Generic Virus Thread

[StefanAVFC]

13 minutes ago, sne said:

Granted you could find pictures like that at any time as Swedes are the original social distancing people by nature.

[It's Your Round]

The grim reaper just casually picking his next target there... 

[Jareth]

Government now 'likely' to miss the 100k test target, says minister. He also added that Villa were likely to miss out on champions league. 

[bannedfromHandV]

5 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Government now 'likely' to miss the 100k test target, says minister. He also added that Villa were likely to miss out on champions league. 

The latter is more surprising than the former.

[sne]

6 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Government now 'likely' to miss the 100k test target, says minister. He also added that Villa were likely to miss out on champions league. 

Smith out!

[chrisp65]

24 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Government now 'likely' to miss the 100k test target, says minister. 

 

The game was never ‘will they hit 100,000’?

The game was always having to wait a full month to hear what ridiculous excuse or correction or denial they come up with when they fail.

We were using a metric calendar and thought there were 10 days in a week.

You all mis heard, we said a hundred, and a thousand.

The EU wouldn’t let us test orphans or ladies.

We have done 100,000 but at this point we can’t share the report that proves it.

Here’s Priti to give you the full stats breakdown.

Look! look! There’s Boris and he appears to be trying for another baby.

Dominic says SAGE say we don’t need testing anymore.

 

 

 

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

I can remember watching the news around 6 weeks ago and they were reporting from Italy around how dire things were and how frightening it all was. It was all quite scary and I can remember thinking I really hope we aren't has hard hit as they are.

We have now been harder hit. Had more deaths and yet the reporting on the news in relation to the UK isn't the same. Things are being glossed over or a blind eye turned and it isn't being presented as the same frightening scenario. I don't get it but can only think that because we have landed in this position due to political decisions and failings that they don't want to shine the light too heavily on that.

 

2 hours ago, DCJonah said:

Exactly the same. 

It shows the power of the media. 

I think a big part of the difference is because Italy's crisis was very geographically-concentrated, which led to the healthcare system in one part of the country being overwhelmed, whereas we have largely avoided surge capacity being breached.

[blandy]

2 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

I don't get it but can only think that because we have landed in this position due to political decisions and failings that they don't want to shine the light too heavily on that.

Yeah, perhaps part of it, but I think there's another underlying reason too, or reasons, beyond political bias.

Firstly the notion that (not that you're saying it) the media should focus only or significantly more heavily on the negatives and failings is one that the media (editors etc.) and also the government would not want to do is or may be because people in lockdown (some who will be struggling mentally) being bombarded with "this is a clusterpork of incompetence" message are likely to suffer more, and also perhaps more likely to act irresponsibly because "well if the government is clueless, why am I following their incompetent instructions" which would make the situation genuinely worse.

Secondly, the government is clearly "messaging" in a way that tries to absolve themselves of responsibility for any flaws or errors. To an extent the media will report what a minister said. the experts too are "on message" so the only other avenue open to the media is direct questions and quoting responses - many aren't sharp enough to ask really good questions. And the other thing the media can do is investigation and opinion. Both of which are done. The Sunday Times, the Grauniad, heck eve the Heil have written critical pieces about ministerial and government incompetence. The Mirror's been scathing, and the other tabloids - well, tabloids gonna tabloid.

And maybe there's yet another angle. With the Gov't seeking to shift responsibility with the repeated line of "we're following the science" - to line up scientists to be held to blame in due course, in the court of public opinion, if not actual courts, if the media were to sort of go at the scientists now, when they actually know that it's the government itself who takes all the decisions, then it removes their ability to later, in the aftermath, go after the Ministers.

And the papers are always trying to sell papers. If people don't want (and the majority don't) loads of stories about how the Government are useless, then they'll not run so many of that type of article.

[HanoiVillan]

21 minutes ago, blandy said:

And maybe there's yet another angle. With the Gov't seeking to shift responsibility with the repeated line of "we're following the science" - to line up scientists to be held to blame in due course, in the court of public opinion, if not actual courts, if the media were to sort of go at the scientists now, when they actually know that it's the government itself who takes all the decisions, then it removes their ability to later, in the aftermath, go after the Ministers.

Have a few quibbles with the other points in your post, but I think this part is clearly correct. The government won't want Cabinet members to have to resign, so they will naturally line up one or more of the Strangeloves to take the fall for them.

[HanoiVillan]

From a resident of Hong Kong:

It was possible to manage this situation a lot, lot better than the UK government did.

[sne]

Quote

Swedish city to dump tonne of chicken manure in park to deter visitors

The university town of Lund in Sweden is to dump a tonne of chicken manure in its central park in a bid to deter up to 30,000 residents from gathering there for traditional celebrations to mark Walpurgis Night on Thursday.

“Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April, [so] I think it was a good initiative,” the chairman of the local council’s environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper.

Walpurgis Night, celebrated on 30 April, is widely marked across central and northern Europe with parties and bonfires. The festivities are classed as “spontaneous” so cannot be banned by authorities, but to avoid the risk of spreading the coronavirus many towns and cities in Sweden have asked citizens to give the tradition a miss this year.

Lund is home to one of Sweden’s biggest universities and many of the municipality’s 125,000-odd inhabitants are students who habitually gather in the park in the afternoon and evening for picnics before the Walpurgis party proper gets underway.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/swedish-city-lund-dump-tonne-chicken-manure-park-deter-visitors-coronavirus-lockdown

 

Today is probably the biggest night of the year for University students and it's huge for most families with kids who go and watch the bonfires. Thankfully the weather is crap because otherwise it could have become pretty crowded. 

[snowychap]

Unsurprisingly, it looks like some people have done very well out of this crisis:

Quote

On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”

One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”

Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.

But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.

Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

A state official, speaking on background because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the terms of the deal, said New York entered into the contract with Oren-Pines at the direct recommendation of the White House coronavirus task force.

...more deals and more details on link

 

[Genie]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

From a resident of Hong Kong:

It was possible to manage this situation a lot, lot better than the UK government did.

How do they all mix, and still not have the virus sweeping through?

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, Genie said:

How do they all mix, and still not have the virus sweeping through?

There's very little travel in, and for anyone who arrives there is mandatory quarantine for (I think) two weeks. Crucially - and still not suggested here seriously - anyone who tests positive is taken to a central quarantine location, not sent back home to infect their family. They acted fast and decisively, so very few people there caught it in the first place.

[HanoiVillan]

This one's for all the BBC fans out there . . .

Here's a quality piece of data viz from one of the latest articles by health correspondent Nick Triggle:

 

(from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52403772)

 

It turns out that if you compare a lot of excess deaths from a few weeks on a scale of an entire year, it doesn't look very much at all! Brilliant.

 

Triggle has been responsible for strongly hinting at the 'most of them would have died soon anyway' line in most stuff that he's written about the pandemic. This was the headline for his article on 21st March:

The reason you have to find that article on the Wayback Machine is that somebody at the BBC must have ordered a completely new article to be posted at exactly the same URL, now with the following headline:

Always good for the national broadcaster to be desperately shredding the evidence.

[Genie]

12 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

There's very little travel in, and for anyone who arrives there is mandatory quarantine for (I think) two weeks. Crucially - and still not suggested here seriously - anyone who tests positive is taken to a central quarantine location, not sent back home to infect their family. They acted fast and decisively, so very few people there caught it in the first place.

I think the first line is the most important/fortunate for them. We initially put people into quarantine but it emerged it was already rife everywhere, and too many people coming in to the country (including coming home) with it unchecked.

I don’t think you can really compare Hong Kong with the UK or many other developed countries. 

Edited April 30, 2020 by Genie

[terrytini]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

From a resident of Hong Kong:

It was possible to manage this situation a lot, lot better than the UK government did.

It’s as simple, and as horrible, as that.

[HanoiVillan]

4 minutes ago, Genie said:

I think the first line is the most important/fortunate for them. We initially put people into quarantine but it emerged it was already rife everywhere, and too many people coming in to the country (including coming home) with it unchecked.

I don’t think you can really compare Hong Kong with the UK or many other developed countries. 

I don't recall us ever having put new arrivals in quarantine?

On the point of comparison, Hong Kong could have been affected *worse* than the UK. The part where people actually live is amongst the most densely-populated areas on the planet, lots of people live in cramped and unsanitary conditions, and there are far far more direct travel routes to Wuhan.

But my point isn't really 'we should have been Hong Kong'. It would certainly have been nice! However, that ship sailed a very long time ago. My point *is* that we have a lot to learn about what works in handling pandemics, and we need to start learning best practices from those countries that haven't just done a bit better but are more similar like Germany, but from countries like Korea and Taiwan, and also from Hong Kong where applicable as well. That needs to include centralised quarantine locations to be honest.

[snowychap]

21 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I don't recall us ever having put new arrivals in quarantine?

I thought there were some people flown back to the UK and shoved in a disused bit of a hospital somewhere up @bickster's way back at the beginning?

[Stevo985]

53 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

There's very little travel in, and for anyone who arrives there is mandatory quarantine for (I think) two weeks. Crucially - and still not suggested here seriously - anyone who tests positive is taken to a central quarantine location, not sent back home to infect their family. They acted fast and decisively, so very few people there caught it in the first place.

I remember an American scientist on the news weeks ago saying this was how China got it under control relatively quickly. 
 

lots of testing. Anyone with symptoms went to a testing location and were quarantined until the test came back negative. If it was positive then they were quarantined at special locations without seeing family until they were over it. 
 

I can’t remember the exact figure but it was something like 75% of transmissions were at home from family member to family member