I guess I would feel more confident in that approach if we had real evidence of developing immunity. Influenza occasionally throws up a killer strain, but we develop immunity to those. The track record with coronavirus (covid-19 and otherwise) is somewhat more troubling. This could be like a killer version of the common cold.
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I agree. I always keep emphasizing to people around me, does not mean the government do not say or do not know, mean we cannot do what is socially responsible. Unfortunately, there are enough idiots as always around the world who like to do otherwise.
I meant it less as a strategy and more as an acknowledgment of the reality after all our tried and tested public health approaches had failed. Other than the lack of mutation, it does have most of the the other characteristics to provide that sort of challenge. It just sickens me that we’re rapidly approaching that same end point without having really given the eradication a proper college try.
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Fuck sakes
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This !!
The way I see it playing out will be Johnson will soon furfill his useful idiot role and will get canned by his own party. Sunak will take over to bring some “credibility” back.
The finances will be used as justification for privatisation, when change is ideological. Segments of healthcare, schooling, transport, BBC, policing etc will be sold off under the guise of repaying debt and the private sector can be more efficient.
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Globally, I don’t think it was really going to be possible with the WHO hamstrung by the US, and the CDC basically on the bench even in dealing with it in the US. International coordination weakened at the precise moment it needed to strengthen
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If your income falls, because you have been made unemployed, had your hours cut, or furloughed then you are not really going to see a lot of benefit from reduced expenditures such as reduced travel costs to compensate for that. Even if you did you probably would have faced increased costs from shopping - during the lockdown supermarkets had ended BOGOFs for example.
There are about 32m people of working age in the UK. 1.35m people were unemployed about 6 months ago. Between the lockdown and August that rose to 2.7m. It is expected to increase further to peak at over 6m this year in the optimistic scenario, or 9m next year in the least optimistic scenario (with about 4m still unemployed by 2024) .
Since the lockdown approximately 9m people have used the furlough scheme. There may be some people who have moved in between these two groups, but even so, that is a significant impact on the economy. You can even add in Self Employed people who didn’t qualify for support during the lockdown and couldn’t earn money.
In other words, a loss of income, or a fear of losing income is more likely to continue to dampen spending, than it is to lead to a flourish.
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Tell you what, I’ll hope it improves quickly. You think as you wish.
Holy Hell, did somebody dig Thatcher up and put her back in charge?
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Yeah I think the chance was lost for the UK when they did practically nothing during the first wave. If you can avoid community transmission, you are golden, or at least as golden as it gets in these time, as you can put your resources into test and trace and keep it at bay or significantly reduced, then respond as the need arrives. The alternative is spending the whole time chasing your own tail. I keep coming back to to Australia as that is my experience but a few things have worked really well there:
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Borders. Having a physical border between states has meant you can have one state with an outbreak (Vic) and a number of other states with no cases at all (Qld, Tas, NT, WA) so those states can continue on as they were while Victoria is handled differently. Locking down a city like is happening in the UK, or indeed as it happened in Victoria (Melbourne had very different restrictions to the Victorian border towns for instance) is nowhere near as effective. Unfortunately I dont think its possible to have a similar type of border lockdown in UK as happened in Aus as there is just too much road infrastructure across county borders. Its not a ‘4 roads in and out of the state’ situation like in Australia.
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Eliminating community transmission as the first priority. UK has never been in a position to do this so there is no point dwelling on it. But yes it is actually possible to live life exactly as pre-covid with the exception of 1.5m social distancing, as I was doing that in Qld. Sitting in the crowd at sporting events? Sure. Everything open as normal? You bet. Face masks? Arent they just for surgeries? All this and we actually felt safe because we knew the government was ontop of it. 4 weeks into the UK and I know a handful of people that were self-isolating (all with schoolchildren …Quelle surprise!) and struggling to get a test. They all tested negative but I do wonder if I would even have been contacted as a close trace contact had they tested positive? Knowing this government was set up for one thing: Brexit means I had very little trust of it from the word go, but ‘very little’ is now zero. It would be very difficult to take this government’s word on an approved vaccine given how they have prioritised government resources on their associates rather than effectively managing the crisis. Jesus. Five years ago I would have called myself a massive conspiracy theorist. Not so any more.
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Stopping international travel in and out of Aus. This one is a no brainer but clearly not for the UK government. I am not sure in these times how travelling in and out of the country for recreational purposes could be considered anywhere close to a priority in anyone’s lives. You shut down the borders and you know what you have in your country. The country effectively becomes a covid-free bubble.
This final point obviously needs clarifying, as Victoria wouldnt have happened if the Victorian government had handled this more effectively. Hotels for returning travellers were outsourced to very poorly managed security services that clearly didnt do their job. The first wave in Aus was centred in NSW where the quantities of returning Aussies was just too high vs the resources available at that time to effectively contain the spread. Victoria were in a much better position before the second wave but just dropped the ball, and demonstrated how easily it is to lose control of covid-19 containment.
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Good post. If the UK were ever serious about stopping the virus this would have happened. This simple fact for me illustrates immediately that the government were not bothered.
You reap what you sow. Having made a hash of the first wave you are in a weaker position for the second. That is exactly what we are seeing now.
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Except they won’t reap anything. Nothing sticks to these Teflon bastards.
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Can anyone confirm this is bollocks?
I’ve downloaded the NHS tracing app on iPhone 7. The missus has got literally the next iPhone down from me and can’t download it.
There are loads of apps we both use with no compatibility problems at all.
The advice is to complain to Apple.
How the fuck do we expect to get this under control if the app won’t work on iPhones over 18 months old? I also know loads of people who can’t get it to work on android.
I have an Android phone and my wife has iPhone 7. Both are well over 2 years old and no problems with either.
It is the iPhone 6 it doesn’t support, plus Android phones of about that vintage.
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Which is crazy. The only place that there is a requirement to use it for me is the kids football club. About three-quarters of the parents can’t download it.
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I have no idea (well, I do sort of) why the UK would use a bespoke program that took months to roll out rather than more or less off the shelf code. I have had one on my phone since June or July, seconds to install and I forget it is there until every Saturday afternoon when I get an alert, have a moment of panic, read the alert, and realize it is the weekly reminder that it is there. But I know others who have been alerted and gone to testing as a result.
The UK one will be useless in the face of current numbers, tracing is impossible and testing is so badly bottlenecked as to be useful only for statistics, not actual suppression.
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She may have only had it 18 months, but that the one down from a 7 is a 6S, and that is an old phone. It was released in 2015 and was discontinued 2 years ago. However, most apps are made to be compatible with devices several generations older than that. Hell, we’re a tiny shop and we’re good all the way back to iPhone 5. If that is really the issue then that is pathetic.
However, another thing to check is the OS. A lot of people will not update their OS with older phones for fear of drastic slow downs, and we often find this is the bigger issue for compatibility than the model per se.
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Yeah, we’ve looked at the OS. It says it’s up to date and there is no option to upgrade.
That seems to be the modus operandi of our current government and in my mind Cummings all over. He seems the type that thinks they can do everything better than anyone else.
Their short tenure is already littered with trying to reinvent the wheel and in many cases failing. Track and trace mk 1, Uk’s GPS system are two off the top of my head. Even basic Covid testing had to be done differently.