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Discussion in 'Plymouth' started by Plymborn, Jun 19, 2016.

  1. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    Bit confused notDistant ....is your £0.75 billion the same as £750 million..... and your £0.2 billion the same as £200 million ?
     
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  2. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    Ish....

    The EPL figure was originally quoted as £800m but I've also seen it at £1 billion.

    The EFL figure was quoted by Rick Parry as £200m within the last 24 hours but no doubt it'll be £0.25 billion before you know it!
     
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  3. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    Unable to log-in to this site late last night....was it just me or was it the website ?
     
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  4. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    Plans are being drawn up for rugby union to be played without scrummaging, tackling and mauling next season to increase the likelihood of some form of the game returning.
    An internal working group at the Rugby Football Union is understood to be working on variations of what is being described as "rugby activity" focusing on reducing the levels of contact to encourage players to return to clubs next season, even if full contact is not allowed because of social-distancing measures.

    Daily Telegraph Sport...Wednesday...07/05/2020.

    My thoughts....Oh jolly hockey sticks.....will they be turning out in gym-slips and frilly knickers...plus hair clips to keep their hair tidy.

    Will we be having football soon without tackling, heading or even fouling and certainly no swearing.....plus of course gym-slips and frilly knickers etc.

    .....and of course empty stadiums that are completely soulless.
     
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  5. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    COMPARISON.

    The architect of Sweden's coronavirus strategy has claimed the UK's lockdown has been largely "futile" in containing the virus.

    John Giesecke, a state epidemiologist who advises the World Health Organisation, said the UK's death toll suggested harsh social restrictions were not the best method of tackling the pandemic. Sweden has so far refused to impose the type of lockdown seen in other European countries, keeping open schools, restaurants and businesses.

    The UK's death toll is more than 10 times that of Sweden's were only 2,941 people have been killed by Covid-19 to date.

    Referring to the high coronavirus death toll across UK care homes, Prof Giesecke said: "A hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes....a population the lockdown was designed to protect."

    He added: "Neither does it decrease mortality from Covid-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries.

    Britain's lockdown strategy "only pushes the severe cases into the future" and has not prevented them, Prof Giesecke argued.

    "There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for awhile, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear," he said.

    Prof Giesecke argued that most people infected with Covid-19 were healthy and young and it was in this section of the population that the "real pandemic" was occurring.

    Despite resisting strict lockdown measures, Sweden's Public Health Institute estimated that the country's R number, the number of people each infected person passes the virus to, fell from 1.4 at the start of April to 0.85 at the end of the month.

    Prof Giesecke has previously been critical of the pandemic modelling produced by the Imperial College London team led by Prof Neil Ferguson.

    He suggested Prof Ferguson's projected death toll were too pessimistic and rejected suggestions the Sweden would see a mounting mortality rate, telling a Swedish newspaper: "On the contrary, I think it will go down."

    Imperial College research, which helped to inform the UK's strategy, forecasted that Sweden's approach would take its R number above 3, leading to 40,000 death by May 1st.

    Daily Telegraph...Thursday...07/05/2020


    My thoughts

    Oh hell have we dropped an almighty clanger here.....Prof Neil Ferguson...lover boy who broke his own isolation rules and had to resigned ....and his Imperial Collage team might of got this totally wrong and our death rate has soared to the highest in Europe...30,000 plus and counting.

    Have we just pushed the second phase down the road and when we start relaxing our shutdown get hit be an even worse death toll....good grief I hope not.

    If that is the case....you can say good bye to any form of sport for the rest of this year let alone this season.....THE FOOTBALL SEASON IS OVER FOLKS....we'll have be satisfied in watching the Bundesliga football instead.
     
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    Last edited: May 7, 2020
  6. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    Just as we've got the trashy newspapers starting to seek controversy and the district councils for Scotland and Wales starting to write their own agendas, the academics whose noses are out of joint because they haven't been co-opted into the official teams are starting to let their jealousy show, I read at the weekend that a group of UK academics outside the Government team are to set up their own group and start issuing their own advice. Just what we don't need.

    In this VE week, coinciding as it does with the virus epidemic, I was thinking that mistakes are made in war as well as in this crisis. In the UK's case, probably sending the Expeditionary Force to France in 1940 in what was a hopeless task, the Dieppe raid, sending HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse to protect Singapore without air cover (my Dad was at school with a lad whose father died on the former), Operation Market Garden. As for the Germans, starting to bomb British cities before they'd finished the RAF off in 1940 and then attacking Russia. But it's better to make decisions and do something than to sit on your hands and cross your fingers. Inevitably that's painful before long.

    Nobody's perfect. The Swedes have a much lower population density than we do - nearly everyone does. There are 8.9m people in the worst hit Greater London Area compared to just under 1m in Stockholm. If I may say so, the gentle Swedes are rather more likely to follow reasoned government guidance than the feral underclasses in our major cities who need severe restrictions if you are to achieve anything.

    The UK is also a much larger cultural, financial and commercial centre than Sweden. Perhaps more should have been done to control people moving in and out of the country sooner but there are larger flows here than Sweden has to deal with.

    The 3 parts of the slogan are Stay At Home, Protect The NHS, Save Lives. The most important of these is not the third but the second. You can't afford to maintain emergency services that can cope with the worst imaginable disaster at a moments notice. The lock-down has given time to increase NHS capacity in the key areas. To me, maybe it's still a week or two too soon to relax things but at least in hospitals the trends are going in the right direction.

    The care room situation is different. It's not pleasant but we have to accept that weakest and frailest are concentrated there and in many cases they couldn't be saved even on an intensive care ward. Rather than uprooting people like that it may well be the kindest thing is to let them pass in familiar surroundings. The lock-down was not primarily intended to protect care homes, it was to stop the virus running wild in the much larger population outside care homes and overwhelming the hospital system. It also protects those most at risk who are in the community at large. You can say more should have been done to stop the virus getting into care homes in the first place and I wouldn't disagree, but as I say, this is an emergency not far short of war.

    One thing's for sure, the lock-down may have done more economic damage than we needed to have suffered but it can't have caused deaths. If deaths would have gone down anyway, fine, but the Government had to do something.
     
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  7. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    I had to read that twice notDistant......."Feral underclasses in our major cities"....I thought I was the biased England for the English.....Farage loving supporter.

    Singapore was a disaster....one of my mothers sisters got out of Singapore on the last boat with her one year old son....waving goodbye to her RAF husband on the quay side never to see him again....most of them ended on the Burma Railway project so she heard....she never new what happened to him....and it showed for the rest of her life...very sad.
     
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  8. sensiblegreeny

    sensiblegreeny Well-Known Member
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    I think notdistant was referring to English as the feral underclass plym so hardly a Farage statement of any type.

    Everybody makes mistakes as I'm sure we all recognise and as I said somewhere else a mistake means that somebody somewhere has tried to do something. Never condemn a trier is my view. But, having made a mistake then own it for christ sake not lie about it or try to blame something else. As far as I can gather they knew about this virus from around December time. Lock down occurred in March and at the end of it at that. That is a minimum of 3 months and in that time the thing had taken hold. China are in my opinion lying about this thing as well and they knew well before anyone else did and didn't say. Our Government originally lied about the death rate before media picked up on the Care Homes being left out. They lied about the PPE and there were firms in this country with stocks the Government did not seek. They lied about the testing. They issued kits but that wasn't a test with a result pending. They set up testing stations in the middle of nowhere which cameras showed were almost empty most of the time. Surely somebody noticed that.

    They are not on top of this thing and probably nowhere near it. I have no doubt it will come back and everyone will be paying for the actions taken for years to come. As for Academics well where does one start with them. One of them is bound to be right in the end by process of elimination. There are enough theories going around to float a Battleship. It has been said that if you give enough Chimpanzees a typewriter each and enough time one of them will write the complete works of Shakespear, I doubt the Swedes are any better at any of this than we or anyone else is. They will make mistakes. As for our illustrious leader where do you start with him. I listened to PMQs on Wednesday. Starmer left him for dead. All Boris did without his rabble to back him up was bluster and bumble. If he looks good then feck everything else that's ok. When it comes to sorting something out properly he is well and truly buggered and history will show that.
     
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  9. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    My comment to notDistant was light hearted and tongue in cheek......and where did notDistant say just English in his comment ?
     
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  10. sensiblegreeny

    sensiblegreeny Well-Known Member
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    He didn't you did plym............England for the English............using feral underclass as the reference. Hence my not thinking he meant the English as the feral underclass. Or did I misquote you?
     
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  11. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    I did indeed mean the British, which, for the avoidance of doubt, I would say includes both black and white but very few from the Indian sub-continent, which is odd really as they probably suffer most at the hands of the racists.

    Going back to the original subject, what this guy means by "putting off the hardest cases until last" is the herd immunity argument. That's allowing the virus to run free with many being infected. The young won't be much effected but the old and the already sick will be decimated. Eventually, enough survivors will be out there having gained immunity to stop the virus moving to new victims.

    Firstly, I don't believe it's yet certain that strong immunity is built up.

    Secondly, the Government started on that route until they were told that this virus is so nasty that deaths could be in the region of 0.5 million, at which point they went down the lockdown route.

    I may be somewhat biased personally but I don't think it's moral to throw the over 50s under the bus for the benefit of the under 30s.
     
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  12. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    Article in today's paper telling us that Swedish nursing/elderly homes are being trashed by Covid-19.....one case mentioned that one person was phoned to get permission to move his mother to another place....when he asked why...he was told that she and one other person were the only two still alive....a fortnight later she also died.
     
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  13. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    Wuhan Lab ...China.

    US Intelligence agencies are reportedly examining mobile phone data suggesting there could have been an emergency shutdown in October at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    According to a report, obtained by NBC News, there was no mobile phone activity in a high-security part of the Chinese laboratory complex from Oct 7th to Oct 24th. Previously, there had been consistent use of mobile phones.

    The report, carried out by private experts, suggested there may have been a "hazardous event" specifically at the institute's National Biosafety Laboratory, between Oct 6th and 11th. Analysis of mobile phone data from around the institute also suggested roadblocks were in place between Oct 14th and 19th.

    Experts urged caution, suggesting the report may be based on limited commercially available mobile phone data, and and that there could be other reasons for varying levels of phone usage.

    However, the document could be what Donald Trump was referring to when he recently said he had seen evidence giving him a "high degree of confidence" the pandemic began accidentally at the Wuhan laboratory.

    The prevailing theory is that the virus originated in bats and crossed over to humans at a market in Wuhan.

    But US intelligence agencies continue to investigate the Wuhan laboratory and Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has said there is a "significant amount of evidence".

    It was unclear which private organisation carried out the leaked analysis of the mobile phone location data. But the 24-page report suggested it "supports the release of Covid-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology" and that the pandemic began earlier than thought. The first confirmed case was on Nov 17th.

    The document was obtained by NBC News in London and has been seen by the US Senate intelligence committee.

    Several days ago Marco Rubio, the Republican senator who sits on the committee, wrote on Twitter: "Would be interesting if someone analyzed commercial telemetry data at and near Wuhan lab from Oct-Dec 2019. If it shows dramatic drop of in activity compared to previous 18 months it would be a strong indication of an incident at lab and of when it happened".

    China has denied that the virus escaped from Wuhan laboratory.

    But a senior Chinese official said the pandemic had exposed weaknesses in the country's operations. In a rare admission. Li Bin, director of China's National Health Commission, said there were "weak links in how we address a major epidemic and the public health system.

    Sunday Telegraph...10/05/2020.


    My thoughts.....Wow if this can be proven then the word compensation could be raised world-wide against China ....and the way it held back from telling the rest of the world last autumn.


    Also my daughter's family got their Covid-19 results....Son-in-law...Negative....Daughter...unproven....Grandson...unproven.

    Having seen on telly how they did the testing it was surprising to hear that they were given three kits and told to park the other side of the car park....this was at the O2 Arena car-park at Greenwich. They had to do the testing themselves....which was okay seeing my son-in-law is a long time experienced London Ambulance Service employee....he made sure they all did it properly....they then had to drive back over to the other side and hand in their sample kits.

    This does not of course solve the original problem of my son-in-law going back to work and the suggestion was that they have another test.....no pick up on the results to make sure that they do a re-test ?

    What crosses my mind is the ability to make sure people do the test properly...and no one watching to confirm that it was done properly and that there was no cheating going on.

    How many results come back every day from nearly 100,000 tests that show a not proven results.....it surely makes a mockery of the whole procedure.

    What we must also take note of is.....NHS staff on the front line of this Covid-19....will probably be testing every few days to make sure they are still free from this virus....so not so many new people being tested as we might expect.
     
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  14. sensiblegreeny

    sensiblegreeny Well-Known Member
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    Well Boris has spoken and we have a way out of lock down. My arse. What a load of bumbling twaddle we have just had thrust upon us. I'm beginning to think Boris is now dangerous rather than an idiot. Actually it could be both and they are fairly close in definition in this case. All I can say is a big thank you to all the twonks who voted for this man to give him the platform to put mine and loads of others lives at risk. I know he was voted in on a completely different subject but this surely shows people what a lying scumbag he is and that he is only fit to be a TV personality we can all have a laugh at rather than somebody to be trusted with anything serious. Why oh why didn't they leave him dangling on that slip wire when they had the chance all that time ago. At least he was out of harms way up there.

    I have yet to meet or speak to anyone who actually has a clue what they should now be doing.
     
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  15. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    Most of the Cabinet apart from the Health Minister wanted a quicker relaxation to boost the economy. He's had to do this himself and this is what we've got.... a muddle.
     
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  16. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    I don't know if you've spotted it but ITV4 is showing highlights of the 1996 European Championship as a palliative for the absence of real football.

    Last weekend they showed the opening game, England v Greece at the old Wembley. What a great example it was of England's first game in any tournament. The fans passionate and optimistic at kick off and the team starting well, with Gazza and Steve McMannaman running riot down the left and Alan Shearer smashing one into the roof of the net from an unlikely angle to make it 1-0.

    Second half of course saw England unable to string 2 passes together, handing the initiative to Greece who finally equalised from a dodgy handball penalty given against Stuart Pearce by a Spanish referee.

    Next weekend we get England v Scotland.

    Other than a nostalgic revisiting of the sensible haircuts footballers used to have, the thing that stood out was how poor the football was. Such aimless long balls and failure to retain the thing would nowadays make a decent League Two team blush, I kid you not.
     
    #2536
  17. sensiblegreeny

    sensiblegreeny Well-Known Member
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    I have to say I've lost a lot of interest in football at the moment and can't quite get into the nostalgia going around. However my son told me on his last check on me having a pulse still that he had been watching some games from the 1970s. He was shocked at "how poor the football was". His opinion is that some of those players would have struggled in league two these days. You can't both be wrong I guess although for somebody who lived through the era I only remember some of the class players there seemed to be about. Maybe that's just having stars in my eyes.
     
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  18. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    It used to be a contact sport back then.....once upon a time you were allowed to shoulder charge the goalie and the ball into the net.....and grass only lasted until November.
     
    #2538
  19. notDistantGreen

    notDistantGreen Well-Known Member

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    It just struck me that the other thing that's changed is that in the team that played Greece, there was only one non-qhite face, Paul Ince I didn't see any black faces on the bench either.

    Ince was primarily a midfield destroyer, whereas now, it's mostly white faces in the strength positions at CB and CM with non-white players providing most of the pace and flair at FB and upfront.

    It's good to see this has happened but it remains a worry that so few with Indian and Pakistani heritage succeed in the game, although some have made it to the England cricket team.
     
    #2539
  20. Plymborn

    Plymborn Well-Known Member
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    I'm a little confused notDistant.

    England didn't play against Greece.....in fact Greece didn't even qualify for the tournament......I think you are referring to England v Switzerland when Switzerland got a late penalty to end up 1-1.

    Besides Ince you will find that Sol Campbell and Les Ferdinand were in the 22 man squad
     
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