Moctezuma

Great to see they've got in a Randian health secretary, I'm sure that won't cause any issues in the future. Having worked with people who know him it sounds like his life is almost completely inured from any displeasure, like talking to someone on median earnings or below.

I was approached by some of the bams in Piers Corbyns crew today, some of their number along with king fruitloop himself were being spoken to by the polis (who now must have a permanent op on them). They were blithering on about the vaccine giving memory loss and how I should refuse it, I decided not to mention at that point being directly involved in the programme. Their aesthetic was very sandals and ropey t-shirts as you would imagine. On the comment up thread about it passing through the schools, of the national data set I look after all of the recent cases forwarded to me have been paediatric, a lot are inpatients for a while, must be horrible for the families regardless of reassurance from clinicians about positive outcomes in that age bracket. I saw two people getting loaded into ambulances with NIV on my run yesterday, I should check on the case rate for my local area. I would imagine England's exploits will push it up given how packed the pubs are.

The thing I find interesting with these weather extremes is that we are just in the foothills of this, that footage last year of the siberian permafrost melting really crystallised for me that we are getting into the feedback loops that will significantly accelerate changes to the climate. Witnessing the mass ecosystem collapse in our life times should be fun.

But isn't the whole point to in effect create YouTube clips that get passed on and lead people even further down the bias algorithm wormhole? Presumably just by being there they are moving elements of the discourse to the right. I've walked past their offices a few times and they certainly seem well staffed and well funded from the outside. I do wonder what a left wing platform could do if they were receiving wads of piled up I'll gotten gains, but then that would never happen as it would not be to said backers advantage. GB news are a inevitable outgrowth of our ridiculous inequality.

Sam Kelly the argentine football journalist, I think this is his first ever go at commentary, gives an indication I suppose that the BBC aren't exactly spending big bucks on this.

You own your home Gooch don't you, it's written large in your posts, your view of this is being heavily dictated by your economic circumstances, if you are unable to acknowledge that then don't bother posting about it. I will freely admit that I'm on the other side of the coin locked out of home ownership and watching as my money gets flushed down the drain each month. This is invariably effecting my outlook on the situation. A period of contraction and negative equity obviously would cause significant economic distress, but if that enables the housing market to actually return to something resembling the purpose it's there to serve (I.e. house people in their own homes or those owned by the state and housing associations). To achieve that heavy regulation obviously be needed on second home ownership and blocking of entire parasitic activity. The notion that things are fine and dandy just now and that the system isn't a towering bubble of asset accumulation waiting to pop and that all we need if a bit of light touch regulation around private rents if frankly imbecilic. You seem to suggest that only the rich and rentiers will profit from a collapse when right now those are the only fuckers who can afford the things anyway and are profiting substantially already, only being joined by a tiny smattering of those who are being heavily backed by the state funds directed from Tory HQ for social engineering purposes. Who is going to buy these housing units in the future when all of the working class and middle class have been priced out? The rich/ firms using it as investment vehicles? One would assume that will eventually tell. Without a required market adjustment the concentration of housing among the wealthy you seem to be so concerned about will be exacerbated. As you mentioned in the above post it's a ponzi scheme that is absolutely crippling the lives of so many people and concentrating wealth for those at the top, if that were to be buffeted then they might finally have to start investing elsewhere to get some returns rather than making huge sections of the populations lives miserable in the here and now.

I pray day and night that this happens, it might actually enable me and countless others to buy a house. The endless rise in house prices is causing some seriously negative effects for the younger parts of the population (;lack of savings due to being forced into high private rents, the associated issues of having not paid off the mortgage or renting/lack of savings when hitting retirement, relationship break-ups caused by lack of private space and home security, delayed starts to families- can't really bring up a kid in a bedroom in shared flat*, lack of housing security in private rents for young families and the impact that has on educational performance, increased conflicts within households caused by limited space and facilities, the mental impact of no light at the end of the tunnel in owning your own place in a 'property owning democracy', greater reliance on older family members/inheritance to support children to buy and increased likelihood of disputes over money) and our government are using every trick in the book to boost the bottom of the market to keep it buoyant, in part because the major property firms and home builders give them huge slabs of cash for donations. A house price crash may even effect the Conservatives endless high poll ratings as it is retirees who own property (one of multiple) who comprise of their locked-in 37%+ base. They would have been crushed at the last two elections had the vote solely been the working age population. A kleptocratic gentocracy at it's best. *This inevitably will have greater health impacts for children and mothers

Thanks both, I have real trepidation about going through a third surge (mainly around staff burnout), you got the feeling in the trust that the first wave was met with heady mix of emotions; excitement, determination, fear and sadness about the colleagues we had lost. The second one felt like a desperate slog which was only tempered by; the vaccine programme, the slow trickle of positive data around the numbers saved via trialed therapeutics and advances in care (in comparison to the first wave) and when the forces medics came in to help out the ICU teams. I'm unsure how people would react to another big influx, though one would assume that the numbers who have a positive outcomes would increase again, with further advance in our understanding of how to treat patients and the vaccines taking the edge off it for some people admitted*. As previously mentioned it's pretty deleterious to see endless government fuck ups, the Cummings testimony was grim, the affirmation that the Prime Minister and (reading through the lines) the Chancellor have a pretty flagrant disregard for the scientific advisors and modelers was confirmation of something that was abundantly apparent, but the added element that they are clearly totally amoral actors doesn't help. Hancock's constant lying I'm assuming is to protect himself in the event of legal recriminations in the future, on occasion this is reality jarring ("There was never a point at which NHS providers couldn't get access to PPE"- the old 'access' chestnut in there, imported from the US healthcare debates), but understandable from his point of view. In terms of the slandering Hancock effectiveness is receiving from Johnson and Cummings what they are actually criticising is the long term hollowing of the state undertaken by the Conservative party. Had so many functions not been cut, outsourced or run into the ground the department of Health's ability to respond to the pandemic would have been far greater, the issue isn't to do with the individual it's to do with the ideology, systems and corruption. Regardless of the active muck spreaders in the media I mentioned in the last post, I have found the press on the whole to be pretty toothless throughout the entirety of this and I think they should be included in any proper inquiry of the pandemic. I once caught a podcast on the way to work where Laura Kuenssberg was extolling the size of Chris Whitty's brain which felt like a nadir. Is there a particular reason why there not honing in on the borders issue? as I can't really explain it, it's clearly a massive open goal and yet they constantly shank the ba deliberately into row Z. The armies of lockdown deniers I see tramping through London each weekend might not be as great if the press had held the government more effectively to account rather than rallying round the flag**. In particular had ventilation been highlighted sooner and greater measures brought in to stop the spread in schools from press critique rather than bashing the unions we may have ended up in a better situation with control of the virus. One thing I have noted is the vaccine uptake for different areas of the country never seems to be linked to population distribution and pyramids, perhaps this is really difficult to manifest in GIS mapping, but if I was sat in somewhere like Kettering General I'd be pretty worried about the combination of vaccine uptake in the local population in Corby and the age distribution of said population. People consistently point to some of the London boroughs having a low uptake, but given the age profiles of the people who live there it's not a huge surprise to me, unless this stuff is factored in already, but I get the impression its just a baseline of population against the numbers of vaccines delivered. *This is a bit of an issue in some of the young people who come in unvaccinated as many of them tend to think they aren't as ill as they are and will seek medical help further down the line than older peers ** Though given the propensity for people to fall down Youtube wormholes and embed themselves in social media covens of confirmation bias it's not surprising. Having seen some of these marches up close they seem to be a weird mix of low information voters consuming pravda style propaganda derived from financiers in industries that are being effected combined with the long term contrarians who are birthed out of the fringes of the conspiratorial left and drug cultures

I've said this before on the thread but the publics understanding of the thin patina layer of service provision that we have as out healthcare system is one of the major issues here, combined with a lack of understanding of large data sets. That and an endless supply of people who I can only describe as muck spreaders, in as much that wealthy donors money hits their current accounts each month via a make-work media vehicle. They then proceed to create a huge amount of disinformation and conjecture by spreading this muck on T.V., newspapers and websites. So much so it enters the brains of our elected politicians and the donors who guide their decisions. At the start of the pandemic we had approximately 62 ICU beds, they were almost completely full with post op patients, people who had various accidents and all sorts of other maladies that effect the general public, we would consistently hit black alert status due to lack of bed capacity where no further complex operations could continue and our ability to admit patients was curtailed. This state of affairs is due to a number of reasons that I could explain, but I think most people understand; i.e. cuts and lack of resources in part through political decisions and active reduction of tax bases via (again) political decisions, evasion and avoidance the ability of healthcare professionals to keep people alive who would have had no chance in the past through new advances other demographic trends including; increased life expectancy in part through (improvements in diet, hygiene, healthcare and pollution) expansion and concentration of the UKs population in certain locales We expanded our "ICU" bed base by 3.5 times during the last surge, this of course meant that we had to stop significant sections of the hospitals activity, with only the most seriously ill or urgent patients being seen through non-covid pathways. On the Covid side we added to the bed numbers outside of ICU with things that were called acute respiratory units (ACU), the notion was that people who were just pre-ICU in terms of their need for more intensive care or those post ICU could be stepped down. At the height of the surge (say a period of 3 weeks to a month) the people in these units would normally have been on ICU, there was also a backlog in getting people into the units. There was a huge amount of decanting and sending patients to other trusts in areas that weren't quite as hotspotish (for want of a better term) to cope. Whether this constituted a collapse of our healthcare system one could debate, but at times it certainly felt like that, huge chunks of our workforce were mobilised solely for ICU duties. I would walk home after ludicrously long days next to stacked ambulances a significant chunk of whom had Covid patients inside waiting for a bed. The conditions in some of the ACUs which I did some ops work in relating to the vaccines were eye opening. If non-pharmaceutical interventions are withheld even if the numbers being hospitalised are relatively low through the advent of the vaccine programme, this will cause significant issues due to the shear scale of the numbers infected and the exponential transmission, also the likelihood of your gran falling down the stairs breaking their pelvis and being stuck there while they wait for an an ambulance and potentially popping their clogs further down the line through a fat embolism significantly increases. You basically end up in a second/third world medical situation. I would assume the economic impact of this kind of thing would outstrip the impact of some curtailment on restrictions and the associated health impacts connected to that, but maybe I'm wrong and having a minimal healthcare set-up for a period of time with the associated death toll is something that our society needs to just deal with as a society. This is starting to turn into a TLDR ramble, but fuck it I'm dyslexic and don't know how to structure a post to save my life. I have a good mate who I would state is extremely intelligent, he and I have had vigorous disagreements about what to do with regard the non-pharmaceutical interventions/public restrictions, but I can't help but feel a lot of this stuff is just a moral quandary i.e. do you want life to continue as normal and not really impinge on your existence, which would result in the collapse of the healthcare system in certain areas and result in India/Quito scenes or are you willing to give up some freedoms for a certain period of time to enable the rest of society to get vaccinated/protected from the virus to a certain degree? I realise it isn't as simple as this, people's livelihoods are at stake with insufficient government support and perhaps the above framing of the question is somewhat disingenuous, but it would be interesting to hear what people think whether it is just a moral decision or does this exist in the realm of something that can be quantified? Of course this also exists in the political realm as well because a significant number of deaths via Covid or other reasons in a third surge may be used as stick to beat the government in the future (not that it would likely effect their polling given how things have played out). All of this chat in some ways is academic because if the Prime minister and his gang of imbecilies had actually implemented a border control policy then we wouldn't have the delta/indian variant rampaging through partially vaccinated populations and the potentiality of further controls in the event of hospitalisations being needed. I speak as someone with relatives abroad I would love to see, but understand the epidemiological necessity at keeping things controlled effectively across borders.

The whole point of this is clearly to move the media discourse even further right than it currently is, doesn't matter if it's a loss leader for its backers as they get the returns in a diffuse way through the ballot box and policies on taxation, that also seems to be true of a lot of the print media publications.

Thanks, would be interesting to see the full course stuff at some point

Has everyone in this data set completed the full course I.e. of those who didn't die have they all recovered/have long term symptoms?

I really do hope this lot keep being Everton. The level of schadenfreude fun this thread gives is good.

Poor lad should have stayed at Sporting, he'd be scoring 8 penalties a game for Manchester United by now if he'd stayed at that point.

Also Clarke giving the bullet to Andy Considine feels like the antithesis of the Napoleon lucky generals line and may not be the best for the culture of the dressing room. Regardless of how poor a footballer he is.