Coronavirus - will we survive?

Burnham was standing up honourably for the people he was elected to represent, as is right and proper. The government were the ones playing sneakily.

wanderlust wrote:
Do cocktails count?

Its a meal!

I think the Tories have a Tier for Bolton thats something more in keeping with a Prison Yard for the Xmas period.

sunlight wrote:I think the Tories have a Tier for Bolton thats something more in keeping with a Prison Yard for the Xmas period.

In my borough (Broadlands) - which at 552 km sq is 10 times bigger in area than Bolton (55 km sq) - there are currently 113 cases per 100k and we're T2.
Luton (which is even smaller than Bolton) has over 300 cases per 100k - and is also T2 for some reason.
Bolton must have loads of cases per 100k. As must Slough for that matter as it's a paltry 32 km sq. It's a case of population density driving new infections which is why more thought is needed about travel.
But the government refuses to give Parliament the opportunity to come up with a more refined approach to tiering in order to reduce stress and keep the economy going.
Do Bolton and Slough have more cases than Luton? I'm not so sure.

We  are been encouraged (forced) to do twice weekly Covid tests where i work, Its a home test that gives you a result in 30 minutes.

Done 2 so far and all ok but have to do it for 12 weeks!

wanderlust wrote:
 It's a case of population density driving new infections which is why more thought is needed about travel.

When I have been to Bolton lately and driven through it, it is extremely overpopulated.

wanderlust wrote:

sunlight wrote:I think the Tories have a Tier for Bolton thats something more in keeping with a Prison Yard for the Xmas period.

In my borough (Broadlands) - which at 552 km sq is 10 times bigger in area than Bolton (55 km sq) - there are currently 113 cases per 100k and we're T2.
Luton (which is even smaller than Bolton) has over 300 cases per 100k - and is also T2 for some reason.
Bolton must have loads of cases per 100k. As must Slough for that matter as it's a paltry 32 km sq. It's a case of population density driving new infections which is why more thought is needed about travel.
But the government refuses to give Parliament the opportunity to come up with a more refined approach to tiering in order to reduce stress and keep the economy going.
Do Bolton and Slough have more cases than Luton? I'm not so sure.

As per yesterday

Slough 350 (11th out of 315) per 100k population seven day average
Luton 301 (27th)
Bolton 270 (40th)
Windsor 137 (180th)
Broadland 111 (217th)


The simple truth is that with or without 'refine' tuning people simply will travel to areas where there are less restrictions.

I know personally of people in Slough (T3) already planning to go to Windsor (T2) which is just 3 miles away, on Thursday when the lockdown is lifted.

Anyone think Windsor's rate will be rising soon because there's going to be half of Slough shopping here next week!

Would it have been better to put Slough (currently with the 11th highest rate in the country) into T2 with Windsor (180th) or put Windsor into T3?

Windsor and Broadland are fairly similar in the table in terms of new infections and position - would you be happy if Norwich was 11th in the table instead and the government did nothing and kept them in tier 2 with you?

Whatever you do you just can't win.

The priority criteria has to be not letting the local NHS's fail. I can only assume Slough's hospital must be near breaking point with Covid patients?

It seems to me that the plan is to bear down on the virus as much as it can to get cases down for Christmas, knowing folk will go stupid for a week during then and New Year and thus when they go back into lockdown in January there will be that many less cases to deal with than if the pre-Christmas 'bear down' hadn't happened, and hopefully by February things can be eased with hopefully the vaccine starting to become rolled out to those most at risk.

It does actually makes sense if you view it that way.

Norpig wrote:We  are been encouraged (forced) to do twice weekly Covid tests where i work, Its a home test that gives you a result in 30 minutes.

Done 2 so far and all ok but have to do it for 12 weeks!

I bet it gets right up your nose!

Sluffy wrote:

I bet it gets right up your nose!

Certainly does 

Sluffy wrote:At the end of the day it is people that spread the virus and not the government.

A party of 200 people at a Nottingham student halls of residence was broken up by police.

The gathering in the courtyard outside St Peter's Court, Radford, which houses University of Nottingham students, stopped after midnight.

It was one of a number of parties the force broke up overnight, prompting a plea to follow the rules.

Shortly after 21:00 GMT officers handed out five £200 fines after responding to reports of a party in a field in Gonalston.

They said they were still trying to find the organiser and a driver who crashed into a police car as they fled the scene.

At about 22:30 officers were called to a flat in Pilcher Gate, in the city centre, where they gave £200 fines to 21 people.

Shortly after 23:30 two people were arrested in Valley Road, Carlton, on suspicion of assaulting a police officer who had been at another illegal gathering.

Just after midnight officers broke up a "large party" in St Ann's and issued the organiser with a summons to appear in court.

Det Supt Andrew Gowan said:

"We understand that this is a difficult time but there really are no excuses for this kind of behaviour where people are blatantly ignoring the restrictions in such large numbers."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-55123543

Just one city on one night - just think how much is going on every day up and down the country!

Still it's all the governments fault though, isn't it!

Yes, ministers and aides all set a perfect example, don't they?

More to the point, knowing what f***** morons Brits are they should have managed the messaging better, criminalised failure to follow the rules, and enforced breaches using the armed forces if necessary.
It is without doubt that the Government is at fault - failing to give clear messaging, failure to give stricter warnings and failure to enforce even the stupid rules that came up with.

wanderlust wrote:More to the point, knowing what f***** morons Brits are they should have managed the messaging better, criminalised failure to follow the rules, and enforced breaches using the armed forces if necessary.
It is without doubt that the Government is at fault - failing to give clear messaging, failure to give stricter warnings and failure to enforce even the stupid rules that came up with.

Utter bollocks.

EVERYONE by now KNOWS what the basic rules are - everyone - yet absolutely loads don't bother with them as the random article above shows.

I did a bit of shopping this evening in a neighbourhood Tesco in Slough (which was the 9th WORST place in the country yesterday) yet I saw three customers and two staff without facemasks on, one bloke not even bothering about social distancing when queueing up to pay despite there being big massive circles marked out on the floor showing you where to stand whilst you are waiting to be served!

Christ is that the governments fault too???

It's about time some of you realise that not everything on Earth you don't like is the governments fault.

You must live in some dream world if you think troops on every street corner would ever be acceptable here and fwiw if we really wanted to enforce lockdown then there simply isn't anything like enough armed forces personnel to do it

People simply ARE NOT taking responsibility for their actions  even though they KNOW what the rules are and carrying on with their lifes as before.

Tbh I really can't blame them as most who do so WON'T be effected by Covid in a bad way.  The point I make and continue to do so is that IT IS NOT the government's fault the virus is spreading - we govern in this country by the 'consent' of the people and not by martial law.

The only real 'levers' it has to stop the spread is to close down social venues which does reduce social interaction to some extent but even that as an adverse effect on the economy.

As I keep repeating it is people that spread the virus not the government.  

Everyone knows the simple basic rules but clearly loads just don't give a stuff about them and what can you do about it, throw them all in prison or something, if so all the jails will be full to bursting after just one day, what do you do then - shoot them?

Only 32 local authorities out of 315 showed a rise in cases today, two of whom were Broadland and Norwich.

No doubt that's the governments fault too...

...certainly nothing to do with people who can't give a fuck about the rules like these in Norwich for instance...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-54511643

I read this and found it interesting, it also backs up what I said at the beginning of all this namely patients sent from care homes to hospitals to basically end their lives there had to be sent back to the care homes (because their beds there were still available to them) to die there instead in order to free up beds for the on gong pandemic -

"One of the challenges the NHS has faced is that it has fewer doctors, nurses and beds per head of population than many other western European countries.



Tory MP John Redwood has been vocal in calling for the Nightingales to be used, accusing those making dire warnings of trying to "scare" the public. Between them they could provide care to several thousand patients.

But the problem is they need staff. Chris Hopson, of NHS Providers, which represents hospital managers, says they were only ever built as an "insurance policy" to be used as a last resort if hospitals were overwhelmed.

To open them would mean spreading staff more thinly across hospitals and the Nightingales. That, of course, has consequences for the quality of care. It is the reason why only two have been pressed into action during the second wave.

Stretching the NHS beyond the point it is at currently is certainly possible, but it will have consequences".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55151832

As we know this undoubtedly led to some patients returning to care homes with corvid and working practices with carers working at more than one care home at the same time, help spreading it to the most vulnerable to death from Covid.

Probably explains why the likes of Germany and France have a much lower death rate than we have, because they had the beds (and doctors and nurses) that we Spain and Italy for instance didn't.

Also if you look at the up to date details from the John Hopkins Centre (which seems to be the world authority on Covid stats) it shows the in terms of Covid deaths per 100k of population that contrary to popular belief we are NOT the worst country in Europe, Belgium is, but if you look at the 'big five', Spain actually tops the list at 97.4 deaths, followed by Italy 93.26, then us 88.96, France 78.85 and Germany on an amazingly low 20.71.

For comparison the USA is 82.72and China 0.34 (yeah right!).

In fact if it was any other country but Germany I'd doubt their honesty of the data.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Anyway I know it won't change anybody's mind that it is all the governments fault but it does seem to me that (and as I've said all along) you could only fight the pandemic with the resources you had at the time and clearly France and Germany having double and treble the beds, doctors and nurses to the population than we did clearly was a big factor in them having lower death rates from Covid than Spain, Italy and ourselves.

Good news about the vaccine but as always the Tories then proceed to lie about it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55163730

Rather than let the facts speak for themselves, Boris and co. so obviously look for as much acclaim as possible by stretching the truth or outright lying.....but their motives are transparent. Not on the scale of Trump, of course, but still excruciating.

 Our newspapers (The Express excluded) and programmes like Sky's Press Preview invariably make clear that no one is falling for the deceptions, exaggerations and the twisting of the truth. If they had any sensitivity at all, the government ministers would desist. It's making them look like self-promoting clowns and sets them up as objects of ridicule.

 It's coming to something when even The Mail and The Telegraph have changed their tune in the light of the Tories' handling of the pandemic and their shambolic posturing re Brexit negotiations that are going to cost us dear.

okocha wrote:Rather than let the facts speak for themselves, Boris and co. so obviously look for as much acclaim as possible by stretching the truth or outright lying.....but their motives are transparent. Not on the scale of Trump, of course, but still excruciating.

 Our newspapers (The Express excluded) and programmes like Sky's Press Preview invariably make clear that no one is falling for the deceptions, exaggerations and the twisting of the truth. If they had any sensitivity at all, the government ministers would desist. It's making them look like self-promoting clowns and sets them up as objects of ridicule.

 It's coming to something when even The Mail and The Telegraph have changed their tune in the light of the Tories' handling of the pandemic and their shambolic posturing re Brexit negotiations that are going to cost us dear.

It is upsetting but there's no point in worrying about what will happen as it will ruin now. 
And not being a Buddhist ATM I reckon you only have one experience - so enjoy it.

New Covid strain sweeping the south of England. Not yet clarified whether or not existing vaccines will protect against it.

So this mutation doesn’t attack antibody production but has evolved to spread more easily - which makes it more of a race against time from a vaccination perspective and will lead to a more stringent lockdown protocol. Batten down the hatches folks!

I have a question - maybe Norpig is my best hope of getting an answer - but one of my sons has a serious egg allergy - and most vaccines use egg white as a carrier medium (take note vegans!), so does anybody know or can find out (no pressure amigo:)) if the covid vaccines are available in an egg-free format?

Definitely a pint in it.