Coronavirus

[TheHowieLama]

@Anubis

Just another daily briefing of lies, obfuscation, fuckwittery and incompetence then.

 

I would imagine they are quite pleased with their incompetence at this point.

[Strontium]

This is interesting about predicting trends in the virus

 

The full paper is here: SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary municipal sewage sludge as a leading indicator of COVID-19 outbreak dynamics

[Dougie Do'ins]

I remember watching this at the time. Change the Tory characters to today's mob and it's even more apt.

 

 

[cloggypop]

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-in-sewage-foreshadowed-outbreak-in-dutch-city/a-52972980

[Section_31]

28 minutes ago, cloggypop said:

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-in-sewage-foreshadowed-outbreak-in-dutch-city/a-52972980

The research indicates that sewage surveillance could be a useful tool in detecting whether coronavirus is present in a population before testing patients.

 

 

Furloughed workers, your country needs you.

[Pureblood]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/26/862230065/as-the-u-s-heads-toward-100-000-covid-19-deaths-we-re-early-in-this-outbreak

 

The bleak milestone the U.S. is about to hit — 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 — is far above the number of deaths seen from the pandemic in any other country.

 

So far, the impact of the virus has been felt unevenly, striking certain cities and regions and particular segments of society much harder than others.

 

To get a sense of how that may change, and where in the course of the epidemic the U.S. is right now, Morning Edition host David Greene spoke Tuesday with Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard Global Health Institute and professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

 

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

 

As you look at this number looming now, what are you reflecting on?

 

Well, a couple of things. First of all, it is a solemn moment to reflect on the idea that about 100,000 Americans have died — mostly just in the last two months. 

 

The speed with which this has happened is really devastating. Of course, we've had very little opportunity to mourn all those losses because most of us have been shut down.

 

And I've been thinking about where we go into the future and fall and reminding myself and others that we're early in this outbreak. We're not anywhere near done.

 

The U.S. ... has had more deaths than any country in the world. Do you think that the country is absorbing the significance of these numbers?

 

I think for a majority of Americans, this doesn't quite feel real because the deaths have been concentrated in few places.

 

Obviously, New York has been hit very hard, and some other places like Seattle, Chicago — some of the big cities. And so people who don't live in those areas may not be absorbing it.

 

But the nature of this pandemic is that it starts and kind of accelerates in big cities, but then it moves out into the suburbs and into the rural areas. So, by the time we're done with this, I think every American will have felt it much more up close and personal. That's what I worry about — that it shouldn't have to take that for people to really understand how tragic this is and how calamitous in many ways this is.

 

Q: We're coming out of Memorial Day weekend, and we saw many regulations relaxed in many parts of the country. As you were watching that, what are you predicting in terms of what we could see by the end of summer?

 

If you look at all of the models out there — and most models have been relatively accurate — a few of them have been too optimistic. But then, if you sort of look at the models of models — the ones that really sort of combine it all and put it together and make projections — the projections are that we're probably going to see 70,000 to 100,000 deaths between now and the end of the summer.

While the pace will slow down, because we are doing some amount of social distancing and testing is ramping up — we're going to, unfortunately, see a lot more sickness and, unfortunately, a lot more deaths in the upcoming months.

 

Q: There's been talk of a seasonal aspect to this. Whatever happens over the summer, do we face even more deaths as we head later in the year?

 

Yes. I'm hoping that the models of the summer of an additional 70,000 to 100,000 deaths are too pessimistic. And they may be, because we may get a seasonal benefit because of the summer: People are outside more.

 

But the flip side of the seasonal benefit of the summer, is what will almost surely be a pretty tough fall and winter with a surge of cases — a wave that might be bigger than the wave we just went through. And we've got to prepare for that, because we can't be caught flat-footed the way we were this time around.

 

Q: What can we do to prepare? We're seeing so many states relax restrictions right now. Is it a matter of potentially putting those restrictions back in place where they need to be? Or are there other things we could be doing?

 

There are two things that I would say. First of all, people can't be locked down for the rest of this pandemic. I understand that people need to get out, and being outside is a good thing. But we have to maintain a certain amount of social distancing. I think mask wearing is really important.

 

The only other tool we have in our tool box is a really robust testing, tracing, isolation program. You know, if you think about how it is that South Korea and Germany have been able to do much, much better? They have had a really aggressive testing, tracing, isolation program. We know that works. It allows us to kind of have more of our lives back without the number of deaths that we've suffered. So I really think that still remains — and should remain — one of our priority areas.

 

Q: The federal government's new strategic testing plan calls on states to take a lot of the responsibility for testing. ... Do you see that as the best approach?

 

I think this is a real missed opportunity and very unfortunate in many ways, because while states have a critical role to play, testing capacity and testing supply chains are national and international.

 

We don't want 50 states competing. We want a federal strategy that helps states. And I'm worried that we're just not getting that from the federal government.

[Dougie Do'ins]

 

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Q: There's been talk of a seasonal aspect to this. Whatever happens over the summer, do we face even more deaths as we head later in the year?

 

Yes. I'm hoping that the models of the summer of an additional 70,000 to 100,000 deaths are too pessimistic. And they may be, because we may get a seasonal benefit because of the summer: People are outside more.

 

But the flip side of the seasonal benefit of the summer, is what will almost surely be a pretty tough fall and winter with a surge of cases — a wave that might be bigger than the wave we just went through. And we've got to prepare for that, because we can't be caught flat-footed the way we were this time around.

This is definitely the thing that concerns the most. There's no way that the country can not operate at something resembling full function over the winter months from October/November to March/April so hopefully the numbers will continue to drop over the Summer, plans on how to cope better through this pandemic will improve and the general public will use their brains to protect themselves and their families.

[Barrington Womble]

As unpopular as he is,  spot on from John crace. 

 

Needy Matt becomes Door Matt in defending Dom’s Durham flit | John Crace

 

 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. There was a brief moment after Matt Hancock recovered from coronavirus when he appeared to be a man of principle. That proved to be nothing more than a chimera. Now he has revealed himself to be the most abject of career politicians, who will literally do and say anything to save his job.

So there was no one Boris Johnson could have trusted more than Matt to have taken the Downing Street press conference on the day after Dominic Cummings had been granted the freedom of the No 10 rose garden – there’s a code for special advisers specifically saying they should not make public statements – to annihilate what was left of his credibility. Needy Matt is the health secretary with the perfect grasp of the public good.

When it came to a straight choice between sticking to government health guidelines or protecting the career of Boris’s boss, it was a no-brainer. Who cared if thousands more might die because they couldn’t see the point of sticking to the rules if Dom didn’t, providing Downing Street’s very own Prince Andrew was still in post? Long live the People’s Government! Oddly, we haven’t heard that slogan much lately. Can’t think why.

How did Matt let it come to this? What makes the tragedy so riddled with pathos is that Hancock deep down knows he is so busted. That he has traded what passed for his self-respect for loyalty to two men who think morality is for suckers. You can see it in the terror in his eyes and the increasing shirtiness in his responses. He is now so brittle, he could shatter into a thousand tiny fragments at any moment. I give it five days at most.

Because not only has his track-and-trace app proved to be totally useless, but he’s also only got five days to meet the arbitrary target of 200,000 tests a day that Boris set when under pressure from Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions. So far, we’re on under 110,000. It’s just not going to happen, Matt. And the public won’t get fooled twice with fake testing targets. As it is, Laughing Boy Dom has already as good as turned the country feral.

Having basically admitted he had nothing to say about anything, Needy Matt first took a question from a vicar in Brighton. That won’t be allowed to happen again, because Martin asked if everyone who had been done for travelling with children could have their fixed penalty notices rescinded. Matt’s eyes widened and darted about in panic. “Er…” he said. Perhaps that might not be such a bad idea. He’d have a word with the chancellor.

It was now clear that there was no law Classic Dom might have broken over the past 20 years that the government wouldn’t be willing to review, just to keep the de facto prime minister in his job. That dope Dom might have smoked at university? Maybe it was time to have drugs legalised after all. That time Dom had driven at 35mph in a 30mph zone? Maybe it was time to up the speed limit so that kids could learn to keep their wits about them in urban areas. That blogpost on pandemics Dom had said he wrote a year ago which it has now emerged had been updated a few weeks back? Actually, scrub that: duplicity has already become an accepted practice in the current administration.

Having rewritten half the penal code, Matt got down to the real business of defending Dom’s moonlight flit to Durham. Classic Dom had absolutely followed the guidelines to the letter. The instructions couldn’t have been more clear. In the event of your partner getting coronavirus and you finding yourself in exceptional danger of having to be responsible for childcare on your own – just imagine! – you were expected to go into work the next day to pass on the infection before driving 260 miles north to your father’s estate. It had been so sad Dom had only been able to stay in a concrete outhouse – so that you could overload the NHS services somewhere else when your son got ill.

It would also be now mandatory for everyone to drive to Barnard Castle as part of the DVLA eyesight test for a nice family day out by the river. And there was no question of his wife being allowed to drive the car at any point even though she had frequently written about having done so. The Cummingses’ car was a manual. Which meant it had to be driven by a man. There was also no need for Dom to have at any time told anyone where he was, because he was the nation’s leader and he could do what he liked.

Needy Matt was adamant, however, that the little people should continue to obey the government’s instructions on self-isolation and freedom of movement because they were both too stupid and not important enough to be allowed to use their own judgment. “People must keep their resolve,” he pleaded tetchily. All other questions were basically dismissed. Robert Peston was sawn off at the knees before he had even completed his question and other journalists were given brief non-answers and no follow-ups.

The 71% of the country – including the ever-so-brave Jeremy Hunt, who had written to constituents explaining that though Classic Dom had broken the guidelines on three occasions he was basically too timid to raise it with the prime minister – who thought Cummings was an establishment elite chancer were basically just wrong. And that was an end to the matter.

The important thing was that he and Dom should remain in their jobs. It was just that Matt’s job description had changed over the course of the brief 30-minute presser. Needy Matt had become Door Matt. A useful idiot to be walked all over, because there’s no way the Dom story is going away. There is no happy ending. The government is hopelessly compromised. As is Matt. The hollowed-out health secretary without qualities. No integrity. No competence. No anything. Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.

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[Anubis]

 

 

 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157875700639733&id=571344732

[Anubis]

https://www.ft.com/content/cfff1b72-9e12-4e7f-a67b-db6eef0443c0

 

Johnson struggles to draw a line under Cummings row

PM set to face fresh questions about chief adviser’s actions during UK lockdown

19 minutes ago

More than 30 Tory MPs have come out in support of Boris Johnson removing Dominic Cummings © FT Montage/Getty/PA

Boris Johnson’s efforts to draw a line under the crisis surrounding Dominic Cummings floundered on Tuesday as more Conservative MPs called on the prime minister to remove his chief adviser and one minister quit in protest.

Downing Street had hoped Mr Cummings’ defence on Monday of his actions during the coronavirus lockdown — after he was accused by newspapers of breaching the restrictions on people’s movements — would defuse the controversy.

But Mr Cummings’ refusal to apologiseand concern that his actions would undermine public adherence to the lockdown led to more than 30 Tory MPs supporting the case for ousting him.

These included several former ministers, such as Mark Harper and Caroline Nokes. Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt said Mr Cummings had breached the lockdown rules but stopped short of demanding his resignation.

Six opposition parties — including the Scottish National party and the Liberal Democrats, but not Labour — called on Mr Johnson to remove his chief adviser, saying trust in public health advice was being “severely undermined”.

Mr Johnson is expected to face further questions about his decision to retain Mr Cummings — who masterminded the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum — when the prime minister appears before senior MPs who chair House of Commons select committees on Wednesday.

Dominic Cummings in the garden of Downing Street on Monday. He said he had no regrets about making the trip and insisted he had not broken lockdown rules © Jonathan Brady/Reuters

Mr Cummings said on Monday he had acted “reasonably and legally” in taking a 264-mile journey in March from his home in London to a property of his parents in the north-east of England to secure childcare for his four-year-old son in case he and his wife were both ill with the virus. 

He also said he had no regrets about making the trip and insisted he had not broken the lockdown rules because they allowed parents to exercise their own judgment if they had concerns over the welfare of children.

But Douglas Ross, a junior minister in the Scotland Office, disagreed and resigned on Tuesday, saying Mr Cummings’ interpretation of the rules was not shared by most Britons.

Recommended

“I have constituents who didn’t get to say goodbye to loved ones; families who could not mourn together; people who didn’t visit sick relatives because they followed guidance of the government,” he added. “I cannot in good faith tell them they were all wrong and one senior adviser to the government was right.”

Jackson Carlaw, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said Mr Ross’s resignation was a “great loss” to the government as he called on Mr Cummings to quit.

William Wragg, Tory chair of the Commons public administration committee, complained at how Downing Street had at the weekend persuaded senior government members — including chancellor Rishi Sunak and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove — to take to social media and television to defend Mr Cummings’ actions.

“We cannot throw away valuable public and political good will any longer,” he tweeted. “It’s humiliating and degrading to their office to see ministers put out agreed lines in defence of an adviser.”

Although Mr Cummings took questions from journalists for more than an hour in the Downing Street garden on Monday, holes subsequently emerged in his account.

Boris Johnson alongside Douglas Ross, parliamentary under-secretary of state for Scotland, who has resigned from the Government © Stefan Rousseau/PA

For example, Mr Cummings said he had foreseen a pandemic such as Covid-19. “Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning,” he said in a reference to a blog post he did in March 2019.

But Downing Street insiders admitted on Tuesday that Mr Cummings had updated the article only last month to include a reference to coronavirus first being diagnosed in 2002.

Opinion polls suggested the public’s view of Mr Cummings was hardening. In a YouGov survey, 59 per cent said he should resign, up 7 points compared to three days earlier. And 71 per cent said they believed he had broken the lockdown rules. The pollster also reported that the Conservative party’s lead over the Labour party had slumped by 9 points — the biggest drop in a decade.

Another survey by Savanta ComRes highlighted the damage the row has done to Mr Johnson and his government.

Mr Johnson’s personal ratings have dropped 20 points during the controversy about Mr Cummings to -1. The government’s approval ratings fell 16 points to -2. 

Health professionals also expressed concern that Mr Cummings’ continued membership of the government was distracting from its message to the public to comply with the lockdown rules to keep the virus in check.

Coronavirus lockdown advice on a sign in Brixton underground station in London © Niklas Halle’n/AFP 

Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist and dean of medicine at Buckingham university, described the row over Mr Cummings as an “absolute farce”.

“This has massively undermined the government’s message — it's not good enough,” he said. 

But allies of Mr Cummings believed he would fight to retain his role as chief adviser to Mr Johnson because any departure by him would have negative consequences for the government.

One Whitehall official said were Mr Cummings to quit, other members of the Vote Leave team now working in Downing Street could also struggle to retain their positions. “That’s why there’s a real bunker mentality,” added the official.

One friend of Mr Cummings claimed he would not care about damage to the Conservatives in the polls.

“If he drags the Tory party down to below the Green party in the polls, he doesn’t care . . . He’s not a Tory, he has no party allegiance, he does not rate anyone in the cabinet,” added the friend.

Health secretary Matt Hancock defended Mr Cummings at a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, saying he believed the adviser had complied with the lockdown rules because they allowed for “exceptional circumstances” involving childcare.

“My view is that what he did was within the guidelines,” he added, saying it was important Britons abided by the rules. “I can understand why reasonable people can take a different view.”

Mr Hancock suggested the government would review all fines levied on parents for breaches of lockdown rules relating to travel for childcare, but officials subsequently denied this would happen.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

Is right! 

 

 

[Anubis]

Daily Mail - the enemy of the people....

 

 

 

 

[Trumo]

Dominic Cummings looks like Danny Boyle. If Boyle had decided to become a junkie while filming Trainspotting.

[Pureblood]

Has a bit of Clarence Boddicker in him.

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Has a bit of Clarence Boddicker in him.

He calls his boss Dick aswell.

[Sugar Ape]

 

[Aventus]

5 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

This is interesting about predicting trends in the virus

 

The full paper is here: SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary municipal sewage sludge as a leading indicator of COVID-19 outbreak dynamics

A load of shite.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Cunts are just gonna ride it out until people are bored.

[Mudface]

 

[Stickman]

[Vincent Vega]

[aRdja]

This is really sad.

 

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

China is a fucking dogshit state.  No US defending democracy over there.