I've got an appointment at my local hospital within 3 weeks for my cataract assessment so the NHS is clearly still open for some things
Specsavers appointment on the Monday, called by my own doctors surgery on Tuesday am, appointment made for 3 weeks later Probably moved up the list as so many potential cataract patients have died in the last 10 weeks
Lockdown continues to be loosened, reduction in two metres rule widely expected. Over 1,300 new, diagnosed through tests, infections today. The day we went into what has been called lockdown there were 947. Be confident and shop but be careful and stay alert! Beg pardon? Still communicating poorly in the same stale, lazy, daily format, still offering contradictory messages, confusing advice and blatant lies. No wonder trust in the government has collapsed by 25% in the last couple of weeks. Trust in the media also nosediving.
In Europe they'll be singing 'Sacked in the morning. You're getting sacked in the morning........................' Whereas we, the employers of this sorry lot of jokers will be giving them a unanimous vote of confidence.
Germany's R number up from 1.79 to 2.88, they're not quite as smart as we thought. Worrying as that may be spread with holidays starting up again...
With reference to the NHS, I had to visit a GP in Portsmouth, about 2 weeks ago. I phoned at 8am, a doctor phoned me within 20 minutes and I had an appointment up the road, at 9am.
We all know politicians are evasive a rarely directly answer a question but these wretches are taking it to unprecedented levels. They are accountable to no one. If cases start spiking again, which is inevitable, do we really think they will put the breaks on easing? Seems impossible now they've totally opened the floodgates. It's just stunning have fast and far we've eased, they've been like a child with their pocket money burning a hole in their pocket.
Too much is being made of this so called R number Sooper. It stands to reason that if the overall numbers are low then a localized outbreak will have a large impact on this ratio. If you have only 100 active cases then an outbreak of 20-30 will cause your R rate to rocket. The important thing is the actual number of active cases ie. that the number of daily recoveries exceeds the number of daily new outbreaks. Germany has seen a rise of about a thousand active cases over the last 6 days - but this is almost solely down to the outbreak at the abattoir and meat processing plant in Weidenbruck (Nr. Gütersloh). Germany has such a decentralized structure that regional lockdowns are easier to carry through than in the UK. Such an outbreak was almost pre ordained - nobody wants to work in an Abattoir and the people who do this are mostly imported labour from Bulgaria and Rumania (pretty much under the same conditions as in agriculture) - they all live together in cramped, workers hostels, do not have the same work safety conditions as other workers, do not get paid when sick (and so work however grotty they may be feeling), and also work in constantly low temperatures where such viruses will spread much quicker. One of the many lessons of this crisis is that we need to ensure that all visiting workers enjoy the same basic rights as the local population. There are many other lessons from this corona crisis - as a result the skies are silent and blue again, and some countries are actually in danger of achieving their Co2 reduction levels for the year - will it stay that way, or will there just be a race to get back to 'business as usual' afterwards ?
