Coronavirus

[cloggypop]

1 hour ago, Spy Bee said:

#pintsinjuly let's begin the campaign!

I can have them from this Monday. 

[Spy Bee]

London is getting a couple of hundred infections per week now. That's hard to explain away if we haven't stumbled to some kind of herd immunity or if the virus is not burning out in some other way.

[Spy Bee]

Just now, cloggypop said:

I can have them from this Monday. 

 I'll drink to that.

 

I win this bet anyway, because Spain is accepting incoming flights from July 1st, so worst case scenario, I will pop to Alicante for some tapas and pints.

[clockspeed]

1 minute ago, Anubis said:

Marina Hyde has just ruined Knight Rider for me forever. Damn you, you witch!

A brilliant article like the BJ wanted to be PM BJ wants to have been a PM it's the bit in the middle he is struggling with. Hope it posted on here . If not could do with repost

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, TheHowieLama said:

Apparently some Swedes are not happy with where they are now. It seems they have a pretty low population density (certainly incomparable to the few nations ahead in per capita death rate) and their economy has been affected like everywhere else. There may be an issue with their reporting in care homes and they are seeing a second spike sooner that may be a little steeper than others.

Last I've seen, it was reported 70 percent support what they have been doing and I don't see spikes in their numbers.

After 8 or so weeks of lockdown, UK is still reporting higher weekly per capita deaths then Sweden, without a lockdown (before today it was 331 - 2118 in absoulte numbers). They do have much higher death numbers in care home than they expected.

[Spy Bee]

So Kuenssberg got a follow up and Peston got fucked right off!

[Anubis]

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/26/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-terrified-sack-him?__twitter_impression=true

Quote

The prime minister’s decision is not born of loyalty to his adviser – he just can’t get rid of his ideas man

 

Perhaps on Sunday you watched the entire nation being lectured on what constitutes fatherly responsibility by Boris Johnson, a man who won’t even say how many children he has, and leaves women to bring up an unspecified number of them.

 

Perhaps on Monday you watched the Guardian’s Rowena Mason being lectured in journalism by Johnson, a man sacked from a newspaper for fabricating quotes from his own godfather, and who blithely discussed helping a friend to have another journalist beaten up.

 

Perhaps today, you heard Michael Gove tell LBC he has “on occasion” driven a car to check his eyesight.

 

If you did see these things, I can only direct you to the slogan flyposted all over Paris during the 1968 civil unrest. “DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND – THERE IS A FAULT WITH REALITY.” The term “gaslighting” is much overused, but let’s break the glass on it for the events of the past few days. As for “indefensible”… well, I don’t think that word means what you thought it meant.

 

Anyway. I see the latest science Dominic Cummings knows more about than you is optometry. Half an hour late on Monday afternoon – like he’s Mariah Carey and not some spad in inside-out pants – the Islington-dwelling humanities graduate took to Downing Street’s rose garden.

 

There, he delivered the most preposterous address to a nation since Tiger Woods stood in front of an audience, including his mother, and apologised to his wife and sponsors. The difference is that Woods had a problem with cocktail waitresses, while Cummings fucks entire public health messages in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Also, he’s not remotely sorry.

 

By now, you may be dimly aware that his wife showing coronavirus symptoms saw Cummings first return to Downing Street, then embark on what we might call an Odyssean project: a heroic 260-mile quest all the way to County Durham, breaking the spirit and letter of lockdown rules he helped to write. I guess he just wanted to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. Then, he explained, he embarked on a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle, with his child in the car, to see if his eyes were so banjaxed that it was unsafe for him to drive. Which is … but no. I’m sorry, I just can’t with that one. Maybe later. Hopefully he’s at least nuked his car insurance premium.

 

Apologies for having to get tough with a guy who has always cultivated an image of himself as the Roy Keane of Westminster, even if that is like being the Clint Eastwood of the DVLA. But if Cummings and his wife didn’t know what they’d done was wrong, why would they choose to write a lengthy article last month about their virus experience – full of personal family information – which omitted all of these dramas, all of these material facts. Or as Cummings addressed these questions of what is unredeemable in the rose garden: “I stress to people that they should not believe everything in the newspapers.”

 

And I stress to people that by far the most inaccurate account of the period in question was in the Spectator, bylined Mary Wakefield and Dominic Cummings.

 

As for his querulous domestic exceptionalism, you’d think they were the first parents ever to get properly ill in possession of children. Or child, in this case. God knows, it’s not much fun. But, dare millions of us say, it is kind of what you sign up for – a reality not lost on the ICU nurse couple I heard on the radio, explaining about both of them being hard hit by Covid-19, and having to isolate with their own three children without help.

 

Cummings’ university history tutor once described him as “something like a Robespierre”, “determined to bring down things that don’t work”. Five years after his revolution, Robespierre himself was deemed to be something that didn’t really work, and was “brought down”, to euphemise the business of being relieved of your head in front of an ecstatic mob. I must say I found the footage of Cummings being screamed at in his street on Sunday distinctly disturbing when set alongside his account of his family’s house having become a target for threats of violence. This is never right.

 

Part of what’s disturbing was the vignette of a Britain Cummings himself did much to foment: grimly polarised, reflexively aggressive and running with an undercurrent of menace.

 

His crowning triumph – the successful campaign to leave the EU – was a masterclass of stoking and exploiting divisions, unpleasantly emotive half-truths or untruths, and evidently considered itself above the law.

 

I wrote last year about the dangerous folly of whipping up people versus parliament narratives, and how quickly those who imagine themselves on the side of the people can suddenly be reclassified as an enemy politician. But even I would have thought it too neat, too written, for Cummings to find himself on the wrong end of his sorcery as quickly as he has been. The thing about playing to angry mobs is that eventually they get angry with you. They came for Robespierre in the end, too.

 

For all the draw of the Cummings character, though, the last few days are ultimately a terrible story about Johnson. “Wash your hands, wash your hands” the prime minister kept gibbering last night.

 

He’s certainly washing his hands of it all. All populists secretly hate their people, and Johnson is no different. But that “secretly” is key. His decision to keep Cummings brings his contempt for those he is meant to serve into the open. He would rather endanger their lives by compromising a vital public health strategy.

 

But why? The thing about Johnson is that he desperately wanted to become prime minister, and he desperately wanted to have been prime minister. It’s just the bit in between he struggles with.

 

With Othello, it was jealousy. Macbeth: ambition. Lear: pride. Johnson: career liar, hollowed out by narcissism, who not even his friends would joke was motivated by public service. I guess it’s the little things that trip you up, isn’t it?

 

Anyone who imagines his defence of Cummings is born of loyalty is unfamiliar with the concept “Boris Johnson”.

 

This is actually a simple story: man with no ideas is too terrified to sack his ideas man. Or to put it in the complex intellectual terms it deserves, some street heckler once shouted at David Hasselhoff: “Oi! Hasselhoff! You’re nothing without your talking car!” Cummings is the talking car to Johnson’s Hasselhoff.

 

So here we are. Cummings stays, and only irresistible external events will make Johnson do the right thing. He is not himself capable. We have the highest death toll in Europe, we left the care homes to their fate, our test-and-trace blunders are an international embarrassment, and we didn’t even save our economy. Johnson takes daily runs, but appears only once or twice a week in a crisis to fail at leadership.

 

This is the utter smallness of the man, and the tragedy for everyone stuck being governed by him. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the acceptance. It would be nice to think we’re not so beaten that we don’t expect better than what he’s given us. After all, lives literally depend on it.

 

[Bjornebye]

18 minutes ago, 3 Stacks said:

Hey, need you guys' opinions. On December 4th, I had a stuffy nose for a couple hours and sneezed a bit. Do you think I had Corona and am now immune? Thanks. 

No it was pepper spray. 

[Red Phoenix]

Good to see this is finally starting to flatten, it took way too long though and there's also questions about how accurate it'll be too I think.

 

[Spy Bee]

If I said on here that I don't think washing your hands makes much difference, would I be spreading bullshit?

[Alan Sex]

You can’t stop Cummings, he’s Cummings all over the place. 
 

Cummings in your face. 

[Alan Sex]

1 minute ago, Spy Bee said:

If I said on here that I don't think washing your hands makes much difference, would I be spreading bullshit?

That’s just an excuse for your bad hygiene, you smelly bugger. 

[TheHowieLama]

3 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

Good to see this is finally starting to flatten, it took way too long though and there's also questions about how accurate it'll be too I think.

 

Ya think?

 

It is a cumulative graph that somehow took a downward correction

[Tj hooker]

1 hour ago, Spy Bee said:

I was supposed to be getting married in Costa Rica in about 6 hours. I've rebooked it (in this country) for September 26th now... I reckon we'll be well good by then.

Throw me an invite please my birthday is the 28th thanks in advance 

[Pureblood]

6 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

If I said on here that I don't think washing your hands makes much difference, would I be spreading bullshit?

The clue was "just my opinion".

 

[Red Phoenix]

1 minute ago, TheHowieLama said:

Ya think?

 

It is a cumulative graph that somehow took a downward correction

 

Yeah I doubted how accurate it was, was hoping it'd represent some truth at least though. So cumulative as opposed to what? And what's the downward correction?

[Strontium]

7 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

If I said on here that I don't think washing your hands makes much difference, would I be spreading bullshit?

 

No, you'd be spreading human shit.

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, Red Phoenix said:

 

Yeah I doubted how accurate it was, was hoping it'd represent some truth at least though. So cumulative as opposed to what? And what's the downward correction?

I assume this is overall cases in the UK?

 

Downward happens in mid May when the total goes from above 250 to below it in the space of a few days.

[Spy Bee]

8 minutes ago, Tj hooker said:

Throw me an invite please my birthday is the 28th thanks in advance 

Might need a new best man, can't see Teek doing it now.

[Tj hooker]

1 minute ago, Spy Bee said:

Might need a new best man, can't see Teek doing it now.

I've had experience of doing that and I'll throw in a free disco back in the uk 

[Anubis]

2 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

Might need a new best man, can't see Teek doing it now.

I’m sure he’s just concerned your future wife wears a veil (a form of mask).

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Tj hooker said:

I've had experience of doing that and I'll throw in a free disco back in the uk 

Aww sorry lad, you thought you were going to Costa Rica. I'm getting married in Wrexham now.

[Red Phoenix]

9 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

If I said on here that I don't think washing your hands makes much difference, would I be spreading bullshit?

Touching surfaces then your eyes/mouth isn't supposed to be the main way it spreads but washing hands for some could be the difference between getting it or not, and considering that anyone catching it could lead to a chain reaction of loads of others catching it, clearly that could be a huge difference.

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Red Phoenix said:

Touching surfaces then your eyes/mouth isn't supposed to be the main way it spreads but washing hands for some could be the difference between getting it or not, and considering that anyone catching it could lead to a chain reaction of loads of others catching it, clearly that could be a huge difference.

The prosecution rests.

[Dougie Do'ins]

32 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

So Kuenssberg got a follow up and Peston got fucked right off!

He might as well as just told Peston to fuck off.