Generic Virus Thread

[NurembergVillan]

1 hour ago, bannedfromHandV said:

I'd strongly suspect they're south eastern Asian sweatshops, so for multiple reasons it's unlikely to be feasible/desirable.

Actual UK clothes manufacturers tend to be high end.

 

1 hour ago, Chindie said:

You are.

The capacity for production is likely maxed out at various suppliers (from my own job I actually know this to be the case for a particular piece of PPE), and it isn't really a case of chucking an incentive at a producer in China to turn around more product - they would need more machinery, etc etc, which itself will have its own issues with supplies etc.

So they've turned to manufacturers that aren't likely to be running much volume through their facilities ATM, and can likely switch over to other products easily. The brand name doesn't matter.

We're getting brands and manufacturers confused here.

Neither Burberry nor Barbour are manufacturers.  They are brands.  Their products are largely manufactured by third-party factories - in the case of Burberry, mostly in Italy and Portugal; for Barbour it's places like Turkey.  AFAIK Barbour still make their waxed jackets in a small factory in South Shields, but everything else is from overseas.

There are machinery and supply chain issues with these two brands too.  If the Barbour factory were to be used the needles in the machines would be too heavy duty for the lightweight materials used in masks and scrubs, so they'd need to address that.  In terms of the materials themselves, they still need to be sourced and delivered from wherever they're manufactured too.

It should be a case of asking "who can help" and figuring out how to get over these hurdles as quickly as possible rather than identifying specific brands. Independent tailors? The small denim factories in North London and Wales? There are plenty of mainstream UK factories making affordable clothing, albeit for very small brands we're unlikely to be familiar with.

Get everyone on board, place a central order for the requisite materials, go.  It's not hard.

[bannedfromHandV]

38 minutes ago, trekka said:

I think you'll find that it was Matt Hancock. 

Haha so it was, serves me right! 
 

Although in my small defence they’re all blending into the same incompetent a-holes irrespective of who it is.

Edited April 17, 2020 by bannedfromHandV

[bannedfromHandV]

4 minutes ago, NurembergVillan said:

 

We're getting brands and manufacturers confused here.

Neither Burberry nor Barbour are manufacturers.  They are brands.  Their products are largely manufactured by third-party factories - in the case of Burberry, mostly in Italy and Portugal; for Barbour it's places like Turkey.  AFAIK Barbour still make their waxed jackets in a small factory in South Shields, but everything else is from overseas.

There are machinery and supply chain issues with these two brands too.  If the Barbour factory were to be used the needles in the machines would be too heavy duty for the lightweight materials used in masks and scrubs, so they'd need to address that.  In terms of the materials themselves, they still need to be sourced and delivered from wherever they're manufactured too.

It should be a case of asking "who can help" and figuring out how to get over these hurdles as quickly as possible rather than identifying specific brands. Independent tailors? The small denim factories in North London and Wales? There are plenty of mainstream UK factories making affordable clothing, albeit for very small brands we're unlikely to be familiar with.

Get everyone on board, place a central order for the requisite materials, go.  It's not hard.

Ah okay, my bad then, figured those two in particular manufactured their own shit with them both having fairly specific and identifiable branding type stuff.

[Kuwabatake Sanjuro]

8 minutes ago, NurembergVillan said:

 

We're getting brands and manufacturers confused here.

Neither Burberry nor Barbour are manufacturers.  They are brands.  Their products are largely manufactured by third-party factories - in the case of Burberry, mostly in Italy and Portugal; for Barbour it's places like Turkey.  AFAIK Barbour still make their waxed jackets in a small factory in South Shields, but everything else is from overseas.

There are machinery and supply chain issues with these two brands too.  If the Barbour factory were to be used the needles in the machines would be too heavy duty for the lightweight materials used in masks and scrubs, so they'd need to address that.  In terms of the materials themselves, they still need to be sourced and delivered from wherever they're manufactured too.

It should be a case of asking "who can help" and figuring out how to get over these hurdles as quickly as possible rather than identifying specific brands. Independent tailors? The small denim factories in North London and Wales? There are plenty of mainstream UK factories making affordable clothing, albeit for very small brands we're unlikely to be familiar with.

Get everyone on board, place a central order for the requisite materials, go.  It's not hard.

O'Neills have switched to producing PPE since the 23rd of March. Their factory in Strabane produces most of their playing kits but I'd imagine a lot of the stuff they usually sell is still imported.

[Lichfield Dean]

47 minutes ago, sne said:

China casually added 1290 new people to the death toll in Wuhan over night.

Maybe they decided to include their care home deaths then...

[bannedfromHandV]

The one bit I’m struggling to understand, and this may well be a data / reporting issue rather than actually being a thing but how has this not ripped through developing nations with overcrowding and high population density issues, you’d think this would spread like wildfire in places like India, Bangladesh etc and yet it appears to be Europe and the US hardest hit.

[Kuwabatake Sanjuro]

6 minutes ago, Lichfield Dean said:

Maybe they decided to include their care home deaths then...

From a translated press release

Quote

he Wuhan New Crown Pneumonia Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters specially established an epidemic-related big data and epidemiological investigation team to organize the city health and disease Control, public security, civil affairs, judicial, statistical and other departments, online online big data information system for epidemic prevention and control in Wuhan The cases in the Municipal Funeral Information System, the Municipal Medical Administration's New Coronary Pneumonia Information System, and the Municipal New Coronary Pneumonia Virus Nucleic Acid Detection System perform online comparison, deduplication, and completion. Offline cases are subject to full coverage and no omissions. Complete collection of data on epidemic sites, including outpatient clinics, hospitals, shelters, isolation points, epidemic-affected communities, and special places such as prisons, pension institutions and other jurisdictions under the jurisdiction of public security, judicial, civil affairs, and all personal information of all cases. Through medical institutions, street communities, grass-roots police stations, patients' units and their families, each person was checked and checked. As of 24 April on April 16, the number of confirmed cases increased by 325, and the cumulative number of confirmed cases was revised to 50333; deaths of confirmed cases The number of nuclear patients increased by 1,290, and the cumulative number of confirmed deaths was 3,869.

 

The reasons for the difference in the above data: First, the surge of patients in the early stage of the epidemic caused a shortage of medical resources and serious inadequate treatment capacity. Some patients did not enter the hospital and died at home. The second is that during the peak period of treatment, the hospital is overloaded and medical staff are busy with treatment. Objectively, there are late reports, missed reports and false positives. Third, due to the rapid increase of designated medical institutions for patients, there are ministries, provincial, municipal and district hospitals, as well as enterprises, private hospitals and square cabin hospitals. A few medical institutions have failed to connect with the epidemic network in time.送 信息。 Send information. Fourth, the registration of some death cases is incomplete, and there are re-reporting and misreporting.

Seem reasonable. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/af8zPJp-zzpXc-fyDRwBhw

[Lichfield Dean]

1 minute ago, Kuwabatake Sanjuro said:

From a translated press release

Seem reasonable. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/af8zPJp-zzpXc-fyDRwBhw

I was actually half joking, but maybe their government is just doing the same as ours after all

[sne]

3 minutes ago, bannedfromHandV said:

The one bit I’m struggling to understand, and this may well be a data / reporting issue rather than actually being a thing but how has this not ripped through developing nations with overcrowding and high population density issues, you’d think this would spread like wildfire in places like India, Bangladesh etc and yet it appears to be Europe and the US hardest hit.

I think it is pretty much as simple as that.

Lack of testing equipment/data and people dying at home rather than in hospitals combined with a large % of people who doesn't mix with the richer people who have the ability to travel and who were among the ones who initially contracted the virus. 

If and when it does mix in with the general population I fear it will be disastrous. Hopefully climate or something will help prevent it.

[Awol]

3 minutes ago, bannedfromHandV said:

The one bit I’m struggling to understand, and this may well be a data / reporting issue rather than actually being a thing but how has this not ripped through developing nations with overcrowding and high population density issues, you’d think this would spread like wildfire in places like India, Bangladesh etc and yet it appears to be Europe and the US hardest hit.

Less international connectivity, less internal mobility and less reporting/monitoring infrastructure. 

It will eventually hit those countries the hardest (imagine a population in Africa with significant levels of HIV infection, like Kenya and South Africa), but will likely take far longer to spread. 

Those countries will also present significant vectors for reinfection unless international travel is more strictly controlled. 

[bannedfromHandV]

1 minute ago, Awol said:

Less international connectivity, less internal mobility and less reporting/monitoring infrastructure. 

It will eventually hit those countries the hardest (imagine a population in Africa with significant levels of HIV infection, like Kenya and South Africa), but will likely take far longer to spread. 

Those countries will also present significant vectors for reinfection unless international travel is more strictly controlled. 

I think if you took a random African country then yes to the reduced connectivity/mobility piece but India is super connected and super mobile, they’ve also had some major problems in maintaining order around social distancing. The virus is there and has been for some weeks I think but hasn’t spread to anywhere near the extent you’d fear.

Perhaps as you say it’s to come but it does seem slightly odd that it hasn’t come already, not that I’m an expert on any of this.

[Awol]

2 minutes ago, sne said:

Hopefully climate or something will help prevent it.

Heard a few days ago that the virus doesn’t start to die off due to climate until the temp’ hits 56 degrees C. 

That’s a bad mid-East summers day, but nowhere else where humans live in significant numbers. 

[sne]

1 minute ago, Awol said:

Heard a few days ago that the virus doesn’t start to die off due to climate until the temp’ hits 56 degrees C. 

That’s a bad mid-East summers day, but nowhere else where humans live in significant numbers. 

Yeah, hopefully it slows the spread a bit somehow thou. No idea why it should but one can hope.

[bannedfromHandV]

2 minutes ago, Awol said:

Heard a few days ago that the virus doesn’t start to die off due to climate until the temp’ hits 56 degrees C. 

That’s a bad mid-East summers day, but nowhere else where humans live in significant numbers. 

If this is true, why are we not putting infected people in saunas and cranking up the temp to max?

(I once got to nearly 100C in a sauna as a laugh with a mate, had to bail out once my eyelids started burning!)

[mikeyp102]

On the whole clapping thing, I’ve never done it. First couple of weeks, I genuinely just forgot about it and was in my living room watching telly. Third week, I remembered and looked out to see who was doing it. A lot of my neighbours were out and clapping, but these are all the ones who have really pissed me off recently by not following social distancing properly. As such, I made the decision that I didn’t want to go out. I’m sure I’m being judged by them by not going out, but if they ever had the balls to say anything to me about it I’d hit the roof and call them selfish hypocrites 

[Chindie]

I wouldn't be too concerned about the environmental temperature. It's going to be subject to so many things in the environment (UV radiation, dry conditions, surfaces it doesn't naturally survive on etc etc) that it's survivability to temperature is kinda meaningless.

Your biggest problem is still, and always will be, coming into contact with other people's respiratory droplets in the air and inhaling them, and with that the ability of the virus to survive for long outside the body is largely neither here nor there.

[Chindie]

10 minutes ago, bannedfromHandV said:

If this is true, why are we not putting infected people in saunas and cranking up the temp to max?

(I once got to nearly 100C in a sauna as a laugh with a mate, had to bail out once my eyelids started burning!)

The internal temperature needed to kill the virus would kill you first.

[Kuwabatake Sanjuro]

7 hours ago, NurembergVillan said:

 

We're getting brands and manufacturers confused here.

Neither Burberry nor Barbour are manufacturers.  They are brands.  Their products are largely manufactured by third-party factories - in the case of Burberry, mostly in Italy and Portugal; for Barbour it's places like Turkey.  AFAIK Barbour still make their waxed jackets in a small factory in South Shields, but everything else is from overseas.

There are machinery and supply chain issues with these two brands too.  If the Barbour factory were to be used the needles in the machines would be too heavy duty for the lightweight materials used in masks and scrubs, so they'd need to address that.  In terms of the materials themselves, they still need to be sourced and delivered from wherever they're manufactured too.

It should be a case of asking "who can help" and figuring out how to get over these hurdles as quickly as possible rather than identifying specific brands. Independent tailors? The small denim factories in North London and Wales? There are plenty of mainstream UK factories making affordable clothing, albeit for very small brands we're unlikely to be familiar with.

Get everyone on board, place a central order for the requisite materials, go.  It's not hard.

ThinkBusiness.ie

Quote

The O’Neill’s sportswear brand is synonymous with GAA and rugby and a plethora of other sports in Ireland, including cricket. The company was set up in 1918 and is the largest manufacturer of sportswear in Ireland with production plants in Dublin, Derry and Strabane, kitting teams out with everything from uniforms to footballs and sliotars.

Whatever challenges O’Neill’s had to overcome in its 102-year history, there was nothing like the freeze imposed by the Covid-19 lockdown.

“It all happened in the space of two weeks and a decision had to be taken,” Towell said. “If we had tried to continue for another two weeks with no money coming in it would have eaten into our reserves, which we would still need for when things open up again. You need a company to go back to.”

Just when things were at their bleakest, hope came in the form of the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trust which urgently needed someone to manufacture scrubs for frontline medical workers.

“They approached us to see if we’d be interested in manufacturing scrubs. The main thing we needed was fabric to make the kits and we already had our knitting plants and dyeing plants which had all been closed.

“On a Friday our MD in Northern Ireland went to see the Trust. By Saturday he made samples and by Monday they gave us an order for 50,000 sets of scrubs.”

I know its a PR article from a bank but it gives an idea of what is involved.

[Sid4ever]

9 minutes ago, mikeyp102 said:

On the whole clapping thing, I’ve never done it. First couple of weeks, I genuinely just forgot about it and was in my living room watching telly. Third week, I remembered and looked out to see who was doing it. A lot of my neighbours were out and clapping, but these are all the ones who have really pissed me off recently by not following social distancing properly. As such, I made the decision that I didn’t want to go out. I’m sure I’m being judged by them by not going out, but if they ever had the balls to say anything to me about it I’d hit the roof and call them selfish hypocrites 

Exactly this bolded bit, first neighbours out every Thursday are the ones, who think it's ok for their 21 year old son to go out 3 times a day in his car to meet up with his friends.

[bannedfromHandV]

Just now, Sid4ever said:

Exactly this bolded bit, first neighbours out every Thursday are the ones, who think it's ok for their 21 year old son to go out 3 times a day in his car to meet up with his friends.

It’s a bunch of bollocks anyway.

I don’t need to be at Villa Park to be a Villa fan, religious folk don’t need to be in a church to be religious, I don’t need to stand on my doorstep and clap at 8pm on a Thursday to be appreciative of all that the NHS etc are doing right now.