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.

@AuldAlliance it's more than a bit awks, that trust in science. Now it looks as though they can't agree or worse don't trust each other. Adds to confusion for the public and actually results in less trust.

Tough spot Cummings has put them in there as they are damned either way. I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with their "don't trust experts" Leave campaign . Still, takes the heat of the real movers and shakers, right?

JeSuis That's interesting.

The radio shows here in Ireland are saying that the turn around for hospital tests is very quick.

But the community ones, which are key to track and trace are taking too long (5ish days). And someone testing positive could possibly have infected too many people by the time they got the results back.

Oh wow, a very sad post from a friend who used to work with this lady www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/kent-coronavirus-care-home-nurse-4090497?fbclid=IwAR21XBj8irSHeiSUWPoNgEFpPEFl4B0vHFaQrUdp6Tb9HEwD3bfJ47dwqB4 who was a single mum. Her daughter is now in foster care . I really hope someone is at least going to help her daughter get her poxy £60k

pmk

That's just so sad JeSuisPoulet
Is it likely that foster care is within the wider family? Poor kid.

@Focalpoint as far as I am aware UK isn't doing community testing at all... so Ireland is streaks ahead, even with the delays

Several Monday papers have BJ (virtually) hosting a pledging conference for a vaccine, with equal access for participants

Unlike Hancock, who was saying if the Oxford team get it, Britain must be first
BJ seems worried that if China develop a vaccine first, the UK would be way down the queue, due to recent spats.

The Times also has a fucking awful red jacket that looks like it has fashion COVID

To be honest BigChoc.
They both have awful red jackets. And bloody actual masks.

Its surreal if you give yourself a chance to step back.

The i reports draft guidelines on return to work sent to employees

< Doesn't mean that is imminent - firms probably need 2-3 weeks to prepare for social distancing (if feasible) >

Guardian thinks "immunity passports" are being revived
< but are UK antibody tests sufficiently accurate yet. And combining with face-recognition ...? >

...also see the United States of America who will have a similar problem and therefore might not be terribly arsed at uk travellers who are barred from Europe.

It suits Trump's purposes to imply that covid 19 is rampant abroad, that immigrants and foreigners in general are dangerous criminals/ disease-carriers, and to keep borders closed.

Also to ask any state wishing to restore flights to the US, 'What have you done for us lately?'

Following my recent chance to catch a documentary on Vietnam, I was intrigued to notice it still pervades US discussion
DGR

Vietnam was the lightning rod in the American 20th century kulturkampf.

Pmk

No competition on clapping round here as mostly elderly. Though clapping for NHS was the idea to start with I firmly believe it's now a chance for people to connect to others and convince themselves we're in it together. As the days go by I see more and more local people breaking the lockdown rules. People are getting restless and anxious. More and more people are wearing masks in supermarkets. More shops like diy and Gregg's opening. Many more delivering. But people are still very nervous about lockdown ending. It's as though we want all to be ' normal' again on the one hand to being terrified to go back to normality on the other.( Not sure whether that is being scared of catching Covid or trying not to face up to the fact that we are going to have to pay extremely heavily both financially, personally and emotionally for the effects of covid). People are having mortgage and rent rates holidays at the moment. End if lockdown will mean many facing losing their house, rental property and business. Many people once minimum support provided by government is removed will lose everything. Those on low incomes hut the hardest in all scenarios and made to pay more for bailing out the richer in this crisis. There will be more divorce more families breaking up once lockdown ends, more children scarred for life by the abuse suffered under lockdown. Then there's the grief families have been unable to work through properly if lived ones lost during pandemic. No, it's too simple to say people are frightened to go back to ' normal' because of fear of Covid. There is much much more to be scared of than Covid, there is reality to be scared of...

A bit late to be PMKing.

But just wanted to note (cynically) that after browsing various COVID threads, there's a significant and increasing multi-factorial correlation between anti-lockdown posters (themselves a mutation of the "it's just flu" brigade) and the phrase "WITH, not OF" Another one of those 3-word slogans that are so contagious with the susceptible, who no doubt would fail to see the irony

Why is it that we are governed by people who, in a case of extremity, ignore proven, detailed, labour intensive solutions to deal with it (in this case, contact tracing/isolation done by actual teams of people), and go for pie in the sky, unproven and possibly unfeasible solutions (“the vaccine”) and other types of magical thinking?
Rhetorical question BTW. But it does seem to exist at many levels. It’s particularly rife in education where the latest fad almost always takes precedence over getting students to sit down, shut up and actually work for the whole lesson, which IME is the best way to achievement.

their hospital was down to 6hr turnarounds, although she was aware other parts of the country were still around the 3 day mark. I don't know if they have sped up - using Universities would help here as previous posters have pointed out.

One of the key things for turnaround times for hospitals is to have on site testing facilities. Many bigger hospitals are colocated with university research institutes which could do this work, as has been demonstrated at several sites. But how long will it be sustainable? The universities can't subsidize the site, staff, machines, and reagents indeterminately. If the labs can go back to research with the potential for future income generation (grants), even if not at full capacity due to distancing, there will be significant tension.

Universities are about to take a massive hit with the expected almost total loss of overseas students. We are expecting courses to be cut and major redundancies. I'm luckier than most as we're just starting year 3 of a 5 year funding cycle and my job is safe, but even there I expect to see slicing from the research councils. At a minimum, hiring and promotion freezes, likely no more annual increments. No one in the bottom 90% is going to be immune from the economic pain, and virtually all academics are in that category.

We're in for a decade of stalled scientific progress as talent chooses other professions and PhD stipends are frozen, making it that much harder for students without parental back up to take up research.

The Times also has a fucking awful red jacket that looks like it has fashion COVID

I'm not fussed either way by the jacket. The gold lame leggings on the other hand...

Re the guardian story and immunity passports and facial recognition??!!! Really? That takes us into the realm of China and I'm not sure it's consistent with Johnson's idea of liberalism (as much as I dislike Johnson this doesn't sound like something he'd support). It sounds like it's a story blown up to upset Guardian readers. I hope I'm not wrong but that story doesn't quite fit and sounds like it's something from off the drawing board that's likely not to get off it and is more part of a brainstorming session.

Facial recognition is deeply controversial in many many ways (not least because its unreliable still particularly with dark skin). Efforts to try and introduce it would be met with lots of legal action.

I thought immunity passports had been shown to be a waste of time given the somewhat unreliable nature of tests?

The problem I have with working from home for the year (or more, one this is implemented companies are not gong to go back from that - too much cost savings for them. See what happened in Spain during their recession of 2008)
The main issue is that people, might well not have the slave to work from home.

DH is working from our dining table atm. Ok for a month or two, not as a year long mesure. We don’t have a spare bedroom for him to settle in.
I am at Uni at the moment and will start working in my new SE role in September. Most of it will also be from home.
How are people like ourselves (and there are many) will be able to actually ‘work from home’ when there is no space to do so and the Internet is doggy?

I thought immunity passports had been shown to be a waste of time given the somewhat unreliable nature of tests?

When did that ever stop this shower of incompetents?

Yes, I'm an office worker for whom working from home is an issue long term. We are managing just about for now, but that is due to the nature of work required and the fact that it's traditionally a quiet ish time.

But we can't really bring, for example, four 3 by 2 foot crates of client papers which we'd be working on in the office, home. We also need access to scanners that can cope with 100 plus pages, photocopiers, printers.

We still receive a large amount of paper correspondence, that needs filing in a physical file. Or at the very least scanning in and storing electronically.

And many people have less than ideal work spaces as pointed out.

I suspect that there may well be some class of rota with people working from home/working in the office 2/3 days a week to reduce the number of people in, which would be sensible.

But office worker does not necessarily = able to work from home indefinitely.

What we've been told in Germany is that our antibody tests are sufficiently accurate for population studies - which are ongoing -
but not sufficiently accurate for individual "immunity passports",
which is a concept that was squashed here weeks ago anyway

As for connecting it to "facial recognition" ....

UK governments for at least the last decade keep looking for a "quick" tech solution,
to avoid investing in people
e.g. for mass testing and contact tracing

... and there's always a tech firm that sees them coming and gets a development bung for a silver bullet.

Germany has recruited a further 20,000 people in local authorities around the country, for contact tracing
They are lead by the thousands of public health and environmental health officers that were already there

Yes, it's old-fashioned and unsexy
But they know their local territory and it works

lead led

I thought immunity passports had been shown to be a waste of time given the somewhat unreliable nature of tests?

Yep.

Similarly for mass testing, btw
German has been using a network of 200 labs around the country

Theoretically the UK's concentrated 9 super-labs should be more efficient and communicate better centrally,
but in practice the German local network has worked pretty well.

What Germany really should copy is the UK's superb ONS system:

German central statistics, having to collect and collate from the 16 states, with 401 administrative authorities, has a much longer time lag
e.g. national death stats up to 5 April were only released last Thursday
There must be a more efficient process and I gather they are working on this