MrSki
Who am I to say you're wrong
He has been pretty solid with his posts for the last few years.
General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat
- Thread starter phillm
- Start date
Dystopiary
putting up a hook to hang my hopes upon
He definitely posts some good info, but I do find him, well, yeah a bit clickbaity sometimes.
Read the whole thread
Yup
Puddy_Tat
naturally fluffy
just been following a discussion on teh tweeter about the merits of train companies encouraging mask wearing.
seems to be a fairly vocal "if i have to wear a mask, i'm not travelling by train" faction and a significant "if twats aren't wearing masks, i'm not travelling by train" faction
seems to be a fairly vocal "if i have to wear a mask, i'm not travelling by train" faction and a significant "if twats aren't wearing masks, i'm not travelling by train" faction
wemakeyousoundb
hopefully not gimboid
can we say Maskexit yet?just been following a discussion on teh tweeter about the merits of train companies encouraging mask wearing.
seems to be a fairly vocal "if i have to wear a mask, i'm not travelling by train" faction and a significant "if twats aren't wearing masks, i'm not travelling by train" faction
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Watched some TV last night; Cummings saying the PM delayed lockdown against scientific advice, which almost certainly killed thousands. Then watched the news showing possibly 4 million dead in India, the world flooded or burning due to climate change, and a billionaire's private trip into space which apparently was awesome.
Fuck's sake.
Fuck's sake.
Government urged to share Covid data from Euro 2020 final as cases soar among England fans
More than 60,000 attended the final but it descended into chaos when thousands more ticketless fans congregated outside before the game
inews-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org
It was always the plan
Cases holding under 50k per day but there are hardly any rest kits available. Yesterday the number of reported tests dropped 200k so, alongside those people who don't test we are way way behind on reporting of new cases. Also there are a lot of positive people who don't know.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Not quite sure of exactly which thread to put this in, but some of these stories of quarantine security guards abusing their position by propositioning female guests are about the second most unpleasant thing I've read this morning.
The MOST unpleasant thing I've read this morning are the responses from some of the companies, trying to minimise and ignore the concerns of the imprisoned women. Blame-shifting everywhere, with hotels, security guard companies, and DHSC all busily Tefloning up their shoulders, and leaving these women high and dry. It's fucking obscene.
Lone women in Covid quarantine hotels to get female guards
The government is responding to continuing complaints of sexual harassment in hotel quarantine.
www.bbc.co.uk
The MOST unpleasant thing I've read this morning are the responses from some of the companies, trying to minimise and ignore the concerns of the imprisoned women. Blame-shifting everywhere, with hotels, security guard companies, and DHSC all busily Tefloning up their shoulders, and leaving these women high and dry. It's fucking obscene.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
You will note from the article that the DHSC is saying, rather half-heartedly, that it will try to get female guards, but if it can't, it'll just double up on the male guards 
Of course, if they will insist on using companies like Mitie and G4S, not exactly notorious for quality hiring practices, pay, and taking responsibility for things, this kind of thing was almost inevitable. As, I suppose, is the wall of denial, silence, and prevarication. These women (and men) in quarantine are owed a duty of care by the Government, and it clearly doesn't feel at all responsible for enacting that.
Of course, if they will insist on using companies like Mitie and G4S, not exactly notorious for quality hiring practices, pay, and taking responsibility for things, this kind of thing was almost inevitable. As, I suppose, is the wall of denial, silence, and prevarication. These women (and men) in quarantine are owed a duty of care by the Government, and it clearly doesn't feel at all responsible for enacting that.
magneze
🎧
My vague hope is that we're at some kind of peak.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Lateral flow tests?
When drilling down to England rather than the UK, the testing section of the dashboard has a graph for number of lateral flow tests conducted. And it looks like the pattern is that its always down on Tuesdays. And I was expecting it to fall anyway because of school holidays beginning in some areas. Will be interesting to see if it goes back up in Wednesday numbers like it normally does.
I doubt this is the only factor behind test numbers reducing, but its a fairly large chunk of the picture which complicates my ability to see what else is going on at the moment via data.
Lateral flow centres and home tests.
Most chemist's round here have run out. Seems nobody can order online. Businesses can no longer get bulk freebies for their staff.
That, plus schools closing, FreeDumb Day and sunshine makes up the drop. My point is that the case numbers are MUCH lower than they should be when we factor in the delta varient and recent large gatherings.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Cheers for the interesting info and view from the ground.
I have an open mind about when cases will actually peak, so I cannot really tell the difference between all these different factors that influence number of positive cases reported at the moment, the picture is complex and messy. Even my ability to use Scotland as a vague guide has been hampered by a lack of recent hospital admissions data for Scotland which I would use to validate that their peak was real.
I have an open mind about when cases will actually peak, so I cannot really tell the difference between all these different factors that influence number of positive cases reported at the moment, the picture is complex and messy. Even my ability to use Scotland as a vague guide has been hampered by a lack of recent hospital admissions data for Scotland which I would use to validate that their peak was real.
It is hard to keep up. Central government are close to useless and think every town/county can be managed the same.
We have now got 'Vacci Taxis' which will take people to and from vaccination centres. They have recently also taken on delivering test kits to unpaid carers and immune compromised people as they can't get any.
Also the last two weeks of school term we had loads of parents and teachers coming to us as they had run out. Even a few NHS and care home staff are in the same boat.
We have now got 'Vacci Taxis' which will take people to and from vaccination centres. They have recently also taken on delivering test kits to unpaid carers and immune compromised people as they can't get any.
Also the last two weeks of school term we had loads of parents and teachers coming to us as they had run out. Even a few NHS and care home staff are in the same boat.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend... 
prunus
Tick tock.
Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...
Absolutely. However I have reservations about this ability and competence of this government to be able to pull off such a trick. I think it’s purely fortuitous for them, based on them not planning to increase test supplies in advance of the very predictable increase in demand as a result of their actions.
Ie it’s incompetence, rather than malevolent genius.
scalyboy
They’re taking the piss now
One of my neighbours just told us she has Covid; she was double jabbed. She thinks she got it from a friend who went to the final.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I dont think they are actually interested in making the numbers look better at this particular stage.Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...
Thats something they might like to achieve in future, but at this stage of this wave such things have been utterly trumped by other priorities.
They have their eyes on a bigger prize - to have a peak and decline that isnt lockdown-induced. And in order to stand some chance of that happening, they left certain brakes in place. Some of those brakes involve testing and contact tracing/the app. As we have seen via the recent emphasis on the 'pingdemic' by the media, the self-isolation stuff is a very big deal in terms of the numbers of people that it affects and the disruption that it causes. But some of that disruption is to the viruses ability to find ever increasing numbers of victims. So the self-isolation stuff, during the peak period of a wave, becames a sort of mini lockdown by stealth. This disruption makes the government look bad, but clearly they felt that they couldnt make the wave planning numbers add up if they removed those brakes at this particular stage. So even though the disruption makes them look really bad, they didnt even want to fiddle with the app sensitivity at this stage despite all the pressure. And I take that as a further indication that they realise that the self-isolation brakes are still very much required at this stage to prevent hospitalisation numbers soaring beyond the limits. They would much, much rather this big disruption and mess for a number of weeks than having to u-turn on key irreversible relaxation pledges by bringing back other forms of brake.
And I think that any temptation to 'fake the peak' via test system limitations is removed by the fact that we'll be able to see the real peak via hospital data later anyway. Plus authorities have not tended to prematurely jump at possible peaks in the case data either, they have tended to use cautious language about peaks and not to describe them as such until a fair amount of time had gone by since the positive test data implied a peak. Scotland was a recent example - they didnt acknowledge the case peak much at all to start with, then used language like levelling off when the numbers had actually been falling for a while, and only in recent days started to talk about the declines. In other words authorities tend to wait until multiple different sorts of data confirm the peak, and arent keen to make fools of themselves by describing something as a peak if theres a fair chance it will later turn out to be an artefact of the testing system rather than a real peak.
Plus the government made a huge deal of how large the case numbers could become in this country, by chucking around figures like 100,000 per day. Now it is possible that they gave a very large number because they were hoping the real number would be lower than that so they could be all triumphant about it. But again they know that the hospitalisation figures and deaths are what really count, so the potential gains from fucking around with case numbers arent very high.
And it makes them look bad when the testing system turns out to be unable to cope. And there are measures such as percentage of tests returning positive which are used to judge such matters and to make educated guesses about reality vs what the daily positive numbers are. And there are infection surveys that use random household testing to demonstrate the scale and direction of travel.
scalyboy
They’re taking the piss now
If, as is looking likely, the Wembley final was a superspreader event, does that mean the Delta variant is more easily transmittable in the open air?
Back In 2020 I thought there was some uncertainty as to whether large outdoor gatherings of people were risky - on the one hand Cheltenham and Liverpool-Atletico are believed to have increased infections, but on the other hand I recall reading there were no infection spikes after big anti-vaxxer demos, Bournemouth beach last summer, or BLM events.
Which is correct? Or is the amount of shouting and singing going to be a factor?
sideboob
Well-Known Member
Not that I am for a moment suggesting that this is happening...but if you were a government who would quite like the numbers to not look too bad, wouldn't one way of achieving that be to mess up the supply of tests? Asking for a friend...
You`re letting everyone in on Japans secret. I was feeling really sick, trouble breathing so I thought I would be reasponsible and get a test done. I couldn`t find anywhere locally to get a test, unless I wanted to pay big money. I`m sure (hopefully) that they`re more accessable in the big cities, but fuck me what a clusterfuck.
elbows
Well-Known Member
In my book Delta transmits more easily in general, and that applies to all settings. Outdoors still safer than indoors, but risk increased by this variant.
Behaviours including singing is an issue. But then so are things such as crowd density and pinch points and travel to and from the event and whether its really all outdoors or only certain parts outdoors.
When judging particular events and images of large groups, I am very heavily influenced byt the current prevalence of the virus. A couple of months ago the number of infected people in the crowd should have been very much smaller than it would be today.
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LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yes, it is.
The spreaders ^
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