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?

mrslaughan - maybe I shouldn't have been so fair on him

The decline of the BBC starts with the loss of channels. First BBC HD, which might have evolved into BBC 4K, then BBC Three, and soon there will be just one kids channel, local news will go online, the last valve at Droitwich will explode and take 4LW with it, etc.

I think it started long before that.

Educate, Inform, Entertain. possibly the most perfect, and easiest to understand mission statement in any language of any time ? Seems the BBC is slowly managing to negate every single verb there, so that it leaves people less educated, less informed and less^ entertained than ever before.

Might be being daft, but when will we find out how long lockdown is extended for?

I KNEW Boris would 'rise again' on Easter Sunday!!!

I am glad he is recovered, and we need a PM in charge, but the timing is not unhelpful for him :O

Might be being daft, but when will we find out how long lockdown is extended for?

You could go to the governments website where they have put up an ongoing feed of official statistics, along with a timeline and how they fit into the metrics they published with supporting data before lockdown. You then see how far along the lines we are and at what point the figures will have reached the point at which it was felt lockdown could end.

Well you could but you would be any the wiser.

Can't you just think of a number, multiply it by your age, double it and subtract your cats age instead ? After all, it's what the government are doing.

There was a discussion about that earlier in the thread stickman : there is apparently a disagreement in Cabinet between the hawks, who want early May (for the sake of the economy) and the doves, who want late May (to reduce deaths).

Shockingly, Gove is apparently in the latter camp

So much for "being led by the science" It seems it depends on which science - Economics/Money Making or Epidemiology/Medicine and I say that as a former Economist

Stickman the one thing we are in agreement on is that until we have a considerably larger amount of community tests we have no idea where the virus is or it's prevalence, so anyone stating dates whole we are so bad at testing is pissing into the wind. Unless of course we again go against ever Public Health guidance and WHO...which is sadly possible.

*while (damn you autocorrect!)

I wonder if Humphreys will now freely admit he simpered lovingly on Farage, seeing as he seems to be admitting the BBC gets special requests

WRT to community testing in my first message, when I say "considerably larger" I do mean ANY, i.e not just testing for those at death's door in hospital or MP's

re the economy.
I think its much more complicated than economy vs health.

The longer te lockdown will carry in the higher the price on life it will be. This is because:

• people wont get checked for health issue wheh they normally would. Plus even if they do, they wont get the care they normally have.
• there will be a huge backlog of people that will need to be seen when the ockdown ends. Not everyone will be seen (Ive had my own apointment with a counsultant cancelled this week. ve been wiating 9 months for it!!)
• the cost in life beause of falring up of domestuc abuse, MH issue etc... will be through the roof
• the more we wait, the worse the economy will be. There are already talks that about 20% of people will have lost their job. In a country that has very little support for unemployed people, this mean another rise in homelessness, food banks and children's hunger/poverty.
• There is also the risk about harvests not happening and food shortages (see the fact that Roumania has already stopped and export of grains out of the country - the uk isnt the only ountry struggling with that). I suspect we will see a sharp rise of nflation and food cost (which associated with people being made redundant will make a explosive mix)

Which means that, imo, the economy HAS TO be thought off in terms of costs of life. We know that austerity measures meant that 300.000 people died. How many more will die if the whole lockdown leads to an even worse 'austerity situation' by default?
How can we balance that out with the deaths from the CV-19?

Im not sure what the asnwer is btw. But making a simple oposition between the two is naive and simplistic imo.

I alos agree that actually we havent a clue of low dangerous that virus is because we havet been testing. Iceland, who HAS tested about 10% of the population, is saying that actually the death rate is pretty low...

Numbers in th UK seem to say the death rate is pretty high (but then it could also be linked to how people are treated. There are more and more reports that not all CV-19 patients shoud be treated the same. When you do, death rates in ICU could be as high as 60% - not far from the 51% in the UK - wheres an approach is individualised rather than a protcol leads to much lower deaths rates....).

There are many many things we dont know yet and making assumptions could lead to very dangerous outcomes (inlcuding monitring of everyne or mandatory vaccinations, using a vaccines that hasnt been properly tested are touted as THE answer all over the world atm). If there is a time when we need to be extra vigilant about excesses from our politicians, this is now.

It's another case of Tory false economy. Why bother fixing the whole road when you can go back every few months and pay a few £k filling each hole? No one cares it costs x3 as much as doing it all in one go and pisses traffic/pedestrians off more.

If we had locked down earlier (I personally think WHO left it a week too late to call it as a pandemic - but if we had locked down then) and done proper testing - as other countries who are flattening the curve now did, we would be far closer to a) knowing where we stood wrt the areas/prevalence b) be able to see which groups are still vulnerable c) start to figure out an end of lockdown plan.

We haven't - so the lockdown goes on and on, they might lift it so we get a resurgence, over and over, until they actually pull their fingers out of their orifices and start TESTING. It will cost far more the way they are doing it.

And with that I think I answered my earlier question as to how the govt will get away with spending a pittance on PPE. There will be an "overall cost" and likely increased austerity after this

The likely austerity is what will crippled the cuntry imo. This would NOT be the time for austerity. No more than it was just after WWII etc....

Great series of Tweets from Elaine Doyle comparing UK with Ireland. Significantly different death rates. She looks at how the two countries responded and wonders why the UK media isn't asking more questions.

"Educate, Inform and Entertain" was the Reithian Vision, and it was in reality the other way round, with the Light Programme to entertain, from which people would graduate to the informative Home Service, and finally to the Educative Third Programme.

It was never on. People switched happily between Light and Home, and the Third, Reith's favourite indulged youngest child, was an abysmal failure with its lofty patronising talks before the 1967 reorganisation.

It was that elitist arrogance that has always permeated Beeb Towers to the core. When you have a few Huw Wheldons, David Attenboroughs and Victoria Woods, significantly all non-Oxbridge, then it was worth saving. Increasingly not the case.

Isn’t furlough allowed until the end of May? That’ll be it then.

Gove?

Lacks a human heart, a soul or a calcium-based skeleton, but his cephalopod brain incorporates a very effective front cortex good at calculating the odds for the best long-term interest of Gove. ....slither.

Shockingly, Gove is apparently in the latter camp

Wouldn't surprise me if Gove and wife aren't reading the public and the death curve compared to Italy and thinking:

UK will end up with the worst death rate in Europe so
Public will want to see a politician blamed so
That will be Boris so
The Tories will need a new leader so
That leader needs to look like they were trying to save lives so
I'd better be in favour of a longer lockdown so
I can be the next PM.

"It was that elitist arrogance that has always permeated Beeb Towers to the core. When you have a few Huw Wheldons, David Attenboroughs and Victoria Woods, significantly all non-Oxbridge, then it was worth saving. Increasingly not the case."

David Attenborough was at Cambridge.

...two of the doctors who refused to sign the Official Secrets Act in St.Thomas have, allegedly, said that "he had the most contrived cough I've ever seen, I'd have sent him home with some lockets and calpol for kids", "If he had Covid. I'm not a doctor". Ho hum, we'll of course never ever know....

David Attenborough was at Cambridge.

True.

I always associate him with my old place because of the various Attenborough buildings there. His dad was the first Chancellor as it wasn't called then.

St Pfeffle of the "I Nearly Died" had one small dose of Oxygen from an ordinary mask of the sort you get in an ambulance. He was then watched to see if he needed any more which he apparently did not.

The sheer number of NHS staff who he name-checked for hovering around his bed begs the question of whether we will all get attention like that.

Correct me if I am wrong, but that sort of oxygen can be delivered at the roadside to people who are involved in accidents.

We were supposed to believe that St Pfeffle was going to come out of self isolation and now he was supposedly at death's door.
Meanwhile ordinary bods, and health care workers are dying.

Since he has now miraculously risen again, let's remind ourselves of Heseltine's words:
He's the sort of man, who seeing the way the crowd is running, darts ahead and shouts "Follow me".

poster Barrique Sun 12-Apr-20 11:25:25
The last one I can recall was BAe Systems - over 2 decades ago ? Only that never got to court.

Rolls-Royce were investigated by the SFO for bribery allegations and had to pay a fair wedge to keep things out of the courts in 2016.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38644114

That was because Prince Bandar of Saudi rang up Tony Blair and threatened “another 7/7on British Soil “ if the court case against BAE wasn’t closed down. Judge Moses presiding said “It was like as if a gun was held to the govts head”.

These were apparently said by Danny Blanchflower, but could usefully be employed by our Politicians.

“We aim to equalise before the other team score. We should get our retaliation in first.”
“Everything in our favour was against us.”
“If we don’t know what we’re going to do, how can the other side?”

It's good to hear that both Labour and the Tories are corrupt. Before Cendrillon jumps in with a "What about Labour?" this is an "Equalising before the other side scores" example.