Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Honest_Man#1]

Don’t want to turn the thread too political, but it really has to be a political issue now because of the absolute mess the government have made of it and how they have now reverted back to blaming not just the poor, but also now doctors and nurses for the lack of PPE.

@Moomintroll I’d genuinely like to know your feelings right now on your party. Would you still vote for them in future after this? Sorry for singling you out but you’re only of the only openly Tory posters on here.

[Crùbag]

Surely Covid-19 has exposed the Westminster govt as a complete circus of charlatans, cheats and utter incompetents?

 

[Savage Henry]

Hopefully this c**t now changes his mindset on the NHS 

I think the elevated status of the NHS may be one of the biggest positives to come out of this. Along with certain hereto respected brands being turned into absolute poison.

[Crùbag]

Just now, Honest_Man#1 said:

Don’t want to turn the thread too political, but it really has to be a political issue now because of the absolute mess the government have made of it and how they have now reverted back to blaming not just the poor, but also now doctors and nurses for the lack of PPE.

@Moomintroll I’d genuinely like to know your feelings right now on your party. Would you still vote for them in future after this? Sorry for singling you out but you’re only of the only openly Tory posters on here.

Political? The Tory reaction to this crisis was political from the start.

Post-Covid, we need to see:

Scottish independence

More 'socialism'

Boris and pals up on trial for manslaughter.

[coprolite]

54 minutes ago, alta-pete said:

The free access to FT.com has been a boon for well written thought out pieces. Think I might have to break my duck and actually pay a newspaper subscription once this is all over. 

 

10 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

I know they dont care about the numbers of dead. In handling a crisis like this, likely no government would be as concerned about how many die as they were about the health services ability to cope. 

People care though. And at some point, it should be known how many families didnt have to lose someone. Just like the austerity calculations. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/e00120a2-74cd-11ea-ad98-044200cb277f

Vsl

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Don’t want to turn the thread too political, but it really has to be a political issue now because of the absolute mess the government have made of it and how they have now reverted back to blaming not just the poor, but also now doctors and nurses for the lack of PPE.
[mention=72852]Moomintroll[/mention] I’d genuinely like to know your feelings right now on your party. Would you still vote for them in future after this? Sorry for singling you out but you’re only of the only openly Tory posters on here.

Its entirely a political issue, the tory uk government and snp scottish government have been a shambles in allocating ppe.

[welshbairn]

3 minutes ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

Don’t want to turn the thread too political, but it really has to be a political issue now because of the absolute mess the government have made of it and how they have now reverted back to blaming not just the poor, but also now doctors and nurses for the lack of PPE.

@Moomintroll I’d genuinely like to know your feelings right now on your party. Would you still vote for them in future after this? Sorry for singling you out but you’re only of the only openly Tory posters on here.

Pretty sure he said he didn't vote Tory in the last election, Libdem or Labour I think.

[Savage Henry]

Its entirely a political issue, the tory uk government and snp scottish government have been a shambles in allocating ppe.

I think that’s why people see it as a non political issue. The SNP and the Tories have responded precisely the same way.

[Michael W]

53 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

When this first kicked off, I felt a large degree of sympathy for those in charge. The scale, the fact that it's a new virus with characteristics that make it a nightmare to contain and all that.

As time goes on though, things that are within government control and are important to the ongoing fight like accurate reporting, testing, ppe etc are being fucked up on a monumental scale. We are definitely approaching the realms now where the Blitz Spirit and All in it together bullshit narrative need to be replaced by repercussions for those in charge.

Maybe not constructive during lockdown while death rates remain high, but to have such shitty reporting this far in is criminal.

I have a lot of sympathy in the regards that no matter what we do, a lot of people will die and people will not accept being made to stay indoors for ever. The government left it as late as they realistically could before locking down. 

The data won't immediately be available, but what has the cost of alllowing the likes of Cheltenham to go ahead been in terms of cases and deaths? Even in Scotland you had 11,000 at Lewis Capaldi gig the very weekend the football was cancelled. Decisions such as these and less formal mass gatherings like the pubs have inevitably contributed to the deaths currently being racked up. 

I suspect that neither the government's senior medical advisors nor the government will really see much in the way of repurcussions, however.

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

Who new that Priti Patel and Scott Steiner had so much in common?

[Michael W]

1 hour ago, The DA said:

I can't work out whether it's that the job is too big for this incompetent government or whether it's a lack of will to do anything about it.  

Carole Cadwalladr has been tweeting about the differences between Ireland and the UK.  Both started off with the same number of ICU beds per capita but Ireland has suffered less than half the death rate.  Almost certainly all down to the UK's one-week delay in announcing a 'lock down'.

More and more, Boris and the Buffoons remind me of the mayor in Jaws.

The lockdown, or at least the banning of mass-gatherings, is probably a key differentiator.

I'm not convinced that the number of ICU beds here tells us much either. I've seen the chart and all of France, Italy and Spain have significantly better ICU capacity than the UK. It hasn't helped them.

Ireland is also small country and lacks a mega city like London, which has unsurprisingly proven to be the epicentre in the UK. Various reasons for this such as volume of public transport use (especially in crowded conditions) and sheer volume of international in/out traffic. The more suitable comparators for the UK are Germany, France, Spain and Italy, only one of which appears to have handled this well. 

 

[coprolite]

I think it's hard to blame the government for being unprepared. 

No government in living memory has had a democratic mandate to spend "taxpayers money" on contingency planning, for anything. 

The tories privatised water boards in england and wales, then cut flood defence budgets. Then floods got worse year on year. But they got voted back in to cut more.  That's something visible and obvious.

Imagine labour/snp trying to spend billions on surplus icu capacity just in case. Waste, inefficiency etc. 

It wouldn't happen. 

c***s they undoubtedly are but they're c***s who are in power because we're all morons obsessed by trivial shite and get the system we deserve. 

[ayrmad]

21 minutes ago, coprolite said:

I think it's hard to blame the government for being unprepared. 

No government in living memory has had a democratic mandate to spend "taxpayers money" on contingency planning, for anything. 

The tories privatised water boards in england and wales, then cut flood defence budgets. Then floods got worse year on year. But they got voted back in to cut more.  That's something visible and obvious.

Imagine labour/snp trying to spend billions on surplus icu capacity just in case. Waste, inefficiency etc. 

It wouldn't happen. 

c***s they undoubtedly are but they're c***s who are in power because we're all morons obsessed by trivial shite and get the system we deserve. 

Won't disagree with the overall sentiment but we could have prepared far far better early doors in this pandemic, we were being forewarned by what was unfolding in China then latterly in Italy, I don't even think we bought ourselves a day in comparison to Italy with 3 weeks notice. 

On a more positive note, in relation to lockdown days, Italy had their highest daily death total Friday and Spain had theirs yesterday, here's hoping. 

Edited April 12, 2020 by ayrmad

[Florentine_Pogen]

The answer is titwank.

Oh.....I thought his surname was Handcock.

[The DA]

6 minutes ago, ayrmad said:

Won't disagree with the overall sentiment but we could have prepared far far better early doors in this pandemic, we were being forewarned by what was unfolding in China then latterly in Italy, I don't even think we bought ourselves a day in comparison to Italy with 3 weeks notice. 

On a more positive note, in relation to lockdown days, Italy had their highest daily death total Friday and Spain had theirs yesterday, here's hoping. 

With all of their talk of 'doing the right thing at the right time', I think they arranged for lock down to kick in at 'just the right time' to ensure the NHS could cope a few weeks down the line.  Any earlier and hospitals would have been relatively under-used, people would have been one week further down the boredom curve and the economy would have suffered earlier and longer.

It's definitely the herd immunity strategy.

[Granny Danger]

32 minutes ago, coprolite said:

I think it's hard to blame the government for being unprepared. 

No government in living memory has had a democratic mandate to spend "taxpayers money" on contingency planning, for anything. 

The tories privatised water boards in england and wales, then cut flood defence budgets. Then floods got worse year on year. But they got voted back in to cut more.  That's something visible and obvious.

Imagine labour/snp trying to spend billions on surplus icu capacity just in case. Waste, inefficiency etc. 

It wouldn't happen. 

c***s they undoubtedly are but they're c***s who are in power because we're all morons obsessed by trivial shite and get the system we deserve. 

I don’t think it’s hard to blame the government at all.  It’s harder being an apologist for them though you’re having a good bash at it.

[Distant Doonhamer]

It’s a global pandemic and everyone can realise that significant mistakes have been and will be made by those in power. What grates most with me is the complete lack of any sense of accountability of the likes of Hancock and Patel and a pretty much uniform failure of our press to call this out.

[ayrmad]

2 minutes ago, The DA said:

With all of their talk of 'doing the right thing at the right time', I think they arranged for lock down to kick in at 'just the right time' to ensure the NHS could cope a few weeks down the line.  Any earlier and hospitals would have been relatively under-used, people would have been one week further down the boredom curve and the economy would have suffered earlier and longer.

It's definitely the herd immunity strategy.

It definitely is, it will be interesting to see how they deal with the scrutiny which should come when we're sitting at 30,000 or 40,000 and Germany are at a fraction, how many normal people will realise that they've basically decided that the lives of their loved ones was a price worth paying, I salute Sweden' approach even if it fails, at least their government have built up a trust with their population that we can only dream of. 

[coprolite]

2 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

I don’t think it’s hard to blame the government at all.  It’s harder being an apologist for them though you’re having a good bash at it.

I'm not apologising for anyone. 

Back in 2016 we had a pandemic practise and cocked it up. 

No-one was campaigning to get the government to sort it. I could have. You could have. Anyone could have, but didn't. 

Instead all political bandwidth went on EU membership. 

So really, it's your fault. 

[beefybake]

4 hours ago, The DA said:

I can't work out whether it's that the job is too big for this incompetent government or whether it's a lack of will to do anything about it.  

Carole Cadwalladr has been tweeting about the differences between Ireland and the UK.  Both started off with the same number of ICU beds per capita but Ireland has suffered less than half the death rate.  Almost certainly all down to the UK's one-week delay in announcing a 'lock down'.

More and more, Boris and the Buffoons remind me of the mayor in Jaws.

 

 

 

How it looks to me is....

 

The Tories won the general election.   Every single member of the cabinet are those who pledged themselves to Johnson and Brexit.

They're not there because of their abilities.

 

Brexit and those who support it pretty much defines the term Little Britain, and the 'island mentality'.

Combine that with the associated   '...Well, it's Asia, they're always having these mysterious infections that happen out of nowhere...,

course, it couldn't happen here etc.   .'   factor.

 

And top it with... 

 

[ Coronavirus : What can the UK learn From Germany ]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52234061

 

".....More significant may be higher health spending:

• Germany spent €4,271 (£3,744) per person on healthcare in 2016
• The UK spent €3,566 per person on healthcare in 2016  ... "

In terms of the other EU countries, the UK spent less than the EU average on healthcare in 2016.

 

 

Edit/Addition :

All the above combined, I believe, to create a slowness to respond, an unwillingness to quickly learn from how other

countries ( ie in Asia ) responded, and also a lack of proper PPE resources in the NHS.

 

 

Edited April 12, 2020 by beefybake