Westministenders: Peak something

[BigChocFrenzy]

Westministenders: Peak something

The story so far

COVID has changed the world for the next few years, like a slowly exploding nuke:

• killed well over 100,000 people
• made many people afraid to leave their home
• caused a Global Depression

Countries locked down because they needed the extra time to

Raise the Line while Flattening the Curve:

1. Flatten the curve of the numbers needing healthcare to a level the system can manage

2. Raise the capacity of their health services and public health systems - their testing and tracking process

Also, scientists desperately needed time to find out more about COVID:
how to avoid it, how to treat it

What happens next ?

Research teams around the world are working to produce a vaccine,
will become hopefully available within the next couple of years

In the meantime, treatment procedures are being developed to better treat COVID sufferers.

Also in the meantime, countries will need to gradually exit lockdown to rescue their economies from complete catastrophe.

Timing & measures for each country will be dependent on:

Death rate after peak,
health service capacity,
testing & tracing capacity etc

....and also what their govt and public deem an "acceptable" level of extra deaths & serious illness.

Possibly some countries will need to cycle in and out of lockdown,
whereas others will be able to accept the death toll with lesser social distancing measures.

The first few countries are already relaxing lockdown,
so the UK will watch, wait and hopefully learn what works and what doesn't

..... then copy these the correct way round

Whether it’s promising entirely depends how long the pandemic lasts. If it’s all over within 2 years like Spanish flu then the vaccine will be rolled out around the time the pandemic peters out.

If immunity is temporary (as it is to other human coronaviruses) then it is far more likely that the virus will become endemic.

The response to the Times article seems to suggest they were aware this was a national emergency all through Jan. So why would the PM then miss 5 emergency COBR meetings? Surely even the most doggedly obedient Brexit voter can see that and remember the lack of any concern on a daily basis only a couple of months ago ?

But Sars and Mers were contained before they became an epidemic. They had the potential to be very serious.

listening There are 12 million people aged 66+ in the UK
very few of them expect, or would accept, being written off as expendable so that your kids can have careers

Imperial say that if we had just let it rip, as you want, ½ million would have died this year.
That still leaves another 11.5 million for future years
COVID would take a long time to die out, in that target-rich environment

Calculations upthread are about 17 million people in the UK have either age or a vulnerability that would lead to their death being "othered,"
if they should die of COVID

Imperial estimate 4-5% of the UK population have been infected so far

The recent CDC paper calculated COVID has an Rt of 5.7,
which would require about 85% herd immunity

85% immunity is what I've heard independently estimated in Germany

The tale of BJ's ego & laziness - and the harm resulting

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/18/how-did-britain-get-its-response-to-coronavirus-so-wrong

In a speech on Brexit in Greenwich on 3 February, he made clear his views on Wuhan-style lockdowns.

“We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric,” he said,
“when barriers are going up, and when
there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage.

“Then, at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange,
some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth
and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”
🤮

^The recent CDC paper calculated COVID has an Rt of 5.7,
which would require about 85% herd immunity^

85% immunity is what I've heard independently estimated in Germany

Yeah 60% immunity is based on an R0 of 2-3. If Los Alamos is right, we’d need 80%+ so 50 million people would to be vaccinated in the U.K.

@ 100,000 a day it would take 18 months just to do the jabs - a rate that has not yet been managed yet for testing.

If immunity is temporary (as it is to other human coronaviruses) then it is far more likely that the virus will become endemic.

It’s difficult to say for the moment, but certainly that is the scenario in which vaccination will have its impact.

Well, this is a most interesting Government post.

I recall the time when a supermarket refused to give a parking token to someone only buying formula milk. The Dept of Health published something then about "when we leave the EU we will make our own rules, and we will promote formula milk, ya boo sucks EU" , or words to that effect. I wrote to complain, and got a good reply back saying that the policy on formula milk was actually a WHO recommendation. To which I replied why didn't you say that on your website, instead of the hogwash you did print? Why didn't you point out that supermarket parking policies are up to the supermarkets concerned. No reply.

The speed of the response, and the detail shows that they are really rattled! Rightly so!

I’m only on the first rebuttal and already I think they’ve made things worse:

He brought the issue to the attention of the Prime Minister and they discussed Covid 19 on 7 January. The government’s scientific advisory groups started to meet in mid-January and Mr Hancock instituted daily coronavirus meetings. He updated Parliament as soon as possible, on January 23rd.

So they wasted a fortnight at the point that China was locking down Wuhan? It just shows that they were not taking it seriously enough then. I’ll keep reading, but I strongly suspect I’ll be even crosser by the end.

If immunity is temporary (as it is to other human coronaviruses) then it is far more likely that the virus will become endemic.

Then we will have to respond in the same way - try to identify those susceptible and try to ensure that people with the corona virus stay away from them. It might knock some sense into some people - the idiots who go into work because they are oh so indispensable and spread their germs around. Instead of taking some days off and staying at home.

Claim - The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus, which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.

Response - The Government has been extremely proactive in implementing lessons learnt around pandemic preparedness, including from Exercise Cygnus. This includes being ready with legislative proposals that could rapidly be tailored to what became the Coronavirus Act, plans to strengthen excess death planning, planning for recruitment and deployment of retired staff and volunteers, and guidance for stakeholders and sectors across government.

So we needed ventilators and PPE and they focussed on... legislation? 🤦‍♀️

Tatiana The UK test problem seems to be lack of lab capacity to process results, which shouldn't be relevant for vaccinations

I'd expect hope that an epidemic slaughtering thousands of Brits would make the govt and PHE pull their thumbs out of their respective arses, once a vaccine is available

Leave all the under-20s without serious comorbities to the last, since their risk is minute

In Germany, although the test capacity here could be raised from the current 500k weekly to at most only 2 million, the roadblock there is the labs processing

There is a large health service capacity that is still unused and could be roped in too
I'd expect German efficiency could manage a million per day, maybe more

Disabled people left off coronavirus vulnerable list go without food

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/19/disabled-people-left-off-coronavirus-vulnerable-list-go-without-food

Their conditions include cancer being treated with chemotherapy, heart disease, tetraplegia, motor neurone disease (MND), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and muscular dystrophy.

Some disabled people reported sleeping to avoid hunger pains, or living off fruit.

At least one rejected for assistance has gone on to contract coronavirus.

Bet you have a massive massive issue in U.K. prisons that no one is talking about.

news.wttw.com/2020/04/15/sheriff-tom-dart-pushes-back-criticism-amid-covid-19-pandemic-i-m-outraged

I don't know if this interview can be viewed in the UK, but essentially it's the Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff, Tom Dart, addressing very adamantly the charge that Cook County is the worst hotspot of Covid-19 in the US.
(Chicago is in Cook County).

He states that the reason the jail looks like the country's worst hotspot (an allegation of the NY Times) is that he tests both inmates and staff, as well as new inmates, and reports his numbers, while also trying to isolate those testing positive and enforce as mush social distancing as possible. Jails elsewhere are not testing or reporting, according to Dart.

I see the consignment of PPE from Turkey due today and announced with fanfare at yesterday afternoons press briefing is 'delayed'.
Could it be that the consignment was hijacked by an American destroyer and currently steaming its way to Charleston, South Carolina?

...the naked terror Americans have been indoctrinated with over communism.
DGR
This is THE key element in American popular culture from 1919 on. Americans do not distinguish at all between communism and socialism and totalitarianism. They very quickly got over Germany's criminal conduct in two world wars. The American public showed itself to be putty in the propagandists' hands in switching its hostility from Germany to the Soviet Union after WW2, having lapped up a diet of 'Our Soviet friends and allies' from Pearl Harbor on. This is a completely swayable population.

Mockers, the Vietnam War has a Dunkirk quality to it. The reality of it, as with Dunkirk, is not relevant. It was indeed fundamentally a Vietnamese experience - but in the American cultural context this truth is irrelevant.
It was a cultural lightning rod in America and as such as become a central part of American history in the 20th century.

“Then, at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”

Bloody hell. When you see it typed out like that...

Supermarket and shop workers/bank workers/truck drivers/forklift operators in warehouses/teachers and child care workers/machine operators in factories and food processing plants are what - trained monkeys?

Forced Labour without pay, as exists in US Prisons, would be illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Mockers

Prisoners are paid.

The Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP) is a federal program that was initiated along with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Prison-Industries Act in 1979.[38] This program legalized the transportation of prison-made goods across state lines and allows prison inmates to earn market wages in private sector jobs that can go towards tax deductions, victim compensation, family support, and room and board. The PIECP, ALEC, and Prison-Industries Act were created with the goal of motivating state and local governments to create employment opportunities that mimic private sector work, generate services that allow offenders to contribute to society, offset the cost of their incarceration, reduce inmate idleness, cultivate job skills, and improve the success rates of transition back into the community after release. Before these programs, prison labor for the private sector had been outlawed for decades to avoid competition.[38] The introduction of prison labor in the private sector, the implementation of PIECP, ALEC, and Prison-Industries Act in state prisons all contributed a substantial role in cultivating the prison-industrial complex. Between the years 1980 through 1994, prison industry profits jumped substantially from $392 million to $1.31 billion.[38]

The Prison-Industries Act allowed third-party companies to buy prison manufactured goods from prison factories and sell the products locally or ship them across state lines.[38] Through the program PIECP, there were "thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations." in states such as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve others.

...But the companies that operate prisons are paid more.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States#Prison_Labor_Post-13th_Amendment_(1865%E2%80%931866)

Why do you think prisons are so full (apart from the fact that prisons are for profit enterprises per se even without the prison industrial complex)?

The Soviets missed a trick with their Gulag.

rong fred there ^^ too then

when you see it typed out...
Here’s BJ’s first speech as PM. It’s juvenile, nauseating and stuffed full of lies and magical thinking.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49102495
I think I recall that the female peer who read it to the Lords had a great deal of difficulty with it, at one point pausing and enquiring in exasperated tones “Who wrote this?”.

The UK test problem seems to be lack of lab capacity to process results, which shouldn't be relevant for vaccinations

Not according to the people who work in them:

When health secretary Matt Hancock visited our Milton Keynes laboratory last Thursday, he avowed that our jobs were crucial, and thanked us for our service. Our workplace, where we test patient samples for the virus, has been called the “biggest diagnostic lab network in British history”, with capacity to process more than 5,000 swabs, eventually projected to reach 30,000 swabs per day. And yet at our testing centre on Tuesday this week, we processed just over 1,000 samples. The day before, the total was 1,300, and three days ago 1,800.

The problem does not lie in the laboratories, or the personnel. The UK has an army of skilled researchers at its disposal. More than 1,200 scientists had volunteered their expertise in the fight against coronavirus in Cambridge alone by early April. Dozens signed up to help in Milton Keynes. The equipment and reagents are all available, now that Thermo Fisher Scientific has confirmed it will supply the UK with all the testing kits it needs. And “scale up” has been the mantra at Milton Keynes since I arrived last Monday. We were promised 5,000 samples “to begin with”. We never saw those numbers. They told us we should prepare for a 24-hour operation, but we are done in four or five.

In the UK, total tests numbered just short of 16,000 on Tuesday. Just in our lab, we could have easily done 8,000. We are ready; why aren’t we being sent more swabs?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/16/swab-tester-uk-germany-south-korea

Thanks @mathanxiety
Anyone who would like to read the Greenwich speech can find it online.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

My first link!

Bcf disabled people are weak and lazy not vulnerable. Heart conditions are something suffered by successful White men who have worked hard all their lives and proved their worth to society. (Eugenics speak not my opinion)

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britons-want-china-to-face-inquiry-over-coronavirus-outbreak-cbm82lpvk
Britons want China to face inquiry over coronavirus outbreak

More than 80 per cent of Britons want Boris Johnson to push for an international inquiry into China’s handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak, according to a poll.

The survey also revealed that 71 per cent of the public wanted ministers to sue the Chinese government for damages if it became evident that President Xi’s administration had breached international law in its response to the coronavirus.

The poll, commissioned last week by the Henry Jackson Society, a British neoconservative foreign affairs think tank, showed that 74 per cent of the UK public thought that China was to blame for allowing Covid-19 to spread.

bangs head against the wall

We can't blame the EU for our poor handling of coronavirus. So we have to blame China, to shift the blame from our own government failings.

And as we can see from the poll, 80% of Brits have no fucking idea of how the world works and that suing the Chinese government is a massive waste of time which would only harm British interests. And once again we have this nonsense that the UK is a superpower that has enough influence in the world to get China to comply with said investigation.

No more wondering how we got here. 80% of the public includes a lot of supposedly educated people.

Our arrogance and ignorance is our downfall. And people are still failing for it.

We are fucked.

RTB what was the sample size for the survey?

We are ready; why aren’t we being sent more swabs?

Because care assistants in Norwich are being sent for testing in Sheffield as was highlighted yesterday.

And since they are drive thru testing centres that screws many care assistants who can't afford to drive because they are so badly paid.

Until its riled out to community level (aka GPs) there is going to be a massive problem related to inequality and access to testing if you are poor.

Atm you only qualify for testing if you are so sick you end up in hospital or you are a hcw or scw of some description. With hospital admissions declining cos lockdown is working, what do you think will happen? Less people meet the current requirements for testing.

This isn't rocket science, but the government haven't really thought about this. It leaves Matt Hancock looking like a dick because his testing numbers are going down and not towards the 100,000 daily target he announced by the end of the month, which people think he will already miss and this will undermine public confidence.

It just highlights the complete lack of joined up thinking going on in Government atm.

You can't test more people if you aren't referring enough people.

We should be doing things like setting up wider scale random testing or loosening the criteria given by 111 to get less severe cases tested or systematic testing on site of care home patients and staff and hospital patients and staff.

But no.

Common sense and joined up thinking departed the UK sometime ago replaced by a desire for 'out of the box' thinking from freaks and weirdos aka eugenics sympathesiers whose solution to difficult problems in society is merely to eradicate people that aren't profitable.