Generic Virus Thread

[OutByEaster?]

11 minutes ago, Wezbid said:

Hopefully, when the next election comes around, this pandemic won't be at the front of people's minds anymore and people will remember what the Tory Party is all about. 

By the time the next election comes around, the focus will have moved on to how we're going to pay for all of this and there will be a massive corporate effort to make sure that bill is socialised. There's no way we'll see anything but a business/bank friendly government elected on the back of a huge media push. 

 

[Villarocker]

BMA apparently now telling doctors they will have to decide who to save and who to let die when the ventilators run out. My GP mentioned this to me last week. That's come around pretty quick. 

[It's Your Round]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

An old favourite of the forum is up to his usual tricks I see:

Philippines president orders police to shoot dead anyone causing "trouble"

'Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has been widely criticised by labour groups after he ordered police to shoot dead residents who cause “trouble” while quarantine rules are in place.

His violent threat follows the arrest of 21 people who had apparently taken to the streets of Metro Manila’s Quezon City to demand help from the government.

Police said the group had protested without a permit, though the website Rapper reported that it is not clear if all residents were demonstrating or if some were simply looking for food. There is growing concern about how the poorest people in the Philippines will survive a month-long lockdown that has been imposed on the country’s main Luzon island.

Many of its 48 million residents live hand-to-mouth and depend on daily work to feed their families.

The government has promised that 18 million low-income households will receive support, but this has not been released due to administrative hurdles.

On Wednesday night, Duterte told people to wait for assistance, adding: “Even if it’s delayed, it will arrive and you will not go hungry. You will not die of hunger.”

“I will not hesitate. My orders are to the police and military, also the barangay, that if there is trouble or the situation arises that people fight and your lives are on the line, shoot them dead. Do you understand? Dead. Instead of causing trouble, I’ll send you to the grave,” he said in a televised address.'

from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/02/coronavirus-live-news-global-cases-latest-updates?page=with:block-5e8566c88f087564da1e42f5#block-5e8566c88f087564da1e42f5

Well he’s been ordering police executions of drug users for years now so its not such a leap for him to start murdering another group now. The man’s an absolute psychopath. 

[wazzap24]

1 hour ago, Jareth said:

I'm usually wrong, but I can't help but think the combination of massive loss of life (much among Daily Mail readership demographics) and the entire country being bored at home and therefore not so busy they don't notice the politicians slipping out of taking blame for the situation - will take its toll. 

I’d love to believe this will lead to real change, but it won’t. 

10 minutes on Twitter will show you, he could stick ‘we’ll get Covid done in 12 weeks’ on the side of a bus and half the country would still believe it. 

 

[tonyh29]

44 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

The countries around Europe who have strong leadership are currently doing well, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland. The rest of the gaggle who are too afraid to commit to or were late to commit are seeing the consequences of their diddling leaders.

Switzerland has more deaths per million people than the U.K. , yet you determine them to be doing well ?

I don’t think you can really determine who has done “well” until this is all over tbh , countries are at different stages in the infection , countries are testing differently I.e Germany is testing just about everyone v other countries only testing the seriously ill , giving skewed figures of  case fatality rates (UK)  v infection fatality rates  (Germany)

We seem to be looking at graphs like it’s the premier league table !!

there is no doubt the UK have failed in regards to testing and other areas  but comparing the UK to Iceland Isn’t really a particularly helpful one imo 

[HanoiVillan]

40 minutes ago, Villarocker said:

BMA apparently now telling doctors they will have to decide who to save and who to let die when the ventilators run out. My GP mentioned this to me last week. That's come around pretty quick. 

Apparently one hospital nearly ran out of oxygen a few days ago, so that's going to be another practical limit on how much ventilation is done as well.

[chrisp65]

48 minutes ago, Villarocker said:

BMA apparently now telling doctors they will have to decide who to save and who to let die when the ventilators run out. My GP mentioned this to me last week. That's come around pretty quick. 

Letters went out from one GP surgery a couple of days ago to some patients considered particularly vulnerable telling / asking them to sign a form saying they wouldn’t seek assistance as none was likely to come anyway. They wanted to keep staff and ambulances for younger fitter cases.

The reality is that was always likely to happen, the cold wording was harrowing.

[StefanAVFC]

 

[snowychap]

Seems like ST Water have decided that it's the ideal time to close off our road for four days and dig it up in the week after Easter.

Scheduled work, i.e. not an emergency, that is going to make a lot of noise and disturbance in a residential street when people are not supposed to be leaving their homes without a reasonable excuse.

I'm glad the 'reasonable excuse' list is non-exhaustive.

[Genie]

3 minutes ago, snowychap said:

Seems like ST Water have decided that it's the ideal time to close off our road for four days and dig it up in the week after Easter.

Scheduled work, i.e. not an emergency, that is going to make a lot of noise and disturbance in a residential street when people are not supposed to be leaving their homes without a reasonable excuse.

I'm glad the 'reasonable excuse' list is non-exhaustive.

Usually these works are scheduled for periods when roads are quietest so this is the perfect time?

[snowychap]

7 minutes ago, Genie said:

Usually these works are scheduled for periods when roads are quietest so this is the perfect time?

Whilst that may, on the surface, seem to appeal, there are two things:

Firstly, our road is only fractionally quieter than usual during the day (a simple case of being a standard cut-through for people);

Secondly, it's not just about the effect upon traffic flow - it's the effect upon people in that residential street who are, effectively, trapped on a very noisy site for the duration of the works.

Edit: And this isn't an issue about 'not here' - I'd suggest that any non-emergency works which involve creating a significant amount of disturbance, noise, and workpeople milling around directly outside people's houses (and thus not much more than two metres from people's front gates) ought to be postponed in residential streets.

Edited April 2, 2020 by snowychap

[sne]

Will reach 1 million confirmed cases world wide and 50.000 dead later today.

Unconfirmed cases and the actual Chinese numbers is anyone's guess

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

Remember the letter from Corbyn that you split your sides over yesterday because it had a typo in it? 'Full PPE for medics and essential workers' was literally the first thing it demanded. This has been said, repeatedly, in Parliament.

Split my sides? Did I?  I smiled at the lack of attention to detail, which I felt typical of his amateurish abilities.

As to the point of my post above, which was no one is going to attack Labour for “politicising” the virus if they hammer away at the disgraceful failure to provide adequate PPE and testing for the NHS staff, well...?

[lapal_fan]

I could kind of understand Boris's first communications instructing us (softly) to begin social distancing.  I kind of understood why the message was progressively more "hard" as the days went by.. After all, you'd think an instruction like "stay away from others" is relatively simple to follow. 

I didn't understand why football matches went on as long as they did (about 2/3 weeks too long), I certainly knew that Cheltenham was a very silly idea, but it all got shut down in the end..

I still really don't understand why (after saying for about 3 weeks now) we're not seeing a huge increase in ventilators, despite factories changing their products to making ventilators. 

I really don't understand why (like Germany) we're not testing anyone who has felt ill at any point in the last 2 months (I had one evening where I had flu like symptoms and my wife caught that from me and felt ill for about 10 days) - this should have been an absolute priority and any data currently out there is heavily skewed because we're only testing people we already assume have the virus?  Of course the figures will look terrible if you test people you think have it.  Why have we not increased the volume of testing and made it clear who should be going to IKEA or wherever these testing drive-thru's are?  

I've seen that NHS staff should be tested - I'm not front line (at all), but I have an NHS badge, so do the cleaners and admin staff on site in separate buildings to the actual hospital - should we be getting tested? 

We're still at the point where there's no clarity at all as to what we're meant to be doing - apart from, isolate and only come into hospital if you've gone through 112 and are nearly dead.

So while I think that it's nice Boris treated us like the adults we are, it's not so nice now that it appears we're reaching the apex of this problem in a couple of weeks with a lot of unanswered questions. 

I know this is an ever-evolving target, and new information on how to fight this virus is coming out daily from different parts of the world (MIT in the States now says 6m distance), but we've got to be more clear!  Look at just how many streams of communication we have now.. I don't know, maybe that's half the problem, but it needs sorting - LAST MONTH. 

Edited April 2, 2020 by lapal_fan

[HanoiVillan]

4 minutes ago, blandy said:

Split my sides? Did I?  I smiled at the lack of attention to detail, which I felt typical of his amateurish abilities.

As to the point of my post above, which was no one is going to attack Labour for “politicising” the virus if they hammer away at the disgraceful failure to provide adequate PPE and testing for the NHS staff, well...?

My point is, you didn't even notice that 'hammering away at the disgraceful failure to provide adequate PPE and testing' is literally what they've been doing, and it's not a surprise, because very few people are paying any attention to what the opposition are doing. In a Westminster system, the opposition are powerless to do much more than question the government in Parliament, and since Parliament is barely even open at this point it's no surprise that the meaningful political action is happening between the media and different parts of the government.

[LondonLax]

This BBC article is a very neat summary of the problem with most media reporting on this virus. Posting daily headline death tolls is misleading and generates significant fear and panic.  We need to get a rational understanding of what is going on in order to work towards the appropriate response.

Quote

Coronavirus: How to understand the death toll
Projections of how bad the outbreak could get have prompted ministers to put the country into lockdown. But what are death figures really telling us? And how bad is it going to get?

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654?fbclid=IwAR0yiwoQHJbMpT4hIqXZ-LGvCY3vgxPRCE-QERk4dYQtuLIspGqOTqMsdlI

[chrisp65]

British Gas have decided to dig up the end of our street too.

I suspect, they’ve had more calls about a faint smell of grass at the junction at the head of the street. But its quite a busy street, when I leave on an early at 5:00am or get home late late and the roads are quiet, you can definitely smell gas. I mean always, for years.

The reduction in traffic levels means I guess that isn’t being dispersed or masked by other fumes, so more people have noticed it at busier times of day.

They’ll wander around behind their little plastic barricade, they’ll do some drilling, they’ll fill it in. Then, when life returns to normal, I’ll get up early to get on the road to somewhere distant, and there will be the faint reassuring homely smell of gas.

[Lichfield Dean]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

British Gas have decided to dig up the end of our street too.

I suspect, they’ve had more calls about a faint smell of grass at the junction at the head of the street. But its quite a busy street, when I leave on an early at 5:00am or get home late late and the roads are quiet, you can definitely smell gas. I mean always, for years.

The reduction in traffic levels means I guess that isn’t being dispersed or masked by other fumes, so more people have noticed it at busier times of day.

They’ll wander around behind their little plastic barricade, they’ll do some drilling, they’ll fill it in. Then, when life returns to normal, I’ll get up early to get on the road to somewhere distant, and there will be the faint reassuring homely smell of gas.

Yes, that's definitely something they'll be on top of sharpish

[Genie]

17 minutes ago, snowychap said:

Secondly, it's not just about the effect upon traffic flow - it's the effect upon people in that residential street who are, effectively, trapped on a very noisy site for the duration of the works.

This reminded me of something my wife said the other day. She works for the council and someone had called up to complain about the noise from their neighbour, they said what sort of noise is it? It’s children playing in the garden. Well, why is it a problem? They said because they were having to work from home children shouldn’t be allowed to make noise in the garden as they find it distracting  

 

[rodders0223]

3 minutes ago, Genie said:

This reminded me of something my wife said the other day. She works for the council and someone had called up to complain about the noise from their neighbour, they said what sort of noise is it? It’s children playing in the garden. Well, why is it a problem? They said because they were having to work from home children shouldn’t be allowed to make noise in the garden as they find it distracting  

 

Fair to be honest. I am working from home currently and I presume the neighbour is too, their chihuahua or shitsu or whatever the **** it is has been yapping not stop for 10 days.

I give it another 4 days before I hop the fence and punt it into the next postcode.