Westministenders: Lockdown continues

[BigChocFrenzy]

The UK has been on lockdown since 23 March,
with no end in sight.

The deaths peak is predicted to be around 17 April,
with the controversial IHME prediction that the UK will have considerably more total deaths - 66,000 - by summer than other European countries.

Supermarkets are struggling to satisfy demand for online slots for the vulnerable
and to keep shelves supplied for other customers

Like all countries, the UK economy is being hammered and heading for a deep recession.
Estimates are for UK GDP to fall 15% this year.

A million people have applied for Universal Credit
The self-employed and small - and some large - businesses are struggling to stay solvent.

They don't know how long to plan for.

The PM is in ICU and Raab has taken over as stand-in, but needs Cabinet approval for decisions.
Probably BJ will be unfit to resume his duties as PM for several weeks, if ever.

WIll he stand down soon and let the Cabinet choose a new PM,
or will the UK continue for weeks with a stand-in leader during the worst crisis since WW2

What's the plan, anybody?

Cendrillon jerks the strings and everyone starts dancing .....

I feel the same, KonTikki. Posters here could learn from FWR, where grey-rocking disruptors keeps useful threads from being derailed by pointless bunfights.

CendrillonSings Sun 12-Apr-20 09:16:53

"To be fair, we don't know he gave Carrie Covid. It could easily have been the other way round."

An honest voice at last.

It's crass in the extreme, and tasteless, to cast aspersions on Carrie, and with not one shred of evidence to suggest she was out anywhere, or shaking hands with anyone, or doing anything but staying put as a vulnerable person per government advice.

Morality, eh?
Throw the woman under the bus as soon as someone suggests it, why don't you...

Or they both caught it a rugby...... an event that should have been cancelled...

I've got back into the habit of scrolling on by. It saves time 🎵🎶

It's crass in the extreme, and tasteless, to cast aspersions on Carrie, and with not one shred of evidence to suggest she was out anywhere, or shaking hands with anyone, or doing anything but staying put as a vulnerable person per government advice.

Absolute horseshit. I’m not suggesting that she gave it to him either! My point is that you have no evidence that either one of them necessarily infected the other, other than your prejudice. You’re the only one casting unfounded aspersions on either of them.

Brown hasn't been PM for 10 years. Alexander Boris still is PM. I think you'd forgotten that momentarily in what you thought was a clear point.

unprepared for a once-in-a-century pandemic

Well, professors of risk management had been flagging it up as a higher threat than terrorism for years. The country ran a disastrous dry-run pandemic test in 2016, then learned precisely none of the lessons from it, probably because their attention was tied up with Brexit.

Moving on...
‘Hawks’ apparently want people to move back towards work around the first May Bank Holiday weekend. (8th May)
I feel that many people will be very anxious and unwilling to return to work as soon as that, which is 4 weeks time.
We’ll only just be coming down from the peak by then.
The end of May might be more realistic, taking into account workers’ feelings. If they had the choice, they’d probably want to stay off that long.

(Of course we shouldn’t forget all the people who never stopped work. My local supermarket staff are constantly cheerful and helpful, yet they must be worried all the time about possible exposure.)

I've got back into the habit of scrolling on by. It saves time

And keeps your brain perfectly self-isolated from any arguments that counter the prevailing groupthink. How well has that worked out in the past? Not all that brilliantly, as I recall

My point is that you were very quick to lean into the idea that Carrie might have infected The Great Man, clearly showing that zealotry has a deleterious effect on the working of the old brain cells. You jumped straight in and threw caution to the wind with your big sigh of relief that the heat was off Boris.

Was Carrie out and about, shaking hands with all and sundry, do you think, or was it more likely that she staying home as vulnerable people were advised to do by her boyfriend's government? Is she the sort of woman who would put her unborn baby in danger by heading out in reckless disregard of medical advice?

"arguments" eh?

My point is that you were very quick to lean into the idea that Carrie might have infected The Great Man, clearly showing that zealotry has a deleterious effect on the working of the old brain cells. You jumped straight in and threw caution to the wind with your big sigh of relief that the heat was off Boris.

Are you illiterate? Quote me exactly where I said that Carrie infected Boris. I’ll wait, and it’ll be a bloody long wait because I never said that.

I'm a bit bemused by Cendrillon's reference to Corbyn above. He isn't leader of the Labour Party any more.

As for elections - let's stop worrying about those. We won't have an election until 2024. By that time the impact of the government's mishandling of COVID-19 and Brexit will have been painfully felt by a lot of voters.

Hester - the man that mows my lawn stocks the shelves in Waitrose in the evening..... he hates it..... no gloves or masks, an she said people seem to think the 2m rule doesn't apply to staff. Initially they were stocking shelves for an hour after they closed, but with limiting the number of people in the store they extended the hours.
I think the thing that really annoys a lot of the staff is that they seem the same people in every day - people not shopping for several days or even a week......

mrslaughan I agree. The small supermarkets here seem to close for an hour when they take deliveries and fill shelves, but in the large ones staff are constantly restocking shelves.
It’ll be interesting next year to analyse whether certain employee groups were more likely to catch the virus.

Will Sunak put an end date on furloughing so people are forced back to work?

@Cendrillion so what is the Tory line of defence about the UK's astonishing lack of PPE, seeing as you are here? www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/one-in-three-uk-surgeons-lacks-enough-protective-kit-survey-finds Was having a Health Secretary with a first in PPE not enough? How have Germany managed better than us with similar lead times on the disease from your POV?

Derailment by focusing on implied moral deficiency or hypocrisy - which is often done by jumping on particular words or phrases, by taking relatively innocuous remarks or humour in questionable taste and blowing it out of proportion - is relatively easy for an articulate practitioner, and almost always generates indignant responses. Best to ignore.

I enjoy reading people like LouiseCollins whose opinions I don't always agree with (and who has a diametrically opposed view to Scottish Independence to mine ) as she argue her case coherently even if I think they're wrong and contributes constructively to the discussion

Howabout was similar but I haven't seen her on these threads for a while.

What pops up when your interest include the classics

www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/10/the-last-refuge-of-a-scoundrel-coronavirus-and-the-british-establishment/

he Last Refuge of a Scoundrel: Coronavirus and the British Establishment

by TONY MCKENNA

I do not wish Boris Johnson to die. I only wish him to suffer.

As paradoxical as it might sound, I don’t mean this in a sadistic way. Suffering is part of the human life; it is as integral to our experience as the drawing in of air, or the feeling of sunlight against the skin. Hospitals are places of suffering; we suffer the fear and anxiety which comes from a loved one undergoing an operation. And we suffer the fear which comes from our own bodily being when we are ill or injured and we are wheeled into a hospital ward.

The Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus wrote ‘he who learns must suffer’. It is in hospitals where, I think, I have learnt the most. Most of all what it means to be vulnerable. When a loved one is seriously ill, when every fibre of your being is shrilling with that terrible lurking dread – the feeling that you might never see them again – the calming, compassionate words of the doctors or the nurses who take the time to talk to you, to update you on what is going on, are sometimes the only things which allow you to hold on to a shred of sanity, to keep you going. When you are stretched out on a hospital bed in an operating theatre, as helpless as a new born baby, the reassuring murmurs and the kind eyes of the surgeons leaning over you are the last things you experience before you slip into darkness. Hospitals teach us about our own vulnerability. Above all, they teach us that we are social beings; that ultimately our lives are bound up with those of others, and that our well-being and redemption depends on that.

(contd)

Incidentally, it's probably just coincidence, but I can't help but feel while Boris was in hospital, Cendrillion wasn't posting. Have they ever been seen in the same room together ?

Coronavirus: National coronavirus testing centre only conducting 1,500 tests a day

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-national-coronavirus-testing-centre-only-conducting-1500-tests-a-day-11971991

Leaked emails show the government's target of conducting 100,000 tests every day by the end of April is a long way off.

Government 'needs to be doing more' on protective equipment, minister admits

Some honesty at last

Admitting a mistake is an important step on the way to correcting it

news.sky.com/story/live-government-under-fresh-pressure-over-ppe-supplies-for-nhs-staff-battling-coronavirus-11972150

"I'm sorry you feel we have blown up your home planet of Alderaan"

Meanwhile, 3 more nurses have died after testing positive for COVID-19,
with the number of NHS staff deaths now over 30

Anyone else wondering if at some point each country is going to have to show how much they spent on this? I bet we are going for bargain basement status - which will only be plumped up by "donations" to the donors for equipment that never arrives. I smell corruption charges there as it is.