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?

I suspect there’ll be an easing of lockdown in schools on Monday 1st June. The day after the halfterm holiday and ten weeks on from 23rd March when it started. Whether all schools, or all year groups in schools, are opened, is debatable. Whether all parents would be happy to send their children in, is also debatable. But I can’t see them prosecuting parents who don’t send their children in: there’ll probably be quite a lot.

I could be wrong... it depends on how the situation develops.

(N.B. The first Bank Holiday in May is unusually Friday 8th, to celebrate VE Day anniversary. Those commemorations will be quite muted, I’d imagine.)

The Covid curve is being flattened
by accident rather than design
but the long tail then has to be dealt with

full Vaccine cover is years and years away - if ever
full her immunity is years away - if ever
so how do we move forwards from where we are ?

Will Brexit happen well or badly?
Will Trump win in November?
How much will business change?
How much will attitudes to adult social care change ?

Its all to play for
but Covid must not be allowed to destroy the future

I also think schools will go back on the 1st of June. No one will be able to endure lockdown any longer. People will change their behaviour as much as possible...for example many more people will WFH, shop online, make fewer shopping trips otherwise, have staycations, avoid unnecessary travel, make fewer trips to doctor’s surgery/hospital. Some of these changes may be beneficial.

There are some astonishing polices by PHE - the most fucked up one is trying to force care homes into taking patients , who they want to discharge from hospitals, obviously too sick to go home, into the care of care homes - without actually establishing that they are covid19 free.

Is there a source for this? I have read it a couple of times on here but can't find a report in the media.

They were talking about it in C4 news ,
Apparently care homes are pushing back.

I think it was also touched on on BBC news. But in an interview, with a CEO of a care home group up north. Where she was saying her group were refusing (under what seems to be some pressure) because of duty of care to existing residents.

It is mentioned here:
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/uk-care-providers-allege-covid-19-death-toll-underestimated

"There is also concern about the impact of Covid-19 patients being discharged by hospitals into care homes filled with the frail and elderly in order to free up beds. Questions are being asked about why this is happening, when the Nightingale hospital in Docklands has received only a small number of patients – reported to be just 19 at the weekend – when it has capacity for up to 2,900 intensive care beds."

www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/18373194.coronavirus-theyre-playing-russian-roulette-residents-says-care-homes-boss/
and
www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/29/care-homes-refusing-to-take-in-patients-discharged-nhs-hospitals-coronavirus-risk

I don't really know what people expected would happen to the elderly who caught it? There is no social care. It seems obvious more care homes will be needed to take in elderly and they may or may not be showing symptoms. Care homes don't get tests. This is the path the govt and the public have embarked upon.

Care homes are being asked to take potential and positive covid patients, making vulnerable residents sitting ducks.

Very worrying this, and yet, where should people go who can't look after themselves at home, and yet have been deemed medically fit for discharge? As a vintage fiction fan I used to enjoy the descriptions of people convalescing in Swiss sanitoriums, but meanwhile back in the real world, what is the realistic option?

Here is the link to the Gov guidance. Page 4 a negative test is not required prior to admission.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-admission-and-care-of-people-in-care-homes

Care homes are being asked to take potential and positive covid patients, making vulnerable residents sitting ducks.

It actively leaves private care homes and the state open to legal action in the long term tbh, even with the covid-19 laws.

This

www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-changes-to-the-care-act-2014
Coronavirus (COVID-19): changes to the Care Act 2014
Changes to the Care Act 2014 to help local authorities prioritise care and support during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

Local Authorities will remain under a duty to meet needs where failure to do so would breach an individual’s human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. These include, for example, the right to life under Article 2 of the ECHR, the right to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment under Article 3 and the right to private and family life under Article 8.

This paragraph is mentioned several times under the rules of relaxing obligations under the Care Act 2014 during the Coronavirus crisis.

Knowingly taking in someone who has covid-19 when you have very vulnerable patients which may place them at a real risk of death, could leave authorities and organisations open to prosecution further down the line if someone deems it to enfringe upon their right to life.

I certainly would be pushing back and saying piss off if I were a care home obviously from an humanitarian point of view but also from a legal one.

The relaxing of safeguarding rules during the crisis do not extend as far as endangering residents. Its that simple.

And given that technically speaking social distancing to prevent the spread of the disease is the law atm, I'd argue that a care home could insist that they will not accept any new patients without a negative test result. (if you have a false negative, you'd at least have your arse covered legally).

"As a vintage fiction fan I used to enjoy the descriptions of people convalescing in Swiss sanitoriums"

Well, still standard in some countries:

• a colleague in Germany a few years ago after he finished chemo had a month fully paid rehab program in a Swiss Alps clinic with super-healthy food, counselling and exercise program customised for him.

I wonder where people get sent atm for rehab though

Now need to build convalescent care home for COVID patients as quickly as the Nightingales were built
In the meantime, requisition some govt owned property - any empty palaces around ?

Cummings was back at work today that ruined my evening...

Well someone had to do it, and research demographics / political beliefs and the link with social behaviour...

Ben W Ansell @benwansell
🚨 Where are people social distancing in the UK?🚨 Thanks to the Google Community Reports we can see how people have behaved since March. Good news - social distancing is happening everywhere. Less good news - there is still a divide. And guess what explains it... BREXIT...😬 1/n

The brilliant people at the ONS Data Science Campus have scraped the Google Community Reports and matched them to demographic and regional data. All I have done is further match this to the 2016 referendum vote at the local authority or county level.
github.com/datasciencecampus/google-mobility-reports-data 2/n

Now slightly annoyingly, Google collect activity data at differing levels - sometimes local authority, sometimes county, and just Greater London... But still we can see how demographics and (maybe) politics shape behaviour. And we'll see the culture war wins out... 3/n

Google collect data on 6 types of activity, taken from people's mobile phones: activity in groceries, parks, retail, transit, workplaces, and residential. And they are tracking how much lower (or for residential, higher) this is than normal. So those are our outcome variables 4/n

My main focus will be on activity in workplaces since this gives us a good sense of who is still going to work. Now that work might well be essential - so we will look at the others too. But this seems a good place to start. So what explains where has less workplace activity? 5/n

If we just plot the vote for Remain in 2016 against the change in workplace activity by April 3rd (the last day we have full data) we see a strong NEGATIVE relationship. Places that voted Remain are going to work less.

Now need to build convalescent care home for COVID patients as quickly as the Nightingales were built
In the meantime, requisition some govt owned property - any empty palaces around ?

There was a lot of fuss on BBC news a week or so about this. Apparently a number of best Western hotels were to be used in this manner.

The Hawks v doves thing and Brexit position does not go unnoticrd

I work in a care home which is Covid free,,mainly because we locked down a couple of weeks ahead of the country lockdown. Absolutely no visitors are allowed apart from residents who are actively dying . We most definitely will not accept and new residents unless they have been tested...it’s a no brainer!!

It's been really noticeable from the start that the areas with fewer cases have looked like Leave areas.

Scroll down to 'Cases by area' www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/coronavirus-uk-how-many-cases-are-there-near-me

I'm guessing that that started from them being less likely to have many people going on skiing holidays to Italy and areas that fewer people visit. So, I would contend that less adherence to social distancing in more Brexit voting areas is because people who live there have taken longer to get to the 'know someone who has had it/died from it' stage.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/08/influencers-being-key-distributors-of-coronavirus-fake-news

Research by Dr Daniel Allington, senior lecturer in social and cultural artificial intelligence at King’s College London, suggested

there was a statistically notable link between people who believed false claims about the coronavirus
and
people who were willing to flout the government’s social distancing guidelines.

His findings, based on a experimental study conducted in coordination with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, found that

people who said they believed coronavirus was connected to 5G mobile phone masts
are less likely to be staying indoors, washing their hands regularly or respecting physical distancing.
< and more likely to be arsonists who set fire to 5G masts >

It is not unexpected that those who are fed up with experts, or believe in conspiracy theories,
are much less ready to follow the advice of experts

• even when "their own" party asks them to

"Cummings was back at work today"

After Easter, the Second Cummings 😂

< gets coat >

I hope you are right RTB and care homes have the fortitude to defy Gov guidelines and protect their residents. When this is over and time/distance provides some clarity, what went on in care homes will prove to be a scandal...

Papers - care homes & the economic crash: