Generic Virus Thread

[Jareth]

I'm wondering why anyone is looking at China at the moment and not squarely at the sheisters in power who have delivered the UK the second highest death toll in the world. 

[terrytini]

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Very weird to be saying this, but Bernard Jenkin had a good piece on ConservativeHome the other day about the route out of our current situation, and a clear-eyed assessment of what the possibilities are (or, really, aren't) and what the consequences are likely to be.

Bernard Jenkin: Keeping or junking the shutdown won’t work. But the alternative requires a transformation unparalleled since the war

'[...]Talking about the mechanics of re-opening the economy is important in order to understand how and in what order different sectors of the economy can recover. However, such a discussion assumes we can loosen the restrictions while also having in place the public health infrastructure and policies for the whole of society that will prevent a second spike in infections. But that is the daunting challenge we cannot yet meet.

The most helpful way to think about meeting it so to consider the so-called  R number (the average number of people one infected person will themselves infect).

If this number is below one, the number of cases goes down. If it is consistently above one, the disease will spread to the entire population. In the words of Carl Bergstrom, Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Washington: “There’s really not a middle ground. It does one of two things: either you get it under control, and it goes back down to very low levels… or it’s out of control and it keeps getting worse and worse until you get a very large fraction of the population infected.”

So if we re-open the economy, even in a phased way, without keeping R below one, we will merely create a slower form of the disastrous “Surrender” scenario described above.

To keep R below one thus far has taken a national lockdown and the deliberate spreading of fear about the virus. To contain R below one, while opening up, will not be attractive to advocates of a small state.

The task is to reduce how easily people infect each other with Covid-19, despite being far freer to move around and socialise than currently. This requires, in the US or UK, “national government to achieve within three months the sort of pandemic preparedness it took Taiwan five years to develop.”

This is why there is now a debate about whether people will need to wear PPE at all times in public. The scale of the requirement for PPE means that the state will have to be much more involved in the supply chain. There will have to be a comprehensive plan for contact tracing and testing, by which the recent contacts of infected individuals are themselves tracked down and either tested negative or isolated.

To collect high-quality data on where ill people have travelled, and who they have been near, phone apps or similar technology to those used in South East Asia must be widely accepted, and personal data used far more freely than we would normally find acceptable. In order to contain a disease that would otherwise spread freely, we will have to increase daily testing to levels capable of catching outbreaks we would otherwise have no idea about.

No longer would testing be limited to hospitals or symptomatic patients: analysis from E. Glen Weyl (one of the Harvard paper’s authors) and Divya Siddarth, both of Microsoft, suggests that, scaled for the UK, we would need to test not 100,000, but 300,000 people per day if we can accurately identify likely infected people. Otherwise, the testing rate would have to be closer to 18 million per day. Given that we are currently managing less than 20,000 per day, we cannot achieve this any time soon.

When considered together, successfully delivering these public health policies would require a level of Government intervention in the market, or “in society” and intrusion into our private lives, of a magnitude never before seen in the democratic West outside the two world wars.

Whole industries would have to be created or expanded and directed by the state.  Huge sums of money would be spent, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of workers would have to be retrained. We would have to accept restrictions on civil liberties for an indefinite period.'

(from: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/04/bernard-jenkin-keeping-or-junking-the-shutdown-wont-work-but-the-alternative-requires-a-transformation-of-britain-unparalleled-since-the-war.html)

The part before this section is also quite good; the part after is mostly some half-hearted attempt at exculpation for the Conservative Party. However, I think this is a good summary of the reality that actually, the hard work is just about to *start*. The volume of daily testing we will need is more than ten times what we are currently managing. That means we will need massively more people producing the components needed, and delivering, administering and analysing the results. We won't simply need to provide masks for healthcare workers, or even for them plus other essential workers, but enough for everyone in the country to have multiple masks. We will need the contact tracing app to have mass takeup of a majority of the population.

Great Post, great article, and very true.

I hadn’t read it when I posted above about China and about the Right.........but really it’s saying a similar thing as I see it.

The only effective way to deal with this will be massive involvement of Local Authorities, Charities, Tech Firms, Government and much more. 
And the introduction of surveillance, which few will welcome.

All that will have to be in place to enable the leisure, entertainment and other non essential businesses to thrive, and to prevent an overwhelmed Health Service.

Im not confident there is either the ideological will, or the competence, in this Government to do that. ( I mean it’s really what’s been needed for years to tackle the Climate threat, and zilch has happened)

On the other hand, on a positive note, to my knowledge the Regional Groups now active are finding their feet, establishing long forgotten relationships across service sectors, and beginning to have influence. They won’t - hopefully - allow themselves to be quietly broken up just because we get through phase One.

[terrytini]

5 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

Are we letting old people die in care homes to keep the numbers at the press conferences down?

If not, why aren't the sick in care homes being moved into hospitals that have capacity to help them?

I’m no expert but I have a little knowledge......one reason is that some of the people in Care have other issues ( eg dementia) and need non medical attention as much as medical attention.

But..

...the main reason, from everything I’ve been told, is more simple. And it’s the same reason as to your first sentence.

Incompetence. 
 

At exactly the time I locked down and advised my family to, (March 10th) my wife, trying to put some of those principles into practice at the Care Home she managed, sought guidance and permissions from Social Care Management. 
I won’t bore people with the details, but she came home that night in tears. She knew, then, we knew, then, that old people ( and not so old, not all in Care Homes are old) were going to die in huge numbers.

It would almost be preferable if they HAD been left to improve the statistics, as that would have at least meant they had featured in somebody’s thinking.

[terrytini]

5 hours ago, mjmooney said:

My son in law's grandmother has dementia and his granddad has been struggling to cope with her at home for a good while. Before the pandemic broke out his granddad had a major health crisis of his own, requiring bowel surgery - so (very reluctantly) agreed to the old lady being moved into a care home. He was still recuperating when the pandemic broke out, and he immediately brought her home. Now at the time, we all thought this was a really bad idea, given their situation. But with what we know now it might well be that he saved her life. 

That is so good to hear

[Stevo985]

6 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

 

 

Please don’t post this Mark. We’re meant to all be patting politicians on the back and telling everyone how brilliantly we’re doing. 
This is just negative. How dare you post something that suggests we’re not amazing

[sidcow]

What makes me laugh is all day long today the press have been running articles which are basically pressing the Government to start the process of easing lockdown.  The pressure is undoubtedly building for this, criticism is starting about why the process isn't being mapped out. Much more talk about the economic damage being caused.  There is definitely a change of course from the press on this. 

The same press will absolutely crucify them if they ease lockdown and the virus hits hard again. 

[Jareth]

6 minutes ago, sidcow said:

The same press will absolutely crucify them if they ease lockdown and the virus hits hard again. 

They really nailed them last time out

 

[Enda]

8 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Yeah that was kinda my point. We’ll claim right up to the end that it’s the EU stopping us doing this or that, just as it’s been the EU stopping us controlling immigration so far. It obviously isn’t / wasn’t, but enough people are happy to believe it as it fits their world view of us good / them bad.

Most countries like the EU.

For all the flag-waving Little Englanders I’m waiting for them to realise that the problem wasn’t the EU, but that the UK just has a shit government.

[DCJonah]

8 hours ago, Jareth said:

Boris 'raring to go' Johnson might be dodging PMQs tomorrow and leaving it to Raab. Not yet confirmed. If true, well, looks like his brush with death (if it was so) hasn't changed him very much at all. Also no ministers doing GMB with Piers Morgan now. Looks like the leader personifies his team, they hide. 

I completely forgot about Boris hiding in the fridge before the election, so he didn't have to talk to the press about the NHS. 

Hero Boris.

[sidcow]

7 hours ago, Jareth said:

They really nailed them last time out

 

I said the press. 

[Jareth]

48 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I said the press. 

Fairs fair. I was being selective. Have to say though, there has been a lot of leeway in this crisis especially from the press and very much from the BBC. I agree that they're damned either way but given the evidence about the national stockpile being intentionally left depleted after their own report into prep for a pandemic was ignored - they have it coming. With this wave of questions headed their way - they put up inexperienced and incompetent ministers for scrutiny. Boris returned on Monday to a fanfare, one of his cohorts even posted a gif of a lion roaring - well we're all waiting to see what he brings and hopefully he appears at PMQs today. 

Also - our fellow learned Brummie and Villa fan gets it 

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by Jareth

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

I said the press. 

Do you feel like the press have been challenging the government hard during this spike? 

To put my cards on the table, I certainly don't. 

[Genie]

I’d love the press to ask Boris at the next press conference if he thinks they’ve done a good job containing the virus so far.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Genie

[Stevo985]

46 minutes ago, Genie said:

I’d love the press to ask Boris at the next press conference if he thinks they’ve done a good job containing the virus so far.

Same. If it were me I’d say something like

”The ONS figures released yesterday show that we currently have by far the highest death toll in Europe and the second highest int he world (behind USA). Given we could see how the virus was affecting other countries Well before we had to act here in the UK, how do you justify saying we’ve handled this situation well and that’s it’s been a success?”

[Stevo985]

9 hours ago, sidcow said:

What makes me laugh is all day long today the press have been running articles which are basically pressing the Government to start the process of easing lockdown.  The pressure is undoubtedly building for this, criticism is starting about why the process isn't being mapped out. Much more talk about the economic damage being caused.  There is definitely a change of course from the press on this. 

The same press will absolutely crucify them if they ease lockdown and the virus hits hard again. 

I don’t think the press have really been pushing for the end of the lockdown. What they’ve been pushing for is clarity on when it might be and what it would involve 

[sharkyvilla]

9 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Same. If it were me I’d say something like

”The ONS figures released yesterday show that we currently have by far the highest death toll in Europe and the second highest int he world (behind USA). Given we could see how the virus was affecting other countries Well before we had to act here in the UK, how do you justify saying we’ve handled this situation well and that’s it’s been a success?”

Again I don't think Spain or Italy include deaths in all settings in their statistics either so it's pretty likely we don't have by far the highest death total.  I may be wrong and have just missed the stats though.

[DCJonah]

 

[Genie]

7 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

 

Absolutely incredible.

[snowychap]

10 hours ago, Jareth said:

They really nailed them last time out

 

Imagine what tomorrow will be like when the press are wanking themselves off over Johnson becoming a father for the unknownth time.

[StefanAVFC]

13 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

 

As much as I think this is a good move, i just plays into Trump's anti, fake media narrative.