There are now more hospitalised patients with covid than there were on the day in March when we locked down.
I'm afraid not - you wouldn't be able to buy a version old enough to only have 65,000 lines so they'd have had that stored in a cupboard full of old modems and broken monitors. The full 12 billion is still out there.
So that's what's world -beating about it - the sheer cost to the tax payer of rewarding faithful party donors. It's Boris' version of the great reset - robbing the people to give to those who already make a very nice living out of being the go to cowboys for government contracts.
My hubbie sells computer software and games on eBay He's got a copy office 2007, comes with Excel, Access and Word. You can get a copy from us for a tenner.
I don't suppose anyone has ordered 1.2 billion copies in the last couple of months? This could explain where the money has been spent.
Don’t be daft. What about the cost of 50,000 16 year olds on £4.55 an hour to manually input the data? Be reasonable.
I just assumed they'd delve into the 14 year old work experience kid pool. This'll mean they'll be running well over budget.
At the briefing this morning, the medical director of NHS England stated that there are currently more Covid patients in hospital in England than there were when lockdown was announced in March. This is true according to the government's statistics - 3,837 today against 3,097 on March 23rd. However, this was just described by Sheila Fogarty on LBC as 'more today than at the March peak', which is wrong and misleading. On 31st March there were 10,767 Covid patients in hospital in England and the absolute peak was 17,172 on 12th April.
Also, the current high is from a much larger number of people who have tested positive. The ratio of hospitalisations to positive tests will be a fraction of that in March, because we only tested people going to hospital back then. Last Friday there were 13,864 new positive tests, and 544 admissions to hospital. I doubt these figures are really compatible, and statisticians would tear this to pieces, but I make that a rate of about 39 hospitalisations per 1,000 new positive tests (disclaimer - maths is not my strong point). The only question is, can the NHS cope with this? As a German provincial health minister said, who cares if the infection rate is 10,000 a day, if only one of these needs to go to hospital. Very mixed messages coming out regarding the NHS - usual ‘protect at all costs’, ‘close to collapse’ etc and then the Medical Director of the NHS saying please keep using the service for everything. From the perspective of many cancer and cardiac patients the NHS collapsed ages ago. I’m guessing the ‘higher than March’ stuff is a trail for tougher restrictions to be announced this afternoon then ‘negotiated’ with regions. Apparently it has taken the government weeks to come up with its revolutionary 3 tier ranking. It’s almost as if no one told them that a second wave was inevitable......
The statistics for positive tests are unreliable and, as you say, can't be compared to the first wave anyway. The only meaningful statistics are those for hospitalisations and the current numbers could all be housed in the mothballed Nightingale hospital in London.
It would make more sense to use the Nightingale as the go-to hospital rather than other hospitals that get overwhelmed. Although the way traffic is in town you wouldn't want to be in a hurry...
It is still a mystery to me how the Nightingale hospitals will be competently staffed while maintaining the rest of the NHS ‘fully operational’.