Coronavirus

That absolutely NOT what I said though.

Helps if you read my post mate.

 

Again this shouldn't turn into a politics thread but the only reason it sometimes becomes 'The Tories' is because of a decade of severe cuts and pay cuts for NHS workers. They're the only ones that did that.

When it comes to managing the crisis then there's no way of knowing what others would have done. That doesn't mean we can't criticise the government when they've handled something poorly.

Generally when they've actually done something it's been positive. The chancellor's done a good job.

Over 10,000 people who later went on to die caught the virus at the start of March - when the government hadn't really done anything except state on the tele that it was fine to still be shaking peoples hands even if they have the virus.

 

I'd like to think so but will consumers swallow the likely price increases .
We live in a world where people demand lower and lower prices .
I fear it will lead to the jobs disappear to automation .

 

The country I saw taking the most decisive action was Denmark. Our government clearly didn't see us as like for like and took a different approach, incorrectly as it goes.

Fully accept that we shut down a week too late, science information wasn't really suggesting we do it much sooner, but the absolute truth is that London isn't only a massive city with large population, it's a also a central transport hub for the world and Europe that **** load of traffic filters in and out of. Not the same as Copenhagen for instance (or Athens).

One the virus was here, it was going to spread.

 

Yeah, this.

 

I’d hope consumers are starting to wake up to paying higher prices, mostly due to the growing environmental conscience people are developing. And those who believe in a fairer society.

That obviously doesn’t necessarily translate to lower earners who can’t afford price increases if they are too high, which as I’ve said would potentially lead to government subsidies.

In terms of automation that’s something which is going to happen anyway across many sectors. As technology improves businesses will, and always have, take advantage of the increased efficiency of adopting that new technology. It’s something that will become an ever more prevalent issue and as a human race we will have to adapt societies to.

 

Yep fair. All the reason to have been more cautious if anything. We had a long lag compared to just about anywhere else between first known case and lockdown.

Trying to be rational rather than emotional, I can see the case for trying a Swedish kind of approach which I think was the intention. I don’t agree with it and it would’ve been horrific probably but I feel now we’ve got the worst of both worlds with some seriously grim numbers of deaths and no evidence we’ll be relatively ok financially compared to countries who took a more draconian approach quicker.

 

Yes I'd also echo that we need a fairer system
I'd be pretty happy to absorb higher taxation and pay it bit more for more ethical producers items.
They can whack at least 5% on the Income tax in return for better pension and healthcare

 

Athens is I believe, the most densely populated city in Europe? ****ing mad place, that I do know (in a good way. Loved Athens).

 

I think part of the issue when people are judging the decisions around this, and many other issues more generally, is that we are prone to taking a black and white view of subjects which are often grey.

If we’d lockdown much sooner would that have meant lower deaths and also coming out of lockdown sooner? Or would it have meant a longer lockdown? If it meant a longer lockdown what would the impact on physical and mental health have been? What would the difference in effect to the economy have been if we’d locked down sooner? Would the economic measures announced by Sunak have been done as quickly or would it have lead to a longer period of no help at the start of lockdown? What would a larger economic impact mean for societies future?

Making the decisions around this has been a fine balancing act between dealing with the direct impact on health of the virus and the consequences on various areas of society of those decisions. I personally think it’s been a very difficult thing to deal with and I wouldn’t have wanted to be making the decisions! It’s inevitable that different courses of action would lead to different mistakes and different issues.

 

I think taxes and higher prices are two things we are all going to have to get used to after all this.

There’s a simple solution for some of us - buy less stuff. Doing that will have an unpredictable impact on the world’s economy, of course. And it won’t help the people who don’t have enough to pay their bills now.

Interesting times.

 

Both your and my figures are from the ONS .So the ONS have 2 different figures on their website for Covid deaths up to 17th April as i assume it gets updated as more registrations are collated so depends what update link used takes you to .

 

Stockholm population is a higher density to London as well 4,800 people per kilometer compared to London's 4,542

 

From a quick google search it appears to be third in Europe. But interestingly comes 26th for space per inhabitant according to an EU website I’ve just read. Not quite sure how that works! Maybe they have larger apartments! And if you take individual square kilometres it drops down to 5th in the list.

Paris tops the list for highest population density overall.

In terms of overall population of a city Athens is way down the list. It doesn’t appear in a top 36 list I’ve just found.

Overall Greece’s population is 13th in Europe, with countries like the uk and Germany over six times larger.

And as a country it’s population density ranks it 29th in Europe.

 

I don’t agree in the slightest. It’s not with the benefit of hindsight that people are saying we locked down too late. Plenty of us were saying it at the time. When the horrendous pictures were coming out of Italy when they were losing 8-900 people a day, they were urging us to lockdown, they were aghast that we were carrying on as normal, and having events like Cheltenham and hosting the fans of Madrid at Liverpool etc.

We locked down around 10 days too late and during that period the virus patently spread exponentially here and thousands have died as a direct result. Had we locked down when we should have there’d have been far less infections as the virus would have remained more contained. It’s merely common sense.

Lest we forget, at that time this Govt was still talking about herd immunity and Johnson was on This Morning talking about ‘letting it rip’ through our society, so lockdown didn’t happen at this stage due to their choice.

 

Further to this (feeling bored), it would appear we have at least 8 cities in the UK with a higher population than Athens.

London has approximately 20million visitors a year (the highest in Europe by about 5 million more than France) compared to Athens 5million.

Hmmm... what other stats can I go searching for!

 

Average size of tits?

 

Are there any pointless answers?