My friend was planning to come over for her daughter giving birth in two weeks and stay at our house... All up in the air of course now.. But she is even trying to find a way to fly over and go into quarantine somewhere...
Furlough scheme extended until the end of October - "following pressure from employers groups to avoid a wave of job losses this summer". I'm sure that said pressure didn't suddenly materialise yesterday or over the weekend, so that makes the 'return to work' decision on Sunday look rather calculated. https://www.theguardian.com/busines...Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1589285407
"The measure preferred by statisticians, counting all deaths above what would be expected, was even higher: more than 50,000." BBC At last the Beeb is starting to question what the true numbers are. For weeks people have been saying that the numbers presented daily are being rigged to make the government's action look better than it actually is. Little wonder that the comparisons with the rest of the world chart has been removed. Update, following today's official @ONS data of total deaths, a cautious estimate of the number of UK excess deaths up to 12 May is 59,700 Of these 51,000 have happened and 8,700 are estimates bringing the official data up to date using evidence from hospitals
From what I can see all countries, apart from Belgium, are doctoring the figures to make themselves to look not so bad.
Long chat with my youngest last night who works in two hospitals, both of which are treating coronavirus patients. The day she works in the operating theatre she has full protective gear, but the theatre is adjacent to the area set aside for the ICU. The other days in a different hospital she sees some people in her head and neck clinic. A lot of these people are elderly who have had problems with their hearing, and she tries to do a lot of her consultations by phone, but some are in real pain and have to come into the hospital for her to treat them. She has lesser protection on those days. Because my daughter is moving around in hospital conditions she is in a vulnerable situation, and should she pick anything up she would be quite likely to pass it on to those who are most at risk. The government say that tests are available, but are not being taken up. I wonder why she has been told that she is not sufficiently at risk to be in the queue for a test? One of the people she works with did catch the virus, and spent 5 nights on a ventilator. She was sent home asap to free up a bed. Three weeks later she is ill again with blood clots in her lungs, but she is home with her husband and two children, and although she might now be immune she has not been tested again to find out. The blood clots are quite a common result of the effects of being ill with this virus. I believe that the staff in the hospitals have been doing a heroic effort, but I am not impressed with the politicians. At the end of the day it is up to our elected representatives to keep the population safe, Maybe because it is my daughter I get a bit wound up, but it does get me really angry when I see members of the government trying to spin figures in such a way that it doesn't make them look bad.
Does it matter what other countries are doing SH, if you know that the government in the UK is basically lying to you?
a subjective view i suspect , to fit his narrative of supporting the regime we have been lumbered with .......
I don't know what you read cologne, but from the comments below the news items that I see in France, very few people are questioning the figures given out here. They may well be inaccurate to a degree for obvious reasons of collecting them together, but for the UK to try and make out that 59,000 is actually 32,000 is just plain wrong.
I wasn't actually doubting what you have just said Frenchie, but was doubting the phrase ''All countries apart from Belgium'' suggesting that over 200 countries are doctoring their figures.
Yes I had got what you said and agreed. As the evidence grows it must become very hard to defend what is turning out to be a shambles of a government.
Excellent support from the Chancellor for workers and businesses, one of the most generous schemes in the world. Hopefully those that can return to work safely will do so a.s.a.p. and not treat the lockdown as an extended holiday. I heard of a couple of shysters today making excuses to avoid retuning to work. There will always be some looking to fiddle the state if possible.
He has done what he to do. The countries around the world are doing similar things, so nothing out of the ordinary unless you got on top of the problem when it first showed its ugly head. You cannot do otherwise when you have shut down the economy. He has said that the country is now in recession which is honest of him although technically it isn't yet. It is sad to see some extreme right wingers saying that he should not have done it. Let people starve to death seems to be the attitude of a few.
Even the D Telegraph, Johnson’s chief supporter, is critical. Norman Tebbit, of all people, writes: ‘Boris Johnson was left struggling under Keir Starmer’s detailed & fair scrutiny.’ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: ‘Govt’s handling of Covid-19 is a very British disaster. Seems to be quite a lot of unhappiness within the 1922 committee about Johnson as well now. Will ill health give him a let out?
The council have reduced our wheeley bin collection, per our local council member it is because the refuse department are working with 50% of normal staff. Not by any measure do I believe that 50% of the refuse collection workforce actually need to self isolate given the rate of infection here and I can only assume a lot of staff are swinging the lead and the sooner they get back to work the better. It is easy to distance yourself when collecting bins.
Looking in the refuse bin in our village the dustmen could come once a month instead of every week. The smell might be a little pungent mind you.
The problem you’ve got with trying to use that particular narrative is the cold hard facts of the excess death figures.
As far as I can see from the statistics the Worldwide death rate for this disease is 6.7% - this is taken only from recorded cases ie. for those which were actually tested positive. The unknown cases ie. those who had it but never asked for help, or those who were simply sent home to self quarantine will never be known - estimates suggest that this figure could be 10 times the recorded figure. If this is the case then the real death rate would be approximately 0.67%. I have referred to this before but I cannot understand why so many have made reference to the Spanish flu of 1919 yet there has been very little mention of the more recent Asian flu outbreak of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu outbreak of 1968, with a second wave in 1969. The Asian flu caused an estimated 1.5-2 million deaths and the later Hong Kong flu took just over a million lives (of these 100,000 were in the USA and 60,000 in Germany). Britain was not so seriously affected by this, because it was, essentially, transported by returning soldiers from Vietnam (Australia was badly hit), and others were not as mobile as they are today. But from all the accounts schools in the USA were not closed, people still went to work, and society regulated things for themselves ie. through social distancing and wearing of masks (though these things were not mandatory, people did it anyway). In fact, sandwiched between the 1968 outbreak and the second wave in 1969 the Woodstock festival happened. There was not a recession immediately following this and the post war boom went back to being a boom afterwards. So what is different today ? We are more globalized, and more dependent on international supply chains than then - and people are no longer used to these things (in those days things like TB, scarlet fever, and Polio were still doing the rounds), we also have the internet spurting out a barrage of fake news and misinformation. It comes as a shock now to remember that whilst we were all occupied with what Stewart Scullion was doing on the pitch a Worldwide pandemic was raging in the background (though Watford was not really touched by it) yet this has slipped into the mists of distant history so quickly.
