes the economy but why tell the most vulnerable to go out when they so recently said that was for the final stage?
Has the science changed so that human interaction and not being stuck indoors is now a factor in their thinking when it wasn’t before?
Click to expand...

The changes are VERY limited, go out with other members of the household, and/or meet one other person from another household, whilst maintaining social distancing.

I can't see a problem with that, TBH.
 
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