I’ll add another … if you haven’t already (and you may have without knowing it) then, by the New Year, you probably will … :!:
I’m seeing/hearing lots of ambulances again so I reckon there are a lot of unlucky people out there. This is a really nasty disease, much misunderstood by those who think it’s mild. It causes changes in the blood, making it “sticky”. Some people have had toes amputated, some have their brain ageing by ten years, others can never breathe normally again. But those are the ones who don’t die.
It can be contracted more than once. We are lucky that it’s not mutating too fast. It’s new, it’s nasty and we don’t have the capacity to let it just run riot.
I agree with Ben, too. 
So what do you consider to be better than best then, Omah?
I agree Tiff.
I said this in another thread somewhere.
It is so easy to sit back and criticise, but unless you could do any better, it’s best to pipe down. 
I’m sure some people reckon Boris ought to have physhic abilities Mort.
I wonder if he regrets going for the job after walking into all the Brexit stuff and then Covid as well.
It is more than most people would be happy about walking into within weeks of starting a new job.
I wasn’t suggesting letting it run riot.
But I still believe there’s a load of scaremongering going on about it.
To be honest if it really was that deadly and dangerous I’d have suspected at the outset, that any government, behind closed doors, might decide that the older generation was expendable and to focus on keeping the economy going by allowing anyone under 50 or 55 to carry on pretty much as normal. The countries future is for youngsters not oldies.
That’s the hard headed realists view… not a popular one. I’m sure.
Right now … the government is trying to protect everyone.
Long Covid … now that needs further research and funds devoted to it. It sounds like caring for the longterm sufferers is going to be the next problem.
I know … only the other day I said to Mr M that I bet Teresa May can’t believe what a lucky escape she’s had.
My DIL (to be) is a hospital nurse.
I was talking to her yesterday and I said why are Corvid patients being sent to hospitals? Why can’t they try and keep our ‘ordinary’ hospitals for all other sick people and send Corvid patients to the special nightingale hospitals?
Isn’t that what they were intended for, after all
She said where she works, all the other nurses and medical staff are asking exactly the same question!
Apparently it is nothing to do with not enough staff either, because thousands have volunteered to help out.
Tackle the blight of confused and contradictory statistics.
Huge resources have been poured into the roll-out of mass swab tests provided by the NHS. In theory, they should tell us who is infectious, how far the virus is spreading and how fast. In practice, the regime is somewhat aimless and indiscriminate. It has wasted precious resources.
In part, this is because the results identify large numbers of ‘positive’ cases among people who are not infectious. In some cases, the swab tests are picking up levels of Covid-19 which are so very low that the patient will not pass the virus on.
This makes a ‘positive’ reading difficult to interpret. In other cases, administrative errors creep in, as is only too likely given the volume of testing. But the bigger problem is this: the tests give us a simple yes/no answer but fail to identify those who pose a genuine risk.
The results make no distinction between an eight-year-old who is less likely to transmit the virus and a 75-year-old who could prove highly infectious and is in personal danger, especially if suffering multiple health problems.
That is why we must stop relying on yes/no test results alone and start looking at people’s age and symptoms, too.
Perhaps those staff ought to “pipe down” - Boris is doing his “best” … :shock:
I believe there’s not enough scaremongering. We don’t truly know the long term effects either. These people with the mild version could end up having some nasty neurological symptoms or psychosis later. We really don’t know yet. We didn’t even know about long covid a few months ago. A virus that attacks the blood is not something to take chances with. The whole world is reacting in the same way so it’s either mass delusion or there is something to worry about.
- IIRC, that’s what BJ’s government did:
25 April
Care homes bosses blame climbing death toll on ‘reckless stiff broom’ policy to send back hundreds of elderly coronavirus patients to free up hospital beds. This came in the wake of a government document which advises hospitals, ‘to free up NHS capacity via rapid discharge into the community and reducing planned care.’
The plan, drafted on March 17, told told care homes to accept patients who had not even been tested for coronavirus. The devastating impact on the elderly has been laid bare in recent days, after Care England estimated the number of Covid-19 deaths in care homes reached 7,500 a week ago.
3 July
Almost 30,000 more care home residents in England and Wales died during the coronavirus outbreak than during the same period in 2019, ONS figures show.
The Office for National Statistics figures are the first to reveal the full toll on care homes, including deaths that happened in hospital.
There were just over 66,000 deaths of care home residents in England and Wales between 2 March and 12 June this year, compared to just under 37,000 deaths last year.
Covid-19 was the leading cause of death for male care home residents, accounting for a third of all deaths, and the second most-common cause of death for female residents, after dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. While 20,000 mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, another 10,000 of the excess deaths were registered to other, non-Covid, causes.
Previous analysis from the ONS has suggested that many of those “non-Covid” deaths could have involved undiagnosed coronavirus. Three-quarters of these deaths occurred within the care homes themselves and a quarter were care home residents who died in hospitals.
Obviously, relatives of those elderly victims of Tory policy were not too happy about their “execution” and the press exposed the scale of the “care home virus scandal” caused by government edict. there followed a now characteristic BJ U-turn and later, characteristically, manipulation of the figures.
Did they not announce back in March that 20,000 deaths would be a good outcome? Was that not met with shock and horror?
- IIRC, that’s exactly what BJ’s government did throughout the summer - millions of under-50’s were allowed to roam the country at will - the streets, the lanes, the fields, the lakes, the seaside - and congregate in their thousands. Then, because children were deemed “immune”, schools were opened, then universities were opened, the last welcoming 500,000 students from all over the UK - much to “Incompetent” Harding’s surprise, infection rates shot up in the “teenage” range. At the same time, all over the UK, pubs and private homes were ignoring safety procedures with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of clients and guests, mostly under 50 and many in the 18-35 age group, which, currently, has the most infections:
30 October 2020
There has been growth in infection rates in all age groups over the past two weeks; older teenagers and young adults continue to have the highest current rates while rates appear to be steeply increasing among secondary school children.
He is not the most exciting speaker but he does explain the difference between the different coronaviruses and he is actually a doctor rather than an amateur epidemiologist.
hi
some interesting comments and views posted.
My take on the situation.
We have the models from the Cold War on how to deal with a pandemic.
It was done locally, local labs and trained officers.
There was the Cold war Bonus when things were scaled down, but kept in place.
Then came Austerity.
The local labs where shut down, trained staff made redundant, Directors of Public Health moved from Central Government funding to LA Funding ang then that funding cut.
regional labs where set up by the Private Sector.
All EHOs are trained in Contact Tracing, used for Food Poisoning Outbreaks and Legionnaires Disease.
They were also subject to the General 20% cut in expenditure.
I do not like Boris, he is an indescivist optimist.
In this case however I must defend him.
Has he made mistakes?
Most definitely yes.
He was however left in an impossible situation by the actions of Cameron, Osbourne , May and most especially Jeremy Hunt.
Boris is getting all the flack, but the real architects of this disaster are getting away scot free.
Swedish Covid-19 expert says lockdowns are merely delaying inevitable | Daily Mail Online.
This is the fact we all have to accept. Eventually the government will.
Attempts to stop the spread of the disease are ‘futile’ because everyone is likely to be exposed to it before a treatment can be found, meaning all countries will end up in a similar position regardless of what measures they took.
Mass hysteria is the correct term Annie !
And it is a well known psychological phenomena common to
members of the ape family !!
The UK experienced it fairly recently when the brexit vote was
for leaving?
I believe it is possible for alarmist media reports to trigger
irrational behaviour in the population if regularly repeated?
It is the basis of all the advertising we have to endure these days!!
Donkeyman!
You missed out Hammond, Swimmy !!
Donkeyman!