The Prime Minister shouted down the leader of the opposition four days ago for suggesting the plan to have a five day Christmas window was ****ing mental.
There seems to be a lot of confusion around deaths In absolute terms we are 2nd in Europe behind Italy In rates per million of population we are 4th behind Belgium, Spain and Italy It's tragic all round and I don't think anyone is laughing at anyone else over this
None of us knows the amount of dialogue between the government and the opposition parties during this crisis, though I suspect that it has been substantial I would've liked to have seen a cross party approach to key decisions during the pandemic. I think this would've sent a more unifying message out to the country as a whole. That said I doubt that the opposition parties would've done many things significantly differently - but we will of course never know
firstly I have just Sky+ The interview Marr/Nandy and he does say Spain and Italy now have higher numbers. He obviously made a mistake. Secondly Boris was wrong to goad Captain Hindsight but we all know what Bojo is like. He wants to stay positive and believed Christmas was okay until Friday when Dr Hopkins hit him with the news. He then acted quickly. I have said before this thing changes daily and showing me something from Wednesday is old news. Today Belgium has stopped us from flying in because news they received yesterday. Why didn’t they stop us when reports wer3 coming out of this new strain... answer because things are changing daily. Stop moaning about every decision and get on with it like most of are.
I thought this in the early stages but there are always some who want to get one over the opposition...on all sides. I actually believe a Jezza opposition would have been more supportive.
Our government has known about this strain for far more than a few days. Post all the memes and show faux outrage about random ****s going to Bluewater all you want but you know this **** is on them. They’ll still get the usual 40% of utter goons voting for them next time anyway.
Ooh you are now playing the health expert? if you had listened to Dr Kerkhove Of the WHO you would know that our government first saw these clusters and informed them in Sept. As she says, there are many different strains. They Monitored the situation and saw a rise in cases which two health bodies informed the government on Monday. Captain Hindsight knew this and played the 50-50 card at PMQ’s at that time Boris introduced tougher restricts... by the way Captain Hindsight never mentioned cancelling Christmas and neither did his droid health expert Ashwortless on Monday. They were gunning for the obvious ( tougher measures). On Friday after the data was collated, it was given to Boris. He was knocked for six as reports said. He then acted very quickly to call a meeting that night and Cabinet meeting Saturday morning. He then addressed the nation. That is what happened from all the correct sources. It makes no difference to people like you and some on here because you are just anti everything the government does and we know why. I await Sir Starmers politics rubbish ‘ I told you so’ after the fact.
i believe the new variant was known far earlier that the recent review though Boris on the 16th of Dec was proudly announcing Christmas was not to be cancelled and it would be inhuman to cancel christmas. 19th rolls on, everyones finished their christmas shopping, it's cancelled boys and girls . So boris
The new variant was clearly known about some days before yesterday's announcement But....surely the key issue was not whether there was a new variant (viruses change all the time - we need our resident expert Beth on this), but whether there was sufficient evidence to change existing expert advice / policy A new variant wouldn't automatically mean it would be more dangerous (new strain of flu hits us every year) and therefore might not change existing advice The debate as I see it is more around should there have been an Xmas relaxation in the first place, new variant or not
Well according Dr Hopkins today the data was given to the government Friday. The information the government had On Monday was update on Friday.
My understanding was that the new variant has been known about for some days but that there was insufficient data available to make policy decisions prior to Friday I thought Boris looked quite rattled yesterday
Storford I am not an expert on this ...my field is diagnostic testing (and I said the lateral flow test was a load of poo and I was right.) I have been thinking about this for a while....and these are my musings, a bit scientific but, there is a lot I do not get. There are now 27 strains (now what they mean are 27 different variants of the virus that are different enough to say they are different strains...no I do not know what is meant by "significantly different enough") One of them is now called a "new strain"...no I do not know what the others are called. It is obviously picked up by the testing regime (obviously not the lateral flow test, as that is just a little man who flicks a coin...and a load of @@@@). If what we are told yesterday is true we can say that as we know it is contibuting to the upsurge in numbers. Now to me this is good, as it probably means it is similar enough to be controlled by the vaccine....THATS THE GOOD BIT. But if it is picked up by testing system ...how do we know that it is on the upswing...and it is not just the old strain that is on the up.. We don't unless we sequence the areas of virus that have changed and compare. That is a fairly big thing to do, and cannot be done for the population, it is done in dedicated labs on small sample numbers. So we do not know. Matt Hancock yesterday was talking through his hat (again). I am not saying that he will be shown to be definately wrong....but in my opinion, they were using the "new strain" as a convenient excuse to make a U-turn. The reason they had to do this was that there was a big upsurge in cases, because the measures they took in November were insufficient, and Dedcember would be worse. The new variant, which as yet has not been proved to be any worse than the "old" one, has not been proved to be the reason for the upsurge either. London and the SE should have gone into Tier 3 when Liverpool did...then old, new and the other 25 viral cousins would not have spread. By the way...I am greatly pissed off too, we have the bestest family Christmases...and with a 2 year old it would have been magical.
Yes ten times over. That I believe is what we want from our leaders. Someone who is not afraid to get it wrong by being proactive as opposed to reactive. Who is not afraid to take responsibility for the decisions made rather than looking for someone else to blame. And who is prepared to make decisions for the long-term and not short-term popularity. Bugger the talk of U-turns. If it's the right decision to make it needs to be made. But it would serve any leader well to admit once in a while that he got it hopelessly wrong. And my own personal view is that Christmas relaxation was an unmitigated and entirely predictable disaster in managing the containment of the pandemic. We know a lot more now than we did in March. Let's hope our emergency planning has been upgraded and adapted to ensure we can cope. Suffice to say I have my doubts
Bloke on the radio said the new variant was spotted as far back as September. But probably not understood so well then, and there are new variants occurring all the time. If this one has only really taken off in the last two weeks we should know if it’s really bad news in the next couple of weeks through hospitalisations and deaths. If it’s the same as the ‘old’ versions in terms of seriousness, that’s really bad news, as it’s certainly easier to transmit and thus more people will get it quickly and the hospitals will be flooded, probably regardless of lockdowns. But it could be milder, still with some fatalities but not as many serious cases. Or it could be worse, in which case we might as well just get pissed and stay pissed until the zombie apocalypse.
Have you read about Project Capstone? Government disaster planning exercise, covering COVID, floods, Brexit all happening in the worst possible ways. Thankfully the exercise showed that the government would handle it brilliantly, which has certainly put my mind at rest.
