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Coronavirus


Bjornebye

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Imagine how stupid you have to be to fall for some of the royals' shit and still lap it up. Their PR people could have done an HND at the university of Bolton and they'd still be able to pull it off such is the subservience of the right wing press and general witless nature of the great British public.

 

"The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are joining parents up and down the country who are homeschooling their children due to the coronavirus.

The couple are teaching Prince George and Princess Charlotte at their Norfolk home, with William saying it's a "lot of fun" but Kate admitting it can be challenging."

 

Have you cottoned on to the fact they do zoom interviews from a box room in an actual fucking palace?! 

 

Everything about the fact the royals are still a thing in 2020 is demeaning to our national IQ and self respect.

 

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Piers Morgan is doing a great job of holding the government to account he’s been relentless and rightly so. 

He’s still a prick but he’s on the right side of this argument. It’s awful watching the rest of the main steam media giving Johnson an easy ride on this. 

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This is right on the money (hoho)-

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/uk-government-pandemic

 



The UK government was ready for this pandemic. Until it sabotaged its own system
George Monbiot
We were second in the world for preparedness. Then Boris Johnson et al deliberately de-prepared us


 ‘We have been told repeatedly that the UK was unprepared for this pandemic. This is untrue. The UK was prepared, but then it de-prepared.’ 
We are trapped in a long, dark tunnel, all of whose known exits are blocked. There is no plausible route out of the UK’s coronavirus crisis that does not involve mass suffering and death. If, as some newspapers and Conservative MPs insist, the government eases the lockdown while the pandemic is still raging, the eventual death toll could be several times greater than today’s. If it doesn’t, and we spend all the warm months of the year in confinement, the impact on our mental and physical health, jobs and relationships could be catastrophic.

We have been told repeatedly that the UK was unprepared for this pandemic. This is untrue. The UK was prepared, but then it de-prepared. Last year, the Global Health Security Index ranked this nation second in the world for pandemic readiness, while the US was first. Broadly speaking, in both nations the necessary systems were in place. Our governments chose not to use them.

The climate modeller James Annan has used his analytical methods to show what would have happened if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlier. Starting it on 16 March, rather than 23 March, his modelling suggests, would by now have saved around 30,000 lives, reducing the rate of illness and death from coronavirus roughly by a factor of five.


But even 16 March would have been extraordinarily late. We now know that government ministers were told on 11 February that the virus could be catastrophic, and decisive action was urgently required. Instead, Boris Johnson told us to wash our hands and “go about our normal daily lives”.

Had the government acted in February, we can hazard a guess about what the result would have been, as the world has conducted a clear controlled experiment: weighing South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand against the UK, the US and Brazil. South Korea did everything the UK government could have done, but refused to implement. Its death toll so far: 263. It still has an occasional cluster of infection, which it promptly contains. By contrast, the entire UK is now a cluster of infection.

While other countries either closed their borders or quarantined all arrivals, in the three months between the emergence of the virus and the UK’s lockdown, 18 million people arrived on these shores, of whom only 273 were quarantined. Even after the lockdown was announced, 95,000 people entered the UK without additional restrictions. In fact, on 13 March, the UK stood down even its own guidance, which had gently requested travellers from Italy and China to self-isolate. This decision, taken as other nations were stepping up their controls, seems baffling.

Similarly, on 12 March, Johnson abandoned both containment and nationwide testing and tracking. A week later, the status of the pandemic was lowered, which meant that the government could reduce the standard of personal protective equipment required in hospitals, and could shift infectious patients into non-specialist care. Again, there was no medical or scientific justification for this decision.

Exercise Cygnus, a pandemic simulation conducted in 2016, found that the impacts in care homes would be catastrophic unless new measures were put in place. The government insists that it heeded the findings of this exercise and changed its approach accordingly. If this is correct, by allowing untested patients to be shifted from hospitals to care homes, while failing to provide the extra support and equipment the homes needed and allowing agency workers to move freely within and between them, it knowingly breached its own protocols. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable people were exposed to infection.

In other words, none of these are failures of knowledge or capacity. They are de-preparations, conscious decisions not to act. They start to become explicable only when we recognise what they have in common: a refusal to frontload the costs. This refusal is common in countries whose governments fetishise what we call “the market”: the euphemism we use for the power of money.

Johnson’s government, like that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, represents a particular kind of economic interest. For years politicians of their stripe have been in conflict with people who perform useful services: nurses, teachers, care workers and the other low-paid people who keep our lives ticking, whose attempts to organise and secure better pay and conditions are demonised by ministers and in the media.

This political conflict is always fought on behalf of the same group: those who extract wealth. The war against utility is necessary if you want to privatise public services, granting lucrative monopolies or fire sales of public assets to friends in the private sector. It’s necessary if you want to hold down public sector pay and the minimum wage, cutting taxes and bills for the same funders and lobbyists. It is necessary if corporations are to be allowed to outsource and offshore their workforces, and wealthy people can offshore their income and assets.

The interests of wealth extractors are, by definition, short term. They divert money that might otherwise have been used for investment into dividends and share buybacks. They dump costs that corporations should legitimately bear on to society in general, in the form of pollution (the car and road lobbies) or public health disasters (soft drinks and junk food producers). They siphon money out of an enterprise or a nation as quickly as possible, before the tax authorities, regulators or legislators catch up.

Years of experience have shown that it is much cheaper to make political donations, employ lobbyists and invest in public relations than to change lucrative but harmful commercial policies. Working through the billionaire press and political systems that are highly vulnerable to capture by money, in the UK, US and Brazil they have helped ensure that cavalier and reckless people are elected. Their chosen representatives have an almost instinctive aversion to investment, to carrying a cost today that could be deferred, delayed or dumped on someone else.

It’s not that any of these interests – whether the Daily Mail or the US oil companies – want coronavirus to spread. It’s that the approach that has proved so disastrous in addressing the pandemic has been highly effective, from the lobbyists’ point of view, when applied to other issues: delaying and frustrating action to prevent climate breakdown; pollution; the obesity crisis; inequality; unaffordable rent; and the many other plagues spread by corporate and billionaire power.

Thanks in large part to their influence, we have governments that fail to protect the public interest, by design. This is the tunnel. This is why the exits are closed. This is why we will struggle to emerge.

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We cannot eradicate coronavirus, expert warns

 

The coronavirus cannot be eradicated, the House of Lords has heard.

 

Prof David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, told the House's Science and Technology Committee that Covid-19 was a highly successful virus.

 

He said: "It is so transmissible, it's so successful, we're so susceptible, that actually it's a little bit of a red herring to worry about it getting worse, because it couldn't be much worse at the moment in terms of the numbers of cases."

He contrasted coronavirus with Ebola, which killed many more of the people it infected but was therefore easier to control as people stopped spreading it.

 

"This virus is infecting so many people with asymptomatic to mild symptoms that it's almost uncontrollable.

"I think we have to be clear that we're not going to be able to eradicate this virus. It's going to settle into the human population and in several years it will become a normal virus."

 

There was also a warning that people who have had coronavirus may not develop significant immunity.

John Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said evidence from survivors of Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a different form of coronavirus) suggested immunity-giving antibodies reduced over time.

 

"So that's potentially bad news for us, that immunity may not last that long against this virus," he said.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52717664?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=5ec3be636b7a9b06537a757c%26We cannot eradicate coronavirus%2C expert warns%262020-05-19T11%3A34%3A39%2B00%3A00&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:ef41752f-c409-4224-b637-7e680ed3f5b7&pinned_post_asset_id=5ec3be636b7a9b06537a757c&pinned_post_type=share

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Something missing from the above bbc tweet, re tweeted of course by Laura . eh I'm trying to think what it is,  probably something trivial, oh that's it, we have nearly 50,000 fucking deaths whilst Denmark has a little over 500.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Gnasher said:

 

Something missing from the above bbc tweet, re tweeted of course by Laura . eh I'm trying to think what it is,  probably something trivial, oh that's it, we have nearly 50,000 fucking deaths whilst Denmark has a little over 500.

 

 

It’s funny how they are happy to compare this with another country on this occasion, glossing over the fucking massive difference in death figures. 
But, if you want to compare the death figures then it’s not right to compare with other countries? 

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Word on the street is that the Invisible Spaffer is dodging PMQ’s today. He appears to be completely abdicating his responsibilities to address the country. Except when he does pre-recorded messages.

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14 hours ago, Mudface said:

Where's this study that reckons we're at 50% immunity? The only ones I've seen are serology surveys which suggest 5-10% at best, with some hard hit places like New York a bit higher.

the 5 - 10% is estimates of those that have been infected, but a few studies have now found a suggestion cross immunity from a common cold. I posted one a few pages back which suggested 34% could be immune, this one is higher - 

You can find all info from that tweet. I'd post the study, but I have some stuff to do so that I can spend this afternoon in the garden.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Word on the street is that the Invisible Spaffer is dodging PMQ’s today. He appears to be completely abdicating his responsibilities to address the country. Except when he does pre-recorded messages.

It's completely ridiculous. 

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10 hours ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

We cannot eradicate coronavirus, expert warns

 

 

There was also a warning that people who have had coronavirus may not develop significant immunity.

John Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said evidence from survivors of Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a different form of coronavirus) suggested immunity-giving antibodies reduced over time.

 

"So that's potentially bad news for us, that immunity may not last that long against this virus," he said.

 

People who contracted SARS still have antibodies now. All the preprints I have seen show that immunity is expected to be long lasting. 

 

This guy says that the disease is so transmissibleble that it can't be eradicated. The fact that it is so transmissible might be it's weakness as a virus. As people get immunity, even if it only lasts two years, then they number of people that the virus can infect is massively reduced and that would make the R rate reduce exponentially.

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1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Word on the street is that the Invisible Spaffer is dodging PMQ’s today. He appears to be completely abdicating his responsibilities to address the country. Except when he does pre-recorded messages.

 

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It is happening today, but he may yet find a way to weasel out...

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13 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Pay people a proper wage with decent hours to do it or fuck off. 

 

How they gonna manage that when the farmers are being squeezed further and further, not to mention the subsidies that are about to disapear due to Brexit

 

They can't pay a decent wage because they don't recieve one themselves anymore.

 

Yey, Capitalism!

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Guest Pistonbroke
3 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I think BBC journalism in fact just British journalism has shown itself to be a farce.

Wasn't the UK voted as having the most untrustworthy Media of all European countries in research done by the European Broadcasting Union? 

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11 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

For fucks sake. 

 

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is missing PMQs today. 

 

He's a fucking shambles and a coward. 

Miss this one and is there then a two week break ? Get all the bad news out of the way next couple of weeks appear back when death rate lower than 100 per day, then disregard all cumulative data and focus on the great success of not overwhelming NHS and R number below 1 even with restrictions lifted. All that has happened since the start brushed under carpet, at end of the day most of them were going to die anyway. 

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