Westminstenders: All bets are off

[RedToothBrush]

We are seeking an extension. Apparently. No prizes for guessing why.

There is no news but COVID news. And that's all there will be for a long time.

Enjoy your stockpile and your sunny uplands it brought.

Keep safe.

Sports Direct is staying open. Apparently bike shops can stay open (bbc online just now).

They have just been ordered to shut. If they do not comply the police will shut them down ( eventually)

The man is seriously unwell. His negative test must make him think he's invincible rather than a fuckwit

'Our country is meant to be open': Donald Trump could remove Covid-19 restrictions by next week jrnl.ie/5055499

The CEO (as opposed to Mike Ashleigh) has just announced that they would indeed be closing - including Evans Cycles which technically could stay open as (apparently) bike shops are exempt. This was on BBC Breakfast.

Closing Evans too - out of spite?

Those songs the Geordies sing about Mike Ashley turn out to be true.

In other news, Piers Morgan has been appointed Emergency Leader of the Oppostion and has forced Gove to U-turn over kids moving between separated parents.

Don't understand why construction work is still allowed to continue.

Because so many are self employed and if doing outside work, they can work away from others. Trades working inside might find it more difficult. The government urgently need to know what measures they are putting in place for the self employed.

Sorry: WE urgently need to know what the government are doing about the self employed.

Construction needs to be kept safe. You can't leave something hanging out at an angle. You need to finish it. But most construction should stop.

Is Nigel Farage an essential service? He was on GMTV this morning. Can we not switch him off and unplug him?

Construction workers are making up most of the footfall on the Tube. Pictures of the tube this morning are not good. There will soon be no healthcare for industrial accidents.

Also this from the telegraph this morning.

7 out of 10 people in intensive care in UK are men. The average age is lower than you think at 63. The common factor is they tend to be overweight.

CDC has found that coronavirus survived in cruise ship cabins for up to 17 days after passengers had disembarked.

You have to read the science carefully though. What I've read is that as time goes on even though virus is still detectable it becomes increasingly less viable.

But it's certainly true to say that this is an extremely infectious virus and that people (still) don't realise how careful they need to be about hand hygiene.

Meanwhile, more and more people I know here are reporting symptoms. Mild, mostly, but scary. No one seems to be tested, though.

I still don't know anyone here with symptoms. Friends in Paris and eastern France have reported illness (but it's worth saying that even now when they are only testing people with serious illness, many test negative).

We have two official cases in the département.

Keep safe ...

Yep, global stats for confirmed cases show much higher death rate for men:

4.7% Men
2.8% Women

Note: real death rates should be much lower, because many cases around the world will never have been tested

Since, in every country, women live longer, if there were no sex bias, then there would be a significantly higher % of women dead,
because of their greater numbers in the 80+ group;
instead, we have the opposite^

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/

Mockers - I made exactly that point to dh earlier , but once a site is has been made safe, it should be left until this lockdown is over.

Ditto with most manufacturing. I remember in one of my old jobs (with ICI) being told, in a time of power cuts/electrical shortages (due iirc, to the miners' strike) the plant had been categorised as essential as it was a plastic film that was used in food packaging. Similar "rules" could be put in place now.

Yes, Misti That's important to note
All reports from all surfaces tested around the world are that
the amount of the virus drops off sharply with time

Also, much transmission is person to person via droplets in the air - coughing, just breathing ....

Do we have any data on the relative % of infections from these 2 means of transmission

• I presume data would be mostly from theoretical models, as only China was really analysing individual spread on e.g. buses

DGR others share your views on this pandemic being a game changer it seems.

My last (and maybe next) job was strategy. I can spot hidden dependencies at a thousand paces.

For example: all the choruses of "we'll go on holiday after this" are swerving the fact that having been caught - very expensively - with their collective trousers down once, governments around the world aren't going to be lax the second time. So I am expecting that - irrespective of any other measures (visas, quotas, etc) a lot of countries are going to require people entering to have insurance cover to be able to self isolate for (at least ?) 2 weeks, should a similar pandemic flare up in future.

That insurance alone will stop most people travelling abroad.

Add on top of that a persons need for insurance should they need to self isolate and be unable to work. Bearing in mind most employers aren't going to be that keen on employees having to have open-ended holidays. (And that's something you are unlikely to be able to insure against ...)

So foreign travel: not so much. Which will mean it's going to be internal again. Maybe HS2 is needed in that future ? Certainly there could be a revival in our seaside towns, as stag and hen parties expand to fill the tack available ?

All too soon to call obviously. But it's hard to see humans being quite so blase about globetrotting in a years time.

No idea (yet) how that would affect industry and commerce. Or indeed economics.

Apropos of that, I saw a FM meme (if I can rediscover it I'll post it) that said when anyone gets to $999million wealth, every cent over should go in taxes and the person gets a badge I won capitalism. Which seemed fair.

red that common factor might explain what happened to that tragic American family where 4 members died of the virus after a family get together. The news said none had underlying health issues, but maybe more a case of as yet undiagnosed health issues? Will the death rates in the US expose how many Americans don't seek medical help at early stages for fear of increased premiums?

Our annual travel insurance runs out in July. Just before when I usually return to Canada to visit family and friends. Will we be able to get it renewed? I, for one, will be extremely sad if I can't globe trot back home on a regular basis. Might make me work on DH to make a permanent move there. Especially with the continuing Brexit saga as the final nail. Ah, wait, we're supposed to stop talking about that now, aren't we?

Our annual travel insurance runs out in July. Just before when I usually return to Canada to visit family and friends. Will we be able to get it renewed?

Well it won't cover C-19 for a start.

It would all depend how the global community reacts. But given the current trajectory, it's bleeding obvious that when people start going from one country to another they are a disease risk, and that currently the only real mitigation is to self isolate (properly, not just identify as self isolating) which involves 2 weeks in a quarantine facility. And that don't come cheap. So it's not unreasonable to imagine that most countries will make being able to self isolate if needed a condition of entry. Which becomes particularly interesting when they apply it to their own returning citizens. Imagine a situation where you could not leave the UK, unless you could demonstrate you are covered for self isolation (at your expense) on return ? A little like the way dogs used to be quarantined for rabies.

Of course the global community could just go Look ! A squirrel ! and return back to how things were. But that would be to gamble on a huge scale that there will never be another pandemic even remotely bad as this. And I say that on the understanding that right now - 24th March 2020 - we have no idea how bad this pandemic is going to get. Viruses are mysterious things with a complexity far beyond their constituents, so there's all sorts of possibilities awaiting us. Who knows ? It could be as bad as measles, and provoke an immune amnesia in survivors. That could be a lot of fun.

Well it won't cover C-19 for a start.

Depends on your provider. Ours has said it will provide CV19 cover on annual policies if you renew the policy with no break in coverage.

Ours has said it will provide CV19 cover on annual policies if you renew the policy with no break in coverage.

What does it cover ? 2 weeks quarantine ? Lost pay ?

Medical coverage. Just pointing out that it doesn’t exclude CV19.

Medical coverage. Just pointing out that it doesn’t exclude CV19.

Yes, but we now know that if you get C-19, you will need to be quarantined for 2 weeks. So that needs to be covered. (The premiums shooting up ...). That's assuming that (a) the country you are visiting or (b) the UK can be bothered to run the necessary facilities and have them ready at a moments notice for you. It might turn out to be much simpler to have no facilities, and few travellers ...

It's all to play for at the moment. Luckily the human race and planet have had a bit of a gentle nudge with a relatively mild virus that isn't too harsh on us. Because there are plenty of really nasty things out there that could have decided to wake up and bite us. And we know very very little about how viruses work anyway.

One critical issue is whether someone who has survived C-19 actually develops an immunity to it. There seems to be some question over that at the moment. Because if it emerges that having had C-19 once is no protection against it in future, we could be in a sticky situation with vaccines and boosters and the like.

What wants to know what Samuel Pepys made of it all ? Since there's some history nerds here (my people ....)

Mistigri I have a friend who is worried because the father of a child in her DD's primary class has tested positive. He apparently lied about sth in order to get a test, but I have no more details on that. Friend is concerned that it will have done the rounds of the class and families. I share an office with the friend and five other colleagues. We are rarely all in it at the same time, but it was unusually busy in the last week before shutdown.

Other friend who went to a conference in Reims 13-15th March, via Paris on the TGV, has been in bed since Sun night with raging fever and aches and pains.

DGR Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year is suddenly flavour of the moment in some circles.