Day 26.......

Last post in the last thread summarises the current situation.

Ouch...a boss breaks cover. Hope he isn't hounded out of his job for spilling the beans. Not surprised to learn that the UK government doesn't understand what is possible in the UK. 

The director of a large NHS trust has contacted the BBC asking for the phone numbers of Burberry and Barbour because he does not have enough gowns for his staff working on coronavirus wards.

...

UK garment factories approached by the BBC have said the government doesn't fully understand what is possible in the UK, and which firms could produce what. This lack of understanding has caused production delays.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52319576

Continued from the last thread:

A more extensive account of the situation here.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/experts/article-8125799/Can-season-ticket-refund-Covid-19-makes-work-home.html

The rail companies' argument is that if someone bought an annual season knowing they only wanted it for two months, they would get the annual discounted rate without any intention to enter into their half of the bargain, i.e. a commitment to travel for a year. Or, taken to extremes I suppose, could even get a week's travel at the cheap rate.  More earthily, their spokesman compared it to a BOGOF offer - you wouldn't get a refund on that second tin of beans if you took it back.

Some companies have accepted that in the present circumstances a pro rata refund is appropriate, but others (notably Greater Anglia)are dragging their heels.

We hear a lot about 100,000 tests or whatever. Beyond those tests allowing key workers to get back to work, is there any point in mass testing until an efficient and comprehensive contact tracing process is in place? And that requires a large amount of labour even if the process doesn't start until the number of new daily cases has been brought down to, say, a hundred or so.

It's an interesting one how this affects people differently.

I live on my own, am an only child and am used to being by myself, my close family all having died. My plan, once the wolves die (the youngest at the moment being 9, so maybe another 5-7 years), is to leave my job at the school and, if I want to, work from home. I will get a dog for company and plan to take long walks with him along the footpaths, beaches and cliffs nearby. I'm not one of those who enjoys exercise, so the idea of going for a 4-mile walk alone doesn't appeal... it's fine with wolves though!

So far I'm really, really missing the wolves. It's 2½ months since I last saw them and although driving along a busy M25 to get to them isn't much fun, the change of scenery, the other volunteers and of course the wolves make it greatly worthwhile. I also miss meeting up with one of my friends and taking his dogs for a walk along the coast, or having my friends come round for a games morning (Mario Kart is much more fun when you've a few people in a room playing it).

I can kind of con myself into thinking it's just a weekend without the wolves, but of course I know it isn't. It's the same strategy I used when my dad died; I could imagine he'd just gone away for a week, then another week... I was and am used to being on my own, but it still felt odd. I guess, in a way, it's a kind of very mild bereavement - at least in this case, though, there'll be a semblance of normality eventually.

The other bits... the queues for Tesco, the lack of being able to pop out at 5:30AM on a Saturday to do the shopping when nobody's around, being able to get a haircut, the loss of just being able to take an Easter egg round to a friend as a surprise - it all feels like some sort of weird dream. It's not, of course, it's real life!

There are positives, of course. I'm not one for walks (at least on my own), but being in the garden and watching the wildlife of a lunchtime is relaxing. I'm lucky in that I have no worries about money and I'm also lucky in that I can do my job mostly from home, so I'm gaining over 10 hours a week of time saved from commuting and getting in early to beat traffic.

From the Tele - bad news from the Netherlands (where they've been doing antibody testing). It would suggest the stark choice is either trash the economy, or take large numbers of deaths in order to build immunity.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/16/uk-faces-eight-ten-waves-coronavirus-population-achieves-herd/

China upgraded it's death estimate for Wuhan. Adding another 1290 to the toll overnight

We would 'need' to tolerate between 600,000 and 1million deaths to achieve herd immunity.

No government would ever go for that. Restrictions (to a greater or lesser degree) are here to stay until/if there is an effective vaccine and there is considerable doubt about that.

There must be something wrong about special flights needed to bring Romanians to the UK to pick home-grown fruit and veg especially when the Romanians themselves are justifiably nervous about contracting Covid during the flight, despite all checks and masks worn

Unless they could plausibly pass the blame and responsibility to the stupid, lazy plebs. Don't get the idea that governments value life. They are predisposed to sacrifice millions in wars to protect real-estate and their own power. They won't hesitate once they find a way to evade responsibility.

This is Tory minister Helen Whately implying NHS workers are in some way responsible for the shortages of Personal Protective Equipment because they are misusing it. She's blaming Doctors and nurses who are literally dying because of the abject failure of this Tory Govt. #PPE pic.twitter.com/UoLhTy0eGP

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 15, 2020

Yes, I did wonder about the risk they were taking. But as one of them who was interviewed said, ‘there’s no work in Romania and I can earn more in four months here than I can earn in a year back home.’

Of course if more Brits had volunteered then we wouldn’t have had to fly people in.

 Thanks for bringing this to our attention on the forum. Several of us have mentioned the Dutch study and I have been keenly awaiting to see what it shows. Frankly I'm not surprised at all. Not one iota. I have long suspected that many people "who had corona in Jan or Feb" are guilty of wishful thinking, although needless to say a few of them will be correct. 

Edit: I'm going to stick my neck out here and say the idea that 50% of people with the corona virus remain asymptomatic will turn out to be complete bull. Gut feel only. No evidence to back it.  

Its not about the lack of volunteers, it’s down to skills. The Romanians come every year so are highly skilled, the British farmers don’t have time to train someone up from scratch.  

I still don't know why we need these Romanian workers. I keep reading that 1 million people in the UK have volunteered to help. Surely some of them could do farming work? I honestly don't understand the stigma attached to it.

The scene from Westminster bridge #ClapForCarers pic.twitter.com/JpzM0YBjgH

— Damir Rafi (@d_rafi1) April 16, 2020

its no wonder London is the worst hit place if this is how they social distance.

Anecdotally I know, but I have heard of quite a few people testing positive with no symptoms particularly with the increased testing in recent days. Includes people in hospital for other reasons and people who have been care workers for or are family of an infected person.

But i agree it is wishful thinking to think more than 5% of population has had it.  

Off the record, I hear the way it's done is they're offered a minimum wage, but then charged most of that for "accommodation" (i.e. 6 crammed into a manky old caravan).

The end result is they're working for peanuts.

They've been testing blood samples donated via blood banks, as I understand it. Lab-based testing works just fine, it's the home-use tests which are a bit flakey.

Unbelievable. All the police joining in too! 

We hear and read a lot of preliminary studies and seem to take them as fact. There is a growing body of evidence, a bit like a jigsaw but the full picture is nowhere near complete.

We need to be very very careful about jumping on every report as conclusive evidence. People can dismiss these comments all they want but scientific consensus takes a long time and requires a large body of evidence. Each properly conducted study adds to that but in isolation is only one piece of the puzzle.

At the moment we need a time machine to get “useful results” but we do not have that. Until then caution and non-stop research needs to continue, but everything at this stage is almost in the “current best guess” category. I realise that is not quite true as some aspects of immunology and physiology are well known, but this this is a novel virus. Look back at SARS (version 1) and you will see it has taken years to get a decent understanding of it.

We don’t have years before we can act, so we will get things wrong and hindsight will no doubt show that. It’s not that those research groups who have carried out current studies have come to the wrong conclusions but often those limited conclusions have been extrapolated by people who want an answer, now. Often an answer is not possible just another series of relevant questions to address.

“Standing on the shoulders of giants”.