Westminstenders: Following the EU lead

[RedToothBrush]

Coronavirus poses a particularly Irish shaped question. How the UK responds to Irish plans for ending lockdown and whether Arlene continues to back an all Ireland plan will be fascinating to watch and see justified regardless of which way we go.

The UK for all its new found independence is looking very closely to the success / failure of EU strategies before making our own plan public. Mainly because we've yet to write one.

Johnson hasn't led much. He's delegated. Yet he gets all the praise for doing the sum total of fuck all and never being the bad guy. There always another fall guy to blame.

Economically we are stuffed and promises of a very quick bounce back don't look likely based on public confidence and willingness to return to places like pubs restaurants and shops.

Our ability to adapt to new conditions at short notice has been tested and businesses can not afford to do this again soon.

This is the background to which we go into talks. Both sides need an extension to serve their best interests. Johnson is determined to cut our nose of to spite our face for the sake of his legacy and to keep those paying the back handers and dodging tax happy.

some antibodies can take months to develop it depends which kind they're testing for

That what I thought - which also explains why an antibody test may end up being a dead end as far as ending lockdown is concerned (although useful for research reasons).

Sooo, if you were looking to France to see how the return to school next Monday is going, you might want to look away.
There is a 63-page protocol including things like obligatory cleaning and disinfecting of any object anyone touches. Lots of mayors have said it is inapplicable and primary schools won't open until September.
In my town, where there are zero (known) cases of CV, the questionnaire asking whether parents wanted to send their kids back next Mon showed that in DS2's primary school 70 out of 300 pupils would return. I have just watched the mayor announce that he thinks the protocol is impossible to implement but they are going to open one primary school as a "test school" for a week, and the two others staggered afterwards on the 18th and 25th if the test is encouraging...

So he's showing willing, but I'd bet a large bottle of our nice local wine that the test will not be encouraging and he will say he cannot open the schools.

In other news from France, the first known CV case now dates back to Dec 27th.
Might 3 months be long enough to do antibody testing, squid?
I'm wondering about the really awful flu I had in late Jan.

Spain is not opening any schools until September and has just said that even in September there will be no more than 15 students in one class and it may be a mix of in person and online learning. How the fuck that will work for those of us who need to be working I don't know.

Blimey, who is going to send their kid in if they've said your school is the bloody canary?! No thank you.

Statistically, 3 Russian doctors all falling out of windows after treating COVID patients must have v low probability

Even lower probability that they all fall out of windows within a 10-day period

No such side effects of COVID noted for medical staff in the West

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/russia-doctors-coronavirus

Alexander Shulepov, a doctor at an ambulance unit in Russia’s western Voronezh region,
complained in an April 22 post on social media about shortages of medical supplies and being forced to work despite testing positive for COVID-19.

Ten days later, he fell from a hospital window under mysterious circumstances, local media reportedd_,

making him the third Russian doctor treating coronavirus patients to suffer a similar fate in just the past 10 days.

Finland has a clear plan
But they also had v v low deaths (they can be grouped as part of Scandinavia)
[[https://twitter.com/FinGovernment
Finnish Government]]t@FinGovernment*

Situation regarding the lifting of restrictions in Finland, 4 May 2020.

My ds1 (16) was really ill in december/January.

Coughing up blood at one point. He felt dreadful.

He attends a college with a large proportion of chinese students and the local university had confirmed cases.

I do wonder.....

I just love that the first thing to be permitted in Finland is 'the borrowing of books from libraries'.

HoneysuckIejasmine
If DS2's school is the canary and there are 70 pupils at most attending, and if they are in half groups, so there are 35 altogether in the whole place, I just might go for it.
His school is spread over 3 old buildings with big rooms and 3 playgrounds that can be separated and closed off from one another. He'd come home for lunch and it might only be a half-day anyway...

He'll have to go back some day, might as well do it when there are so few kids. And cases.

www.smh.com.au/world/europe/biggest-failure-in-a-generation-where-did-britain-go-wrong-20200428-p54o2d.html

'Biggest failure in a generation': Where did Britain go wrong?

Unlike Italy, the United Kingdom had time to prepare for the coronavirus tsunami. But as the death toll climbs, critics say Britain's response has suffered from a series of deadly mistakes and miscalculations.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock was midway through a radio interview when the phone call came through live to air. On the line was Intisar Chowdhury, whose father Abdul had made a prescient public plea

to Boris Johnson in late March. Through a Facebook post, the 53-year-old consultant urologist for a London hospital had urged the Prime Minister to make sure every health worker in Britain would be given

protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic. Abdul Mabud Chowdhury died just three weeks later, after contracting the disease.

In his phone call, the doctor's grieving son asked for answers and an apology: "The public is not expecting the government to handle this perfectly," he told Hancock.

"We just want you to openly acknowledge that there have been mistakes in handling the virus, especially to me and to so many families that have really lost loved ones as a result of this virus and probably

as a result of the government not handling it seriously enough."
(contd)

One of the first measures in Slovakia was the announcement that people needn't return their library books.

I saw Dec 17th for the first case in France, and they were thinking the bloke caught it from his asymptomatic wife who caught it from a box of sushi made by Chinese immigrants...

How do these people sleep at night?
Because they are too thick to comprehend the consequences of their actions
or too psychopathic to care

I've been seeing the 27th, BurneyFanny

www.leparisien.fr/societe/sante/coronavirus-un-premier-cas-en-france-des-le-27-decembre-03-05-2020-8310117.php
www.lepoint.fr/sante/coronavirus-un-premier-cas-en-france-des-le-27-decembre-03-05-2020-2373963_40.php

His wife worked in a supermarket next to a sushi stall staffed by Chinese workers, so I think they're not sure whether she might have caught it from packaging or her colleagues more directly.

I hope they haven't been buying from China again

This HSJ (Health Service Journal) article suggests that the app is not quite as "security cleared" and the data not quite as private as Matt Hancock was trying to make out during the press briefing

https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-wobbly-tracing-app-failed-clinical-safety-and-cyber-security-tests/7027564.article

Colour me surprised

VERY detailed leaks, obviously intended to gauge reaction

Covers several sectors:
general guidance, offices, shops, restaurants & hotels, working outside, in people's homes, in vehicles ....

but not in schools ?

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-documents-reveal-how-workplaces-might-change-when-lockdown-is-eased-11983050

Seven government documents, drawn up by cabinet office minister Michael Gove and business secretary Alok Sharma,
have revealed what guidance will be given as people are allowed to gradually return to work.
.....
The guidance states:
"It will not always be possible to keep a distance of 2m. In these circumstances both employers and employees must do everything they reasonably can to reduce risk."

A bigly epidemic just so Trump can restart the economy before the election ?

Grim FEMA Predictions from the US
but difficult to assess without seeing the document and e.g. the assumptions within the model

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies,
his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks.

The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1,
according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times,
nearly double the current number of about 1,750.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month,
up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

Yes my mistake Auld, I could have sworn the doc said Dec 17 on the telly.

If it was here earlier, does that mean it doesn't spread as quickly as first thought?

Or do we just not know enough yet?

I just love that the first thing to be permitted in Finland is 'the borrowing of books from libraries'.

Any word on whipping each other naked with birch twigs?

Mockers Finland is sounding better and better...

2nd April;

"Nationwide in Germany "2,300 hospital staff members are infected with Sars-CoV-2,” reported the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) on Thursday following an inquiry to Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for public health."

"However, the number of undetected cases is thought to be much higher. "It must be assumed that there is an under-recording," the institute explained to the newspaper."

"The figure applies to hospital staff, it added, and not those working in doctors' surgeries, laboratories, retirement and nursing homes or outpatient care services."

"The SZ, in partnership with public broadcasters NDR and WDR, sent out nearly 400 inquiries to state and local health ministries looking for this information - and were mostly told it was not available."

"Yet they were able to find the following figures, which they say could shed light on the coronavirus outbreak's burden on Germany's public health care system."

"In Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, 322 employees of outpatient and inpatient care facilities were infected as of Wednesday, according to the State Ministry of Health. Another 1,485 people were in self-quarantine."

"According to Baden-Württemberg's State Health Office, 566 infections were registered among medical staff in the southwestern state as of Wednesday, almost twice as many as in the previous week."

"Zwickau in Saxony alone reported that 60 doctors and nursing staff in the district have become infected, according to the state's health office."

www.thelocal.de/20200402/over-2000-medical-staff-infected-with-coronavirus-in-germany

Clearly Germany have not been able to prevent medical staff from contracting coronavirus in large numbers - nevertheless their death rate is lower.