Off Topic Coronavirus - 606 tales from the Inquiry

Breaking news:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52951920

A clash between Italian Ultras and Far-Right extremists (there's a difference?) at an Anti-Lockdown protest in Rome

I wonder how the Race Equality protests are going in Italy

 

Boredom has set in.

 

Infection rates have stopped falling in several European countries.
In the UK they are still falling slightly, but are still 300%, 400% or even higher than most other places.



The second wave is just beginning to stir in Italy, Germany and probably Spain.
Here we have had a rush to the beaches, and huge numbers crowded into demonstrations in our big cities.

Sadly, even if the Prime Minister wakes up to this, drops his cheery 'victory' persona and starts getting tough again, will people listen?
He has squandered most of the trust that people had in him, and the Government's message.
We have not had honesty and transparency and straight talk.

We have had lies, feeble excuses, lectures about moving on from embarrassing situations, and scientists disappearing from briefings where they were being asked legitimate questions.

Remember weeks ago when journalists asking awkward questions were asked if they had anything to add?
That did not last long.
Now their questions are dismissed with non-answers and curt thanks, with no opportunity to follow up.
The questions session at each briefing has become a cosmetic afterthought.
Do Johnson, Shapps, Hancock and the others think nobody has noticed this?

 

And now for the Good News

• Only 77 recorded Coronavirus deaths in the UK in the last 24 hours. The lowest level since before the lockdown.
• Nobody registered as dying from Coronavirus in Scotland in the last 24 hours.

New infections are officially down as well.
We won't see any consequences of the beach weekend or the protests for another 2 or 3 weeks.
But it seems that the first easing of the lockdown rules (about 4 weeks ago) has not in itself caused a second wave.

Bearing in mind the post I made just above this one, these good news figures may only be temporary.
But we may as well take hope from them while they last.

 

New Zealand is starting to open back up again. Having successfully stamped hard on Covid-19 the momento cases began to show, by serving a lock down without dithering about, and sticking with it, they now have a couple of days with no new cases reported, and a number of deaths (both per se and y percentage of population) that are the envy of most of us in Europe. They still aren't letting in international travellers with the exception of those who will boost the local economy (James Cameron is flying in with a team to start shooting Avatar 2 shortly) which they can probably control easily enough. Wish we had their prime minister here in Spain !!
Meanwhile, Spain continues to unlock, and seem o be doing it in the same haphazard manner that they treated Covid-19 when it arrived. The provinces are oening up on a local basis depending on the numbers of cases/infection rates/UCI beds available, which all seems fairly logical. We Will be all required to wear masks in public from tomorrow. I always wear one to the shops now (and my shopping policy has always been go in, buy whatever I want asap, and get the f**k out) and as the temperaturas go up, it's very very uncomfortable, so I'll be continuing to social distance for the time being. Football will begin later this month, with no crowds, while bull fighting returns, WITH some crowds. I imagine football crowds tend to be a bit noisy and uninhibited (I'll skip what think of crowds who watch animals being killed as sport) but I miss the part where the logic meets some crowds being okay, and others are wrong. They are also desperately trying to kick start the tourism industry, so we'll be opening up for holiday starved tourists from july 1st. Again, a bit odd, as imported incoming cases (the UK being a prime example) will be a worry. The last I heard about covid-19 is that it's ability to hang about in the air for hours will be seriously affected by ultraviolet light, so I would guess we may be saved a major outbreak during the summer. But I'd like to think those in charge were basing their decisions on the sort of guess work I do. Not too much evidence of that so far, so maybe next time I decide to change country, I'll give New Zealand a thought. Dunno if I could live that far from the Valley though, and they have a lot of earthquakes there.

 

It is reported this morning that the NHS is working at roughly 60% of its former capacity because of the various effects of the Coronavirus crisis.
New procedures, staff absence etc.

Waiting lists are projected to rise to 10 million people from the current 6.1 million.
With a much higher proportion being seriously ill.
And that projection assumes the NHS returns to 100% of it's pre-COVID19 capacity within 1 year.

One thing the Government has continued to tell us throughout this crisis is that the lockdown and our compliance saved the NHS from being overwhelmed.
If it is true that NHS capacity is down 40%, and there is no guarantee that it will ever return to 100% again (let alone within 1 year) then we may have been spared pictures of patients dying on the floor in corridors, but our Health Service has been dealt a crippling blow.

With the economy also wrecked, the additional investment needed to help the NHS recover simply cannot be made.
The money does not exist. Not even to maintain previous levels of support, never mind fix the damage that has been done.

The number of people who will suffer and die in the next few years because of the Coronavirus crisis is very likely to far outstrip the number who have suffered and died due to catching the virus itself. I could easily imagine the number of of crisis consequence deaths passing way beyond a million.
Something like 2% of the UK population.
The disease itself has claimed roughly 0.1% of our population so far.

 

Professor Clifford Stott has been reading my posts from a while back.
Here's what he had to say today;

Scientific adviser warns of riots over Covid-19

Riots could break out across the UK this summer over the effects of coronavirus, a scientific adviser has warned.
Professor Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University, said mass job losses, rising unemployment along with concerns about economic and racial inequality could spark "confrontations" in the coming months.
A divide between poorer and more affluent areas brought on by possible local lockdowns could also have an effect, said Prof Stott, who sits on the government's Sage sub-committee on behaviour.
"If the police don't invest in building positive police-community relations now, there is a potential for serious and large public disorder to emerge this summer," he told PA news agency.
"I think in the worst case scenario it's not inconceivable that we could have disorder on a scale equivalent to August 2011," he said.


"I predict a riot" over possible local lockdowns of deprived housing estates, while affluent neighbours in leafy suburbs are unaffected...

Link: Coronavirus - 606 Tales from the Trenches (27th May)

Great minds thinking alike. Can I join the SAGE committee now?

 

And then you’ll be able to have little trysts With married women all over the country with Boris’s backing

 

Shops opening soon, drive-through fast food joints open again already, day trips at weekends, families meeting up...and football on TV again.
Within weeks the 2m rule will be relaxed (probably to 1m) to help pubs and restaurants get trading.
recorded Infection rates are right down, recorded deaths are right down.
The public could be forgiven for thinking the Coronavirus crisis is as good as over in the UK. And of course that's what many folk want to think.

Don't worry too much about all those people who lost their dead-end jobs. The Government will sort that out eventually.
Don't think too much about the care home workers or the NHS staff, now the pressure on them is 'easing'. They'll be OK won't they?
Just look to the future and think about your holidays.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52985781

Nobody wants to hear this, so it will be largely ignored.

 

The Government are trying to progress things along too quickly, it is a concern.

 

think everyone was waiting for the news... i've restarted my sky sports subscription. £72 a month for sky & bt sports on virgin. previously £103. was pleased with myself all day yesterday with that!

 

The 2 metre rule will go next - that will annoy all the big companies with factories, who have put a lot of time and money into setting up for it.

There may not be as many queues at supermarkets either, but I'd strongly advise folks to go there at quiet times.
A crowded supermarket is not a nice prospect.

 

I was vaguely hoping that the sun would cause the coronavirus to degrade a lot more rapidly (I have a mate who works in science-though not virology- who thought this would be the case). The news from the US however suggests that the infection rates are curving upwards all over the place, particularly in the places that followed Donald Trump insisting that Americans wanted to get back to normal. I'm sure they, like the rest of us, wanted just that, but states like Florida and Arizona, are simply not going the right way, and unless something changes, they may well run into the problem of carry on and watch the death rates spike, or go into another lock down and suffer another wave of huge losses.
In Spain, I have been following reports that the death rate has dropped down into single digits (as well as days with no deaths) but I got another unconfirmed source yesterday that suggested they may not be quite as good. I've been missing the news a lot, having overdosed in march and april, but they don't seem to be talking about the death rates so much. A cause of concern though is the imported cases, of which we had nearly 100 the day before yesterday. I cannot even imagine where they came from . the frontier doesn't open until july 1st, but again, its fairly clear that we are not emerging from covid-19, but emerging WITH covid-19. Given that, we are going to have to social distance a lot more tan many seem to want. Like the UK, there is a general umbrage that now the weather is nicer, we should start to get out and enjoy it. The daftness of that defies me. I can understand the need to try and get the economy running safely, though obviously in a big city, public transport being crammed on a normal working day makes that a real problem. But the need to sit crammed into Parks, restaurants and pubs? I had to go into Barcelona the other day, which is on level 1 of the emerging plan. My missus was keen to go to a restaurant (she's from Barcelona and misses the bustle) so imagine our surprise when we were crammed into a terrace (Level 1 orders are that restaurants can open terrace seating at máximum 40% capacity): I stuck with it until the table behind me was occupied and I could literally feel them breathing down my neck, when I called for the bill and cleared off.
I'm no fan of what either the Bristish or Spanish governments have done - they both have a lot of unnecessary deaths for being too slow to close. They are also starting to get ahead of the science regarding coming out of lockdown. But there comes a point where the rest of us need to take a look around too. The governments should be a lot more responsable (The worst ones being Bolsonara, Trump and Johnson - I can't mention Putin as there are no reliable numbers about how many died in Russia) but we're supposed to be a species with some sort of intelligence. Lemmings follow their mates off a Cliff. We really should be better than that.

 

There is something amiss with Spain's reported COVID19 death figures.

They were broadly in line with those in Italy until about 2 weeks ago.
Then for a few days there was no data from Spain.
Then suddenly when the numbers resumed they had dropped from 60, 70, 80 per day (that kind of range) to 1, 2 or even 0.

That just doesn't track.

 

I have read reorts that they are having (undisclosed) difficulties getting the numbers in. But as you say, they don't seem to add up, and there are rumours that the current low ones are inaccurate. The guy I read yesterday claimed 500 in the last week, which is about 450 more tht the official numbers. I get the impression the numbers are somewhere in between, but I tend to distrust governments when numbers suddenly change or vanish for no reason. There may well be logical reasons why the numbers have sudenly gone awry after daily reoprts since before lockdown began, But it's not a good look, and looks a lot like a lack of transparency, or an excess of complacency.

 

It was being reported today that the Government are being urged to cut distancing to 1 metre.

It's been like that for a while.

 

A scientist said just now on the TV news that if you put 100 people in a room and 1 of them already has Coronavirus,

• If everybody is 2 metres apart, 1 or 2 people will be infected.
• If everybody is 1.5 metres apart, 3 or 4 people will be infected.
• If everybody is 1 metre apart, 13 or 14 people will be infected.

But it is also true that if pubs and restaurants etc. must maintain 2 metre distancing, many will close for ever.
They just cannot make ends meet with very low customer numbers.
If the Government does cave in to pressure to reduce the social distance to 1 metre I will understand why, even if I don't agree with the decision.

In some environments, 1 metre distancing is almost the 'old' normal.
In a supermarket for example, most of us would feel uncomfortable if a stranger enters our 'personal space' (within about one yard of us) for any length of time.

However, in a busy pub or at a football match we think nothing of being crowded close together.
Of course that used to be the case on the tube and on buses as well.

I think a 1 metre rule will be here before the end of June.

 

A woman who said goodbye to her dying father through a care home window is suing the government over his death.
Dr Cathy Gardner's father, Michael Gibson, 88, died of probable Covid-19 related causes on 3 April.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-53012565

Good luck to her.
If she needs additional resources to fight the case, Dr Gardner should consider crowd-funding.
I'm pretty sure there would be no shortage of people willing to chip in.

The NHS policy of sending hundreds of frail, vulnerable people back to care homes without testing them for COVID19 first was a shocking blunder.
I acknowledge that at the time a huge crisis was just beginning to break upon the entire health system.
But somebody at a senior level should have recognised this danger, and prevented the terrible sowing of the disease to evironments where it could spread like wildfire among people who are most vulnerable to dying horrible, lonely deaths from it.

I believe most of the 14,000 care home residents who lost their lives to the virus might still be alive today, had this tragic policy been changed.

The Government continues to repeat blandly that it protected care homes from the very beginning.
That is just a bare-faced lie.
It's not just the sending back of people from hospitals with no testing.
The lack of PPE availability was also plainly evident, and was clearly a critical factor of the rapid spead of Coronavirus within care homes. Yet this scandal too has been repeatedly downplayed and pretty much denied.

I recognise that most care homes for the elderly are privately run, though by no means all of them are.
But residents still deserve the protection of the Government as much as any other person in this country deserves it.

 

Hope everything’s ok lardy you’ve gone a bit quiet mate

 

He's probably knackered. He's been keeping the site going virtually single handed since the football vanished.

Here's hoping he's back before our big away win in Hull on saturday...