Westminstenders: A test of logistic planning

[RedToothBrush]

We are witnessing a demonstration in Government crisis management.

For the past week journalists have asked the same questions and politicians have said they've already done it / are doing it in the near future. But as time wears on, the inability to produce the answers or demonstrate results is proving illusive.

This will have consequences.

It is a demonstration in how planning has proved to be lacking in certain areas.

With Brexit in mind, the lack of vision, coordination with business and wider capability and capacity this does not bode well.

imo, almost everyone will put up with lockdown for several weeks more, even with debt hanging over them,
provided they have the essentials:
sufficient food, rent, utilities

If people have to wait long for their 80% pay, or indeed to get anything, there may be trouble
The behaviour of some employers has been shockingly irresponsible

Might also be a flareup if there is a confrontation with police or army in certain areas

From what I gather, the Italian govt hasn't given adequate financial support,
so a few people have resorted to invading supermarkets, to feed their families

I wonder if some of these local delivery services that have sprung up will continue longterm
The crisis itself may well last for 18 months and local is more reliable if some foodchains are indeed disrupted due to staffing issues

I don't know tbh. This business opportunity is mainly because the village markets are closed. The veg are bought wholesale and come from Spain and BE/NL as well as France, so it's not strictly what they call here the "circuit court".

There is probably permanent demand for delivery in remoter villages, but I'm not sure the business model works if you only deliver to the most remote places. At the moment she can do big rounds that include a number of deliveries in bigger towns (which would normally have markets) so she can offset the relatively higher cost of delivering to remoter villages.

It's interesting anyway. I have never in my life been involved with a new business that has taken off more quickly. It's like a case study from my long ago MBA!

It's all very Heath Robinson at the moment - she doesn't have a PC so I work in google sheets and she gets the delivery lists on her phone.

Yes, that man drilling holes in ambulance tyres, familicides, the con-men going door to door, bumping up of prices for hand sanitiser and loo roll etc. Real community spirit for NHS, agreed, but that wasn't ever going to be something leaving the EU helped (we have over 44,000 less NHS staff than we did last year) - although I see the Brexit supporting Telegraph had an article blaming NHS today, lovely!

Here in Kent we seem to have had an increase in vandalism - the local council fb page has posted pictures every day of graffiti, arson attacks and last night a large group broke into a car park apparently to skateboard (police got there for that one). If nothing else this shows what effect the lockdown is having on teens, who also clearly aren't that adverse to flouting the social distancing rules. Anecdotally I can attest to that from our daily dog walks, with the groups of teens I see every single time. We haven't been in lockdown for as long as many other countries and I don't expect these things to get better.

Channel 4 News just now - Victoria McDonald - the real number of deaths as tracked by the ONS (including care homes and at home) is probably more like over 9,500 now rather than the 6159 they announce.
I wonder if they’ll eventually add them on?

mobile.twitter.com/DHSCgovuk?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

In both Sainsburys and Waitrose they are selling white eggs ..... catering eggs

In both Sainsburys and Waitrose they are selling white eggs ..... catering eggs

Doesn't surprise me.

The delivery business that I help out is selling eggs pretty cheap: they were hard to get a couple of weeks ago but now there are plenty around, as supply chains adapt and the eggs that used to go into catering find their way into retail channels.

Getting hold of flour is still a problem - I've got my local greengrocer putting some aside for me when he expects to get some more in in a couple of days. He says the local bakery has plenty of flour - he just can't package it into smaller quantities quickly enough

....here's my latest effort. DGR's Clever Carrot recipe is definitely the winner: easy, no knead and turns out fabulous loaves

Fauci: Failure to support Trump's fantasies and / or hunt for a scapegoat re the economy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/07/fox-news-coronavirus-trump-media-allies-turn-against-fauci

In recent days, Donald Trump’s closest conservative media allies have been pursuing an increasingly strident case against Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
and a prominent part of the federal government’s Covid-19 response.

Critics close to the president have recently been alleging that Fauci is recklessly damaging the economy,
preventing the use of supposed wonder treatments like hydroxychloroquine,

and now, mid-pandemic, some of them appear to be calling for his job.

The most prominent and stinging attack on Fauci came last Friday,
when the Fox News talkshow anchor Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to Fauci’s recommendation for a sustained lockdown, calling it a recipe for “national suicide”.
....
On hydroxychloroquine, Harris-Roxas said that
“the promotion of untested treatments and cures has been a feature of almost every epidemic in history”.
< but not by responsible / sane leaders >

He said that this led to three potential problems:

Untested treatments could harm people,
cause shortages of drugs for people who need them for proven treatments,
and “contribute to the infodemic – the spread of misinformation”.

Should Fauci go, there will be little impediment to the misinformation which is already exerting a powerful influence on the US federal government’s health policy.

On hydroxychloroquine, Harris-Roxas said that
“the promotion of untested treatments and cures has been a feature of almost every epidemic in history”.
< but not by responsible / sane leaders >

And not by leaders who don't have a personal financial interest in the company that makes it. As reported by the New York Times.

According to Trump's (ongoing) press conference, the UK has asked for 200 ventilators.

Will these be supplied instead of or on top of the ones that the US has stolen from other countries

"Trump removes watchdog overseeing the pandemic fund

https://www.nytimes.com

President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused the U.S. Health Department’s inspector general of having produced a “fake dossier” on American hospitals suffering shortages on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak.

www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-watchdog/trump-slams-u-s-watchdogs-report-on-shortages-at-coronavirus-hit-hospitals-idUSKBN21P2NR

I suspect it's only a matter of time before Fauci gets the chop.

I am not at all surprised that Americans are hunkering down in the face of a pandemic. Whilst they might embrace the concept of liberty from my observation of them adjusting to expat life in Asia they have a much narrower comfort zone than the rest of us. Even the presence of trash cans in the street could bring on an attack of “oh how poor people are here” (though I am sure you would not have to head far into poor areas of US cities to find worse). Very little tolerance for risk and anything less than Martha Stewart levels of hygiene.

A huge number of Americans live in extremely clean, graffiti free suburban areas and never venture into poorer areas of cities. Many have never used public transit.

It is beyond me how [Louise Collins] could possibly think that it proves we will be resilient in the face of no deal Brexit food shortages etc when this, the panic buying, the resentment, will just be limbering up for a Brexit no deal. And this is an unavoidable crisis that threatens us all, even if some don’t realise it. Why would there be resilience in the face of a self imposed crisis that almost half the population don’t want?
@Emilyontmoor
Agree.

And on top of that, assuming CV 19 will pass, people will be out and about.

I suspect it's only a matter of time before Fauci gets the chop.

I completely agree with this. He speaks truth to power and this president in particular can't tolerate it.
Fauci is also well liked by the public which is also unacceptable to Trump.

Reuters Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-path-speci-idUSKBN21P1VF

DH and I were talking about the Kennedy family earlier - do they actually die more frequently or is it just that it’s a very large family?

My exH's large extended Irish American family are very well off but not at all well known, and suffered enough misfortune to make several Greek tragedies. Imo it wasn't that they were marked out for disaster, there were just a lot of them. But also, they pretty much all considered themselves immortal until they turned 30, if they made it that far. There was a strange fatalism to them as well - they seemed to accept that there was a price to be paid for their collective prosperity in the form of a life here, a life there. They wouldn't use the term 'karmic debt' but that's the concept.

Reuters Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm

Ah, the blame game continues apace. Johnson is in a position to choose his scientific advisors. And he could also have read the fucking news.

This crisis has definitely revealed what the blitz spirit was really like i.e some people being unselfish and considerate and others being argumentative and all out for themselves.

Which is exactly how my parents described it - how the Press would take about the jolly sing-songs in the shelters but in real life it was about rows with the butcher for giving you a short ration.

imo, no PM should be changing the govt science advisers

They are independent of politics, being a mix of civil servants and university teams etc on long-running govt consulting contracts

Otherwise, we get into Trump territory

A govt can say they want additional input from more fields, but we need to be v careful that we don't get into a USA situation,

where a POTUS can just sack the advisers of the previous POTUS, sack any advisers who won't endorse crackpot theories
and invent their own science

There is nothing wrong with honest disagreements. If the Govt Scientific advisers disagree then they should get together in a room and try to thrash something out.

I agree though that the blame game is starting.

BTW - it wasn't just me going mad my short term memory going: MNHQ has swapped the positions of the Bookmark and Report buttons in the app . There's a thread on it in Site Stuff.

Cue lots of inadvertent reporting of innocuous posts

They've finally come on to that thread to say that it's not a mistake and that it's in preparation for new buttons coming

I agree though that the blame game is starting.

'Tis funny, isn't it, how we're being asked to patriotically and doughtily BeLeave that we're demonstrating our special national BlitzSpirit capacity to totally boss No Deal because looooook at how marvellous we Brits are at sailing effortlessly through lockdown (even if it were true, ignores that other countries are also enduring lockdown with just as much, if not more, equinamity), led by our Brave Brexitatious Leaders who Know All.

And simultaneously, we're being asked to BeLeave that our poor ickle PM and Scummings and Tentacles and Raabot, are blameless, unable to make decisions or take control, helpless in the face of crisis, and all-at-sea-buffeted-by-the-cruel-winds by dithering incompetent boffin-types.

pretty Yep, it is VERY annoying
I keep automatically tapping the first icon

Also, MN "search" seems to have removed the ability to include poster name
If so, that could be to stop people searching a poster's history,
but this morning I wanted to find a link I had posted myself and it took several attempts at keywords

Grrr
If it ain't broke, don't fix it

< same motto for IOS, which brought in FUCKING links in Notes and Posts, without an option to switch them all off globally >